And Now, Something Totally Different: Piña Colada Espuma

I imagine most of my readers come to Nami-nami for uncomplex comfort food recipes. This is how we eat - most of the cooking taking place at our house is what could be described 'rustic', 'down to earth', 'simple', 'quick'. I'd like to think this is visible on the blog as well - comforting cakes and muffins, earthy soups, quick-to-assemble pies and quiches and so on. However, we have recently acquired one kitchen gadget that almost falls into the field of 'molecular gastronomy' - iSi Gourmet Whip. A product by Swiss isi Group, the cream whipper has been popularised by Ferran Adrià who uses this to make his (in)famous espumas. There is a whole section written by Ferran Adrià and dedicated to foams and espumas in The Cook's Book (a book I recently wrote about here), and that got me curious. There are some supercool and stylish bloggers who have been writing about espumas on their blogs - Hungry in Hogtown made an Americano cocktail foam and Chubby Hubby recreated the 21st century tortilla in a glass - so I had been keeping my eyes open for the sleek and glossy stainless steel thingy myself. So when I spotted a Gourmet Whip on sale at a local professional cookware store where K. had taken me one afternoon, I managed to convince him that we badly needed one ourselves:)

Since then we've had fun with ours - and NOT because of the laughing gas* chargers:) We've made raspberry-flavour whipped cream (we didn't really enjoy the texture, as it was too light and airy - the Gourmet Whip whips up the volume four times!). We experimented with microwaved 'pistachio sponge' (really interesting, if not a total success yet - but we will try again). We very successfully recreated the parmesan espuma on top of pumpkin soup that we had first enjoyed at our anniversary dinner at Stenhus. And we've made Piña Colada Espuma - recipe for which we found in the iSi brochure that came with the Gourmet Whip - more than once. You see, I'm the type of girl that first eats the milky foam and then drinks her cappuccino. Piña Colada Espuma is a foamy, silky, creamy decadence in cocktail glass. Almost like a very good cappuccino foam - just with a powerful taste of the beach, to borrow Hungry in Hogtown's words. Really, really, really good..

Piña Colada Espuma
(Piña Colada Espuma vahukokteil)
- ingredients for the 500 ml iSi Gourmet Whip
Serves 4-6 - works equally well as a cocktail or as a dessert



300 ml pineapple juice
175 ml coconut milk
2 Tbsp dark rum (35% vol)
3 sheets gelatine (a 1.7 g)**

Soak gelatine sheets in cold water for 5 minutes.
Heat 4-5 Tbsp pineapple juice to 60C and stir in the pressed out gelatine sheets.
Mix coconut milk, pineapple juice and rum, add the dissolved gelatine.
Pour through a fine sieve into the 500 ml iSi Gourmet Whip and screw in 1 iSi cream charger. Shake well, and chill in the refrigerator for 4 hours.

To serve, shake the whipper vigorously upside-down, then dispense into cocktail glasses. Whizzzhhhh...

* iSi Cream Chargers contain nitrous oxide (N2O), popularly known as laughing gas. It's a no laughing matter, however - just read this.
** If you prefer using powdered gelatine, then take 6 grams (type silver).