Panna cotta
Panna cotta — cooked cream.
Cream set with just enough gelatine to hold its shape for a moment on the plate and then slump under the first spoon.
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Soak the gelatine sheets in a bowl of cold water for 5 minutes, until they are limp and floppy.
Use cold water. Warm water starts dissolving the sheets where they sit, and that setting power goes down the sink when you drain them.
Wipe six 150ml dariole moulds or ramekins with a little neutral oil on kitchen paper, leaving a film rather than a pool.
Set the moulds on a tray.
Put the cream, milk, the 90g of caster sugar, the vanilla seeds and pod and the fine salt into a pan.
Warm over medium heat for 4-5 minutes, stirring until the sugar has dissolved, until the surface trembles and steam comes off it steadily.
Take the pan off the heat before it boils.
Leave it to infuse for 10 minutes.
Lift the gelatine out of its water and squeeze it dry in your fist.
Stir it into the hot cream for about 30 seconds, until it has completely dissolved. Hold a spoonful up to the light and check no threads are left, because an undissolved thread sets as a rubbery streak.
Never let the pan boil once the gelatine is in. Prolonged heat breaks gelatine down and the panna cotta sets soft, or does not set at all.
Pour the mixture through a fine sieve into a jug, which takes out the pod and anything that has not dissolved.
Cool the jug to room temperature, stirring now and then, about 20 minutes. Poured hot, the vanilla seeds sink and set as a black layer on what will be the top.
Divide the mixture between the moulds.
Chill for at least 5 hours, and overnight if you can, until the surface does not move when a mould is tilted.
Toss the strawberries with the tablespoon of caster sugar about 20 minutes before serving and leave them to give up their juice.
Run the tip of a small knife around the top edge of each mould.
Dip a mould into a bowl of hot water for a count of five and invert it onto a plate.
Shake it once, sharply, downwards. If it does not drop, dip it again for three seconds rather than digging at the edge with a knife.
Spoon the strawberries and their juice around the base.
Look at it as it settles. It should hold its shape for a moment and then slump slightly; a panna cotta that stands up firm and slices cleanly has too much gelatine in it and eats like a jelly.
Nobody has rated this recipe yet.
Sign in to rate this recipe. One rating per person, and you can change it.
Cream, and almost nothing else, which is either the point or the problem depending on how it is served. Double cream warmed with vanilla is sweet, fatty and faintly cooked-tasting, and 90g of sugar across six servings is restrained. The vanilla is the only aromatic and a real pod matters here more than in almost anything else in the collection, because there is nothing to hide behind. Salt at 1g is invisible and stops it tasting flat. And then the fruit, which is not a garnish: there is no acid anywhere in a panna cotta, and something sharp is what makes it possible to finish one.
Vanilla and warm cream, and very little else. It is one of the quietest dishes here and it smells expensive, which is largely the vanilla.
The entire dish is a texture. Smooth, dense, coating, and set only just enough — it should feel like cream that has been persuaded rather than cream that has been trapped. The mouthfeel is fat rather than gel; at this concentration you should not be able to detect the gelatine as anything but a suggestion. Too firm and it reads as a jelly, which is a completely different and much worse dessert.
None whatever. It is the silent dish in this collection.
Cream first and coating. Vanilla through the middle. There is no finish to speak of, which is the honest assessment — the dessert ends where it began, and that is why the fruit is doing structural work. With something sharp beside it the arc is cream, then acid cutting it, then cream again, and it works.
Cold, and it matters — a panna cotta that has warmed on a plate loses its wobble and the fat becomes obvious on the palate. Turn it out at the last minute.
Sharp fruit above all — macerated strawberries, raspberries, poached rhubarb, roasted plums, a passion fruit spooned over. A caramel or a coffee sauce is the other direction and is also good. Amaretti crumbled over for texture, which the dish otherwise entirely lacks. A small glass of Moscato d'Asti, which comes from the same region. Where it fails is served plain, and next to anything else creamy.
The easiest dessert in the collection to make and the easiest to get subtly wrong. There is no technique at all; there is one number, and if it is off by two grams the result is either soup or rubber.
Moderate. Half a litre of double cream and a vanilla pod.
A pan, six 150ml dariole moulds or ramekins, and a sieve. Scales that measure to the gram, because six grams of gelatine is not a spoonable quantity.
Any time, and it suits warm weather because it is cold and light on the palate despite being rich.
None, though the fruit alongside it should be — rhubarb in spring, berries in summer, poached plums in autumn.
In the pan: steam coming off steadily and the surface trembling, with no bubbles. Set: the surface should move as one when the mould is tilted, and a fingertip should meet resistance and leave a mark that slowly fills in.
This is the whole thing. It should hold its shape for a moment on the plate, quiver visibly, and collapse completely under the side of a spoon. If it needs to be cut, there is too much gelatine.
