The juice should be absolutely clear you should have at least 1 cup of clear juice. Line the strainer with damp paper towels and strain a fin l time. Discard the solids, then pass the liquid through the strainer again into a clean bowl and then back again into the original bowl. Use a spoon to gently stir the puree and encourage the juice to strain but don’t push any of the fibers through the strainer. Pour the pureed fruit through the strainer into a clean medium bowl. Transfer the flesh to a food processor and process until liquefied. Scoop out the melon flesh from the remaining three quarters into the bowl, using a spoon to scrape close to the rind, where the flesh is deeper in color (this will improve the color of the jellies). Step 2Ĭut one of the melon halves in half again lengthwise and set aside a quarter for garnish. Scrape out the seeds with a large spoon into a wire-mesh strainer, set over a medium bowl, to catch the juices. To make the juice: Cut the melon in half lengthwise. This recipe was excerpted from ‘Rintaro' by Sylvan Mishima Brackett. If you can’t find a green melon that’s overwhelmingly fragrant but you really want to make this parfait, it’s not terrible to add a couple of tablespoons of green Midori, the Japanese liquor made from the famous Yubari King and muskmelon. While sweetness can be an indication of flavor, remember you can always add more sugar. Charentais, which is similar to a cantaloupe, works well, as do muskmelons and canary melons. If you can’t find Piel de Sapo, use the most fragrant melon you can find. It’s similar to a honeydew, but when they are good, they are intensely fragrant with a flavor that reminds me of that melon I gave to my grandmother. ![]() I use a variety of melon called Piel de Sapo. Throughout the year, parfaits appear on the menu at Rintaro, my San Francisco restaurant, showcasing jellies made from the best seasonal fruit. In Japan, fruit jellies, made with actual fruit juice, are incredibly popular and often served layered in a parfait glass with whipped cream or ice cream. If I were to go back in time, knowing what I know now, I probably would have transformed that fancy melon into jelly. That batch of melon granita, too, lasted for a week, coming in and out of the freezer to be eaten a couple of spoonfuls at a time. She had let it go too long! I had started working as a pastry assistant and had the clever idea of turning the juice