This week: Passion Fruit Sponge Custard. Not the most elegant dessert we’ve ever made, but ignore the appearance, go for the taste, like the fruit itself. Ripe passion fruit resemble hard-boiled eggs, after the apocalypse, wrinkly red-brown ovals. But inside, oh… a pucker-sweet crazy delicious psychedelic orange pulp dotted with black seeds. (You eat that goop?! I thought nature made things in bright colors as a warning – poison! poison! poison!? Nope. Nature wants you to eat that goop, to, uh, carry the seeds away.) The flavor of passion fruit hovers somewhere between orange and mango, just as sweet, but way tarter than either. The only exotic fruit with an equal effort/pleasure ratio, IMO, is the durian, but we’ll reserve durian for another day. In the meantime, try this sponge custard, an antique English dessert that’s not really spongy or a custard, flavored with an intense sweet-sour taste of the tropics.
The main drawback to passion fruit is that you get so little edible material from each of them. In Haiti, where Jody and I recently travelled, passion fruit are common and cheap (my mother would never have approved of them). Rosa’s, a single-table restaurant in Mirebalais where we ate a couple of times, served pitchers of freshly-squeezed passion fruit juice to diners, who then added Haitian Barbancourt rum to taste.
We are not so lucky in this country, where passion fruit is neither common nor cheap. I can’t conceive of what that pitcher of passion fruit juice would cost here, unless made from frozen passion fruit pulp, which you can buy without breaking the bank. To our taste, the frozen pulp was more than a few notches down in intensity from fresh juice.
So, we husband the fresh juice as a flavoring, parceling it out in drams, as in the Chicken Livers with Passion Fruit a few weeks ago, or for this old-fashioned caky English treat. Passion fruit goes into the batter, which separates as it cooks, so that the dessert ends up with two distinct layers–one caky, one saucy–both with passion fruit flavor. Avoid the temptation to eat this as soon as it comes out of the oven–the custard will be too thin. It needs to chill to reach the consistency of a crême anglaise. The tops will deflate a bit, but what the dessert loses in pride is worth what it gains in texture. Enjoy. Ken
Passion Fruit Sponge Custard
Ingredients: Be sure all the ingredients are at room temperature.
- 6-7 ripe (wrinkly) passion fruit, enough to make ½ cup juice
- ¾ cup white sugar
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
- ¼ teaspoon fine sea salt
- 3 large eggs, separated
- ¼ cup all purpose unbleached flour
- 1 cup whole milk
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350°F.
- Cut the fruit in half and scoop the pulp and seeds into a wire-mesh sieve sitting on a bowl. Using a rubber spatula, scrape the seeds against the mesh, pushing the juice through the sieve and into the bowl. You should have ½ cup of juice.
- Take 2 tablespoons of sugar and set it aside for the egg whites.
- Put the butter and the remaining sugar in the bowl of a standing mixer. With the speed on high, beat the butter until smooth. Add the salt, then the egg yolks, one at a time, and continue beating until the mixture is light and fluffy and the sugar has dissolved. Turn the mixer to low, add the flour and beat until combined. Add the passion fruit juice and milk and beat to just combine.
- Put the egg whites into a clean bowl of the standing mixture with the whisk attachment. Using a moderate speed, beat the egg whites until they begin to foam. Add the remaining sugar in a slow steady stream and then increase the speed to high and beat until the whites hold soft peaks. Don’t let them get stiff or it will be difficult to fold them into the custard mixture.
- Using a rubber spatula, stir the custard mixture to ensure nothing has settled on the bottom of the bowl. Then stir a third of the whites into the custard mixture to lighten it. Gently fold in the remaining whites.
- Spoon custard into custard cups, being sure to scoop from the bottom of the bowl as the top will be lighter. Set the cups into a roasting pan. Pour warm water half way up the sides of the cups. Bake 30-35 minutes, turning halfway through. The tops should should be puffed and golden brown.
- This is best served chilled. Allow to cool, cover and refrigerate for at least an hour before serving. The tops will deflate, but such is life.
