The cashew apple is underutilized in many African countries. So having the syrup in there, it allows it to coat your palate to experience all the other flavors with the cashew apple flavor.Cashew ( Anacardium occidentale), a crop projecting Ghana internationally beside cocoa, is usually cultivated for its nut, for both local and international markets. It lends itself well to both savory and sweet. The creme fraiche made sense because it’s rich and fatty. It needed fat, something to coat your palate to allow the flavor to linger. It needed texture, so you have the sweet potato. “You just start thinking about what the fruit’s lacking and what we need to complete it. Candied cashews, grated raw cashew, purple sweet potato leaves, and oxalis (a type of wood sorrel) finished things off.īeran described cashew fruit as “off-balance”: acidic, sweet, and overall incomplete.
#Cashew apples skin
After the sweet potatoes were roasted and cooled, he peeled them and broke them apart into slivers, then deep-fried some of the pieces of skin and sweet potato, reserving other slivers of sweet potato for use in the dish. He also made a syrup from the juice cooked with sugar and a small amount of malic acid, serving this both straight and mixed with creme fraiche.Īnother main component of the dish was roasted purple sweet potatoes, which Beran said they’ve been experimenting with for an upcoming menu at Next (they don’t taste much different from orange ones, he said, but he prefers the texture of the purple variety). The cashew apples he cooked in a pan with brown butter, brown sugar, and salt, deglazed with lime juice and rum, then roasted until the sugar caramelized. He ended up using it several different ways, incorporating cashews as well-though not the ones attached to the fruit he had (cashew seed pods contain an acid that’s both toxic and caustic and has to be removed through roasting). So he overnighted them to me, along with a bunch of random candy and weird trinkets.”īeran’s first thought was to use the juice to do a dry shot/wet shot concept: “If you drink the juice raw it completely dries out your mouth, and if you cook it and drink it again, it refreshes your palate.” But he rejected that idea as “underwhelming” and began considering what to do with the fruit itself.
The friend sent some interns out to search for the pseudofruit, Beran said, and “one of them found them in the back freezer section of a little Mexican market in LA.
#Cashew apples movie
Video by Michael Gebert/ Sky Full of Baconīeran wasn’t able to locate fresh cashew apples-for one thing, they’re not in season, and even if they were, they’re too delicate to ship-but with the help of a friend who’s a movie producer in LA, he did track down frozen ones. He also noted that they “smell like sweet vomit when they’re roasted.” It’s like chewing on a cotton ball.” Though they’re high in tannins (an astringent compound also present in tea and red wine), cashew apples lose their astringency when cooked, Beran discovered. “You put them in your mouth and they dry you out completely.
It’s really cool.” He thought the cashew fruit tasted like a cross between a cashew and an apple, but very tannic.
“It’s so sweet, fruity-it almost smells like bubble gum. The cashew apple (which is technically a false fruit, formed from parts of the plant in addition to the ovary) looks like a small bell pepper with a cashew (which is technically a seed) smushed into the wider end. “And then you see how big the fruit is and how much it takes to get one cashew.” “For the longest time I always wondered why cashews were so expensive, because it’s this silly little nut,” Dave Beran said.
#Cashew apples series
Sommelier Series (paid sponsored content).
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