As I promised yesterday, I will give you here the recipe for Panna Cotta as I demoed this morning.  Panna cotta is a classic Italian desserts.  Most restaurants in Italy offer it on their dessert list and it’s Ron’s favourite desserts.  When we are Italy, Ron has made it his mission to taste as many panna cottas as possible to compare to the ones I make.  So far, he says, he hasn’t found a better one,  but of course he is slightly biased!

Panna cotta is a rich dessert and a small portion goes a long way.  I like this dessert because it can be made days ahead of time (as long as you cover it well and refrigerate it, you can make it up to a week ahead of when you need it), and you can come up with a infinite varity of flavor combinations. My favorite to make is Panna Cotta with cherry liquor. It has a very mild cherry flavor that can be paired with different sauces from simple fresh berries to a complex cherries and port sauce which is what I like to use.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of heavy cream
• 1/3 cup of sugar
• 3 gelatine leavest
• 3 Tbsp of cherry liquor

Soften the gelatine in cold water for a couple of minutes.  Place all the ingredients in a saucepan, including the gelatine drained of the water.  Heat gently stirring constantly until all of the gelatine is dissolved.  Remove from heat and pour in prepared molds (you can use just about anything as a mold, small containers for individual servings or larger pans for family style  service, just remember to use a little butter to grease the molds unless you are using silicone molds). Cool down for at least 3 hours or until the panna cotta has firmed up. To serve, unmold and served with sauce or fresh berries.

NOTES:

If you use powder gelatine, you need to experiment with it to reach the same consistency as the gelatine leaves. Refer to the package to get an idea of how much you may need for 2 and  1/3 cups of liquid.

You can replace the cherry liquor with another liquor (orange for instance), or chocolate sauce, or fruit puree, or leave it out altogheter and not flavor the cream at all.

The amount of time it may require to firm up will vary on the size of the mold you are using, the gelatine you are using and the flavoring if any.  To be safe, you should make the panna cotta at least the day before you need it.

Hope you’ll try it, and if you want to use the leaf gelatine you can buy it at the Bistro for $.20 per leaf.

Let me know how it goes.

Brunella

This is my first official blog for the new website.  Today is an exciting day because both my sisters arrived from Italy last night.  We just had breakfast together and now they are headed to the Bistro while I’m home catching up with some stuff, including this blog.  My sister Diana is the one who has a dairy farm and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese factory and she is one of the reasons we are doing a Split the Wheel dinner this coming sunday.  Today we are all working on the menu together for that dinner.  I already got the wheel of cheese and it’s dated August 2009, which mean that on Sunday we are going to split a wheel that is 2.5 years old.  Very exciting!  For those of you who don’t have tickets for Sunday’s dinner, remember we have another Split the Wheel on April 1st, and we have about 10 tickets left for it.

Tomorrow is my early morning day with the KKCO 3-minutes cooking demo. Every week I stress about what to make…not many recipes we have are conducive to being explained in three minutes.  If you have any ideas, please send them to me at info@ilbistroitaliano.com.  For tomorrow, I think I’m going to show how to make a classic Italian dessert called Panna Cotta.  I used it for my cooking class this past Saturday and the ladies in the class really liked it.  It’s easy and versatile and can be made ahead of time.  Perfect for Valentine’s day.  If you missed the show (I don’t know who wouldn’t want to be up at 6 am and watch TV…..!), I’ll post the recipe here tomorrow, and you can see the video at the KKCO website.  We are trying to have those videos on this website as well as some point in the future.

Until tomorrow…arrivederci!

Brunella

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