Jody Notes:
When I was in Haiti in late September working with the Zanmi Lasante/Partners In Health culinary teams, passion fruit were coming into season with a force. Marie Flore, the director of the PIH facility at Cange, asked me to show her culinary team how to make a simple dessert with local ingredients. As all of you know, dessert is not a default mode for me. I fell back on one of my old familiars, Lemon Sponge Custard, substituting passion fruit for lemon. My Haitian attempt left me unsatisfied (chefs are always unsatisfied). Back at home I tweaked the recipe to get it the way I wanted. Here it is.
The Garum Factory 
Hey folks. I somehow missed your November post and feared the worst, I was going to have to drive to Cambridge to say hello!! Glad you are ‘back’. Wish you the best in the holidays ahead. Safe travels!! xx’s
And we know what homebodies you guys are, NEVER leaving the house. Happy Holidays and safe travels to you too, here or in warmer climes. Ken
Can you do anything with the leftover seeds/pulp that doesn’t go through for the custard? I’m always trying to use that part up. Once I made fruit leather (I think it was when I was pressing raspberries). Any thoughts?
I hope we’re on the same island together after global warming drowns everyone else. I can already tell, you’re the kind of person who figures out how to keep everyone in shoes after we’ve finished making the fresh coconut nutribars. You could use it for fruit leather, if you’re that ambitious, but I’d just use the remaining pulp in a smoothie or mixed with yogurt. As an aside, Chobani makes a passion fruit flavored yogurt WITH the seeds, which, as you can imagine, immediately parses the world into those who love the yogurt, or hate it. The thing for me, is that while the seeds are edible, they don’t have much in the way of flavor. I think they end up in things with passion fruit for the simple reason that they’re hard to eliminate. So, if you’re like me, you’ll scrape the leftover pulp into a ziplock snack bag and throw it into the freezer with the peeled overripe bananas. The next time you want a smoothie, with a little zip… My personal aspiration is to have some on hand that I can use in a smoothie with an avocado. Let me know how it goes. Ken
A smoothie works for me!
It sounds very similar in concept to Margaret Costa’s Lemon Surprise Pudding in her Four Seasons Cookery Book that Nigel Slater has since appropriated (i.e loved and fanfared extensively) – but here made with sparkling passion fruit, which sounds like an absolute winner to me. I always forget when passion fruit are in season, but love their wrinkled little bodies, so will keep a look out. Sophie
I don’t know her, but I’ll look now (we’re preparing for a downsizing move and our place is increasingly chaotic). Jody has a recipe that’s an adaptation of a newspaper recipe her mother clipped in the 1950’s for a cake with spoonfuls of lemon curd. Same source, perhaps? I have to admit, like you, passion fruit season wasn’t exactly hardwired into my brain. Ken
P.S. Are you a Sarah Water’s fan?
Love passion fruit but they are so expensive for what u get. A friend of ours gave us a vine for our engagement. It’s coming into flower now and I can’t wait to start picking the fruit. Shall have to try this when I do.
Wow! That’s great. You must live someplace warm, if you can grow the vine. Ken
I’ve never tried passion fruit. Not knowing whether the seeds are edible, it’s always seemed like a mighty expensive fruit to use for experimentation.Well, now I know that they are edible and I’ve a good recipe to try. Let the experimentation begin! Thanks for sharing another great recipe.
Hi, John–Thanks for the kind words. So, yes, the seeds are edible, BUT just to be clear, we’re not using them in the recipe. I was just speaking with Leah about using the leftover pulp after you’ve squeezed the juice out of it. Enjoy. Ken
Thanks, Ken.I saw that, too. :)
Amazing! I love passion fruits. The only time I’ve ever seen them cheap and abundant was in the Dominican Republic…and now Haiti. What an awesome trip that must have been. If passion fruit anything is on the menu for dessert, that’s the one I pick. I’ve missed you guys!
You’re so sweet, Amanda. We’ve just had A LOT on our plates the last few months – and more to come (downsizing, moving, new projects, Africa, maybe a return trip to Haiti, blah, blah, blah). But we’re going to continue posting when we can, and I hope I can eventually catch up with everyone else’s cooking, shooting and eating. I still want to pick your brain about websites. Thanks for the sweet thoughts. Ken