YOGURT & HONEY PANNA COTTA with Roasted Strawberries + A Video

Yogurt & Honey Panna Cotta + Roasted Strawberries

This silky smooth dessert is lightly sweetened with honey and barely set to make a deliciously creamy and moorish dessert. Roasting the strawberries intensifies their flavour making this dessert one to remember. This recipe makes enough to serve 8 people so you could halve the quantities for less people, however, it keeps well for several days in the fridge for a sneaky dessert once the children are in bed.

Servings 8 people

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 sheets gelatin or 10g powdered gelatin packet *see notes for vegetarian option
• 1/2 cup whole milk
• 1 cup cream
• 1 vanilla bean pod or 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 4 heaped tablespoons liquid honey
• 2 cups thick Greek Yogurt

Roasted Strawberries:

• 500 g fresh picked strawberries or 2 punnets
• 1 tablespoon raw sugar
• vanilla bean pod reused from making the Panna Cotta
• Chopped pistachios to serve

Instructions

• In a bowl, cover the gelatin sheets with cold water and set aside to soften.
• Over a moderate heat bring the milk and cream to a gentle simmer. Scrape the vanilla seeds from the pod and add these along with the empty pod to the cream. Simmer gently for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and scoop out the vanilla pod (reserve for roasting the strawberries). Drain the gelatin, squeezing out as much water as possible and stir through the cream mixture – it will dissolve instantly. Add the yogurt and pour in the liquid honey, gently whisk until smooth.
• Pour the panna cotta mixture evenly into 8 x 120 ml ramekins or glasses. Set in the fridge for at least 4 hours. These can be made a day in advance and covered until ready to serve.
• Roasted Strawberries: Preheat the oven 180C and line a baking tray with baking paper. Remove the leaves from the strawberries and cut into quarters. Toss with the sugar and reused vanilla pod and spread in a single layer on the baking tray. Roast for 20 minutes until your house full with the intoxicating smell of strawberry perfume. Cool on the tray.
• To serve, use a flat spatula to scoop up the roasted strawberries and spoon onto the cold panna cotta. Scatter with chopped pistachios.

Notes

To make a vegetarian Panna Cotta use agar agar flakes (a seaweed derived jelling agent). Use 3 tablespoons agar agar in place of the gelatin, adding the agar agar to the milk and cream mixture before heating as the agar agar needs to be boiled to be activated.

This past week was New Zealand’s first ‘National Honey Week’. We love honey and honey bees around here and this time of year our garden is buzzing with activity as the bees feed on blue borage, sage, chive and thyme flowers. If you want to attract honey bees into your garden it is important to  plant blue and purple flowers as they are particularly attracted to these colours. Honey bees are essential for pollination of many food crops so celebrating them and the sweet nectar they produce is a good thing.

The other thing my garden is bursting with at present is homegrown strawberries. This beautiful warm weather is doing amazing things for the garden with all of my vegetable plants well ahead of schedule compared to last year. Every few days I head out to the garden with my children in tow for, as my daughter puts it, ‘a strawberry session’. I must have said this once when we were picking berries and truth be told it really is ‘a strawberry session’ as none of the strawberries make it past the garden steps. Well, except for the bowl you see above. I managed to distract the eager little fingers away from the strawberry patch for a few days so we would have enough to make a little video. If they only knew!

The recipe I make in the video above is part of my Wild Tomato Magazine Christmas Lunch Menu. If you live in the top of the south island (New Zealand) be sure to pick up the December issue of Wild Tomato for my 6 page food feature. The menu is a simple lunch focusing on seasonal and local ingredients. As well as creating and writing the recipes I photographed the whole feature including this beautiful table spread.

*Video produced by my friend and videographer Fraser Heal.

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