The Restaurant Makeover

I think that what separates a good dessert from a great dessert is the attention paid to flavor balance, texture balance and temperature.  While it is fun and overload-y to have sweet upon sweet upon sweet, sometimes more restraint can equal more elegance.  Balance a sweet flavor with an acidic flavor.  Make sure you're adding some salt--not to make your dessert salty, but to round out flavors.  Pair a really rich sweet dessert with a sauce that will help to cut and balance the sweetness.  Apple pie with whipped cream is good, but try it with creme fraiche or an apple cider gastrique instead, and you'll see what I mean.  Also, a great dessert will let the diner experience multiple textures in one bite--creamy, crunchy, silky, cakey, gooey, crispy--you name it.  Sound hard?  Nah.  You do it all the time without thinking about it.  Cake and ice cream give you cakey-gooey-creamy.  Lemon meringue pie gives you crispy-silky-poufy.  Try and have three textures on a plate.  Last but not least:  temperature.  General temperature "categories" for desserts are warm, room temperature, chilled and frozen.  Serve warm apple pie (warm, duh), with a cinnamon anglaise (chilled), some sort of a streusel crumble (room temperature) and your choice of ice cream (frozen).  The contrast in temperature can boost your offering from good to great.

Creating a restaurant dessert from a home dessert is not such a difficult thing.  I think that they fall into three basic categories:  deconstructing, refining and spinning.  While there is overlap among these categories, I'll try and hit the unique highlights of each one.  Plus, here are helpful pages on Dessert Construction and Dessert Plating.

Dessert Deconstruction

Refining the Dessert

Spinning the Dessert

Dessert Construction

Plating Your Dessert 

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