Nombelina

Panna cotta with a delicious coffee caramel sauce. I’ve shared my panna cotta recipe before and I had to experiment some more with the caramel sauce. I wanted it to still be runny when cooled in the refrigerator.

Even tough I don’t drink coffee I do love mocha and coffee flavored foods. This sauce is so heavenly you might just end up eating it from the bowl.

Ingredients for panna cotta serves 4:

250ml or 1 cup whole milk

250ml or 1 cup cream (unsweetened/unwhipped)

2 gelatin sheets

2 Tbs sugar

Optional: vanilla bean or vanilla extract or coffee extract

Ingredients for the coffee caramel sauce:

120g sugar

60ml water

125ml cream

1ts coffee extract

15g butter

Panna cotta

Prepare the panna cotta well in advance as it needs to set for a couple ofhours.

As I’m serving the panna cotta in the glasses I use only 2 gelatin sheets.

Soak the gelatin in cold water for a couple of minutes.

In the meantime pour the milk and cream into a pan and add the sugar. Optionally you can add the marrow from a vanilla bean or ½ ts vanilla extract or ½ ts coffee extract. I used coffee extract, but you could skip this step.

Bring the milk and cream to a gentle simmer while stirring, remove from heat. Squeeze the gelatin and add to pan and melt into the mixture.

Pour into a jug and cover with plastic wrap. Press the wrap onto the liquid to prevent a skin from forming. Leave to cool to room temperature and stir once in a while.

Pour the cooled mixture into 4 glasses or ramekins and leave to set in the fridge for 2 to 4 hours.

Coffee caramel sauce

As it can be tricky to make your own caramel sauce I took some photo’s of the process and different stages of the sugar while caramelizing. Never leave your pan unsupervised, use a low heat, don’t touch the hot caramel and don’t stir!

Make sure your pan is high enough, because the mixture will expand a lot after adding the cream. Have everything ready and measured before starting your caramel.

I used one of my white pans to show you the stages of the caramel more clearly. I have seen caramels where no crust forms on top during the caramelization process, I have no idea what the difference is. Perhaps a higher temperature?

Pour the cream and coffee extract into a seperate pan. We will heat this before adding it to the caramelized sugar.

Pour the water and sugar into a sauce pan. Swirl or stir to mix.

Put the pan on the lowest heat. If it takes too long you can turn up the heat slightly. Don’t stir anymore.

The sugar will melt into the water and it will start to bubble. Slowly a crust will form on top.

Underneath the crust you see the sugar turn golden. Don’t stir or shake the pan.

The crust will melt into the caramel. Now you can gently swirl the pan to help melt the sugars into the caramel. Now you can start to heat the cream and coffee extract. Bring it to a gentle simmer, it doesn’t need to boil.

The caramelization is done.

Add the cream carefully. The caramel will start to bubble and expand. Keep stirring until the cream and caramel have completely mixed together, turn off the heat, add the butter and incorporate.

Pour the caramel sauce into a jar or bowl. Don’t touch or taste yet. The sauce is still way too hot. Soak your pan and spatula in hot water for easy cleaning.

Once the sauce has cooled you can keep it in the refrigerator. You might have to stir the sauce to loosen it directly from the fridge.

We had this sauce with panna cotta and vanilla ice cream. You could also serve it on top of waffles, pancakes or on a chunk of bread.

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