Passionfruit Butter

That would be the banana brown butter tart at Herbsaint, my favorite restaurant in the world. I have written a lengthy review on the restaurant (incidentally, it is also not as gastronomically pornographic as this astounded gushing of agape-love) that expounds on my love and respect for the restaurant’s food, service, ambiance, and everything else for which there is no word… but that’s a review for my column on Blake Makes, it hasn’t been posted yet. As always, I’ll be posting the first paragraph on here with a link out to the full version, so stay tuned.

Basically, this banana brown butter tart is my single favorite thing to ever have ingested. If I hadn’t already planned to have an elaborate spread of cupcakes with mix-and-match cake/icing flavors (banana cake with Nutella frosting! chocolate fudge cake with salted caramel buttercream! raspberry cake with chocolate ganache! the possibilities are endless!) in lieu of a cake at my wedding, I would SO commission pastry chef Kristyne Bouley to just make an inordinate amount of these tarts to adequately sate every person in attendance. The “crust” isn’t even cakey or dense — it’s nearly gritty (but at the same time very smooth) and vaguely salty, not cloying at all, so you get a very multi-noted flavor from that alone. For someone who has viewed crust all her life as just that — crust — this was a VERY pleasant surprise, as this entity was a critical element of the dish’s success. The best way I can describe it is that the inevitable butter in the crust itself combined with the sacred banana-brown-butter soup that came from within soaked the crust to a refreshing degree of spoonability. There isn’t really any crunch at all to the tart until you get to the fluted end (and that, too, falls apart in your mouth — it gives itself over to you entirely and selflessly). Truly a beautiful thing.

And then there are the other elements, which are just lagniappe: two caramelized banana slices as garnish (I feel hesitant to even call them that, because isn’t that throwaway leaf of parsley also a garnish? It’s criminal for the two to even be considered on the same level), with a deliciously thin, delicate layer of lacy sugar like expensive lingerie on the perfectly ripe banana. Then there’s a whipped cream that is most definitely homemade, with what tastes like real vanilla bean in it — it’s hardly sweet, which is my favorite way for whipped cream to be prepared. (I love nothing more than the barely sweetened crème chantilly that seems so pervasive in France.) Just this side of bitter, actually, which is a beautiful complement to the fleur de sel caramel, which you see drizzled so artfully underneath the slice, like a self-contained, edible doily… or a throne. It’s sweet, it’s salty; sure, it’s nothing new, but when we’re talking about salted caramel, do we really want something new?

Just think about that.