Ixta Belfrage’s Passionfruit Pudim
As seen on Sunday Brunch on Channel 4, Ixta Belfrage's recipe for Brazilian pudim is flavoured with passion fruit and topped with caramelised coconut flakes.
From the book
MEZCLA: Recipes to Excite
From the co-author of Ottolenghi's FLAVOUR
100 vibrant and colourful dishes with inventive ingredient combinations
A blend of Italian dishes, with Mexican flavours, and Brazilian spices
Introduction
All over Brazil, there are buffet-style restaurants called ‘kilos’ where you pay for your food by weight. Most of these are cheapish restaurants, but not when you’re as greedy as me. My mother has always said that ‘my eyes are bigger than my stomach’ and she’s not wrong, so you can imagine just how excited I get whenever I’m in a kilo. I go IN. What is perhaps slightly more surprising is the fact that I go overboard on desserts as well as savouries, which is very unlike me (I don’t usually order dessert unless coerced by whoever I’m dining with). Pudim de leite condensado – which is essentially a slightly thicker and less wobbly flan made with condensed milk, features on every dessert counter in every kilo in the land, I would hazard, and it was always the dessert I headed for first. My favourite kilo in Rio always had a big platter of halved passion fruits on ice on the dessert counter, which I would scoop out and spoon over my pudim, and that’s how this recipe was born.
Ingredients
| 100g | caster sugar |
| 5 | large passion fruits |
| 397g tin of | condensed milk |
| 320g | whole milk (semi-skimmed won’t work) |
| 1½ tsp | finely grated tangerine zest |
| ¼ tsp | chilli flakes (optional, leave out completely or just add a pinch if you prefer) |
| 2 | large eggs, plus 1 extra yolk |
| 1 tsp | vanilla bean paste |
| A pinch of | fine salt |
Essential kit
You will need: a 20cm round tin (not spring-form), or a similar sized ovenproof dish and a mesh sieve.
Method
Preheat the oven to 150C fan.
Have a round 20cm ovenproof dish or tin ready. Make sure the dish/tin doesn’t have a removable base, or else your caramel will escape
Sprinkle the sugar evenly into a medium non-stick frying pan and place on a medium heat. Gently cook for 5–6 minutes, swirling the pan once the sugar begins to melt. Keep cooking until the sugar has liquified and turned from light amber to dark amber. Watch the pan closely – you need to remove it from the heat as soon as it turns a darker shade of amber, or it could easily burn. Pour the caramel into your dish/tin and swirl it to evenly coat the base. Set aside while you make the custard.
Scoop the pulp from the passion fruits – you want 90g of pulp.
Put the passion fruit pulp into a large bowl with the condensed milk, whole milk, tangerine zest, chilli flakes, eggs, yolk, vanilla and a pinch of salt. Gently whisk until combined. Don’t whisk too vigorously, as you want to avoid creating air bubbles.
Tap the caramel to make sure it has set hard. Place the pudim dish in a large, high-sided baking tray. Pour the custard through a sieve into the pudim dish.
Place the baking tray on the middle shelf of the oven. Pour hot (not boiling) water into the larger tin to come halfway up the sides of the pudim dish. Bake for 45 minutes, until set on top but still wobbly. Remove from the oven and leave the pudim to cool for 1 hour before removing from the water bath and refrigerating overnight.
Remove the pudim from the fridge 10 minutes before you want to serve it. Run a knife around the edges of the pudim to release it. Place a large, lipped platter on top of the tin, then quickly flip the whole thing over. Gently lift off the tin – the pudim should have released itself on to the plate, but if not, give the tin a good bang on the top and sides. Slice, and serve.