Nothing to manage. Note that fresh pineapple, kiwi, papaya, figs and fresh ginger all contain protease enzymes that digest gelatine and will stop a panna cotta setting entirely — this is the single most common way people ruin a gelatine dessert with fruit. Cooking the fruit first destroys the enzymes and solves it.
Soaking the gelatine in warm water, which loses some of its power down the sink. Boiling the cream with the gelatine in it, which degrades it. Using too much, which is the most common fault and produces something that stands up rigidly — a panna cotta should never need cutting. Not oiling the moulds. Setting it with fresh pineapple, kiwi or papaya, which contain enzymes that digest gelatine and prevent it setting at all. And serving it plain, with nothing sharp beside it.
Will not set: not enough gelatine, or it was boiled, or an enzyme-bearing fruit was in it. It can be melted down gently, more soaked gelatine stirred in, and re-set. Rubbery: too much gelatine, and nothing recovers it. Will not release: dip the base of the mould in hot water for five seconds and try again. Grainy or separated: it was boiled. Bland: more vanilla, more salt, and something sharp on the plate.
It must be, and that is its whole appeal. Overnight is better than the minimum and it keeps three days.
Three days in the fridge, covered, in the moulds.
Never.
No. Freezing breaks the gel network and it weeps on thawing.
There is nothing left over. The vanilla pod, rinsed and dried and buried in a jar of sugar, is the useful remainder.
Freely, at roughly 1g of gelatine per 100ml of liquid for this softness. That ratio is the recipe worth remembering.
Powdered gelatine works: use the same weight, sprinkle it over three tablespoons of cold water, let it swell for five minutes and stir it into the warm cream. Agar makes a vegetarian version and behaves completely differently — it sets firm and brittle rather than wobbling, needs boiling to activate, and produces something that is not really panna cotta. Buttermilk or yoghurt replacing some of the milk gives a sharper, more interesting dessert.
Not vegetarian — gelatine is an animal product, which surprises people about a dessert that contains no visible meat. Agar or a vegetarian gelling agent makes a version, at a real cost in texture. Gluten-free and nut-free. Contains milk, declared.
Leaf gelatine, which is easier to measure accurately than powder and dissolves more cleanly. A real vanilla pod. Double cream rather than whipping cream, which has less fat and sets differently.
Replacing 150ml of the cream with milk saves money and calories and changes the dish very little. Vanilla bean paste costs a fraction of pods and still gives the seeds, which are most of the visual point.
Half a litre of double cream between six is the footprint. Unremarkable as an occasional dessert.
Around 470 calories a serving, and it is essentially cream — there is no way to present it as anything else. Replacing some of the double cream with milk or buttermilk reduces it meaningfully and produces a lighter, sharper dessert that some people prefer.
Worth it, and worth setting softer than you think. It is twenty-five minutes of work for a dessert that is finished the day before and looks like restaurant food, and the single decision that makes it good rather than ordinary is using less gelatine than the recipe you last read. Serve something sharp with it — that is not a garnish, it is the other half of the dish.
Piedmont, in north-west Italy, in the twentieth century.
Panna cotta.
PAN-na KOT-ta.
Cooked cream, which is a slightly generous description of cream that has been warmed to below boiling and set.
The dish is much younger than most people assume. There is no mention of panna cotta in the Italian culinary literature of the nineteenth century — Artusi, whose 1891 book documents the Italian repertoire in enormous detail, does not have it — and it appears to be a twentieth-century Piedmontese creation. It is on Piedmont's official regional list of traditional agri-food products, which is a formal designation rather than a marketing claim. The story that a Hungarian woman invented it in the Langhe hills in the early 1900s circulates in almost every account and has no source behind it. What is not in doubt is why Piedmont: it is a dairy region with a serious cream and butter tradition, in a country where most cooking is olive-oil based, and a dessert made of nothing but cream is exactly what such a place produces. Its international ubiquity dates from the 1990s, when it became the default restaurant dessert on three continents, largely because it is made entirely in advance.
It is the dessert that restaurant kitchens reach for when they want something that can be plated in thirty seconds, and it spent about fifteen years being on every menu in the Western world. That ubiquity has damaged its reputation somewhat, which is unfair to a very good thing done badly by a lot of people.
Dinners, and any meal where the cook wants the pudding finished the day before.
Nothing beyond warming and setting. What is traditional is the restraint of the set, and it is the thing most commercial versions get wrong.
It got firmer as it travelled, because a dessert that has to be transported and plated by people who did not make it needs to survive handling. The Piedmontese version is softer than almost anything served abroad.
Piedmont often serves it with a caramel sauce or with local hazelnuts rather than with fruit. Coffee, chocolate and buttermilk versions are all common and none is traditional.
It sets softer than most published recipes, deliberately, and it says why. The salt is not traditional and is a genuine improvement.
None documented. The Piedmontese origin is the settled account; the Hungarian-inventor story is not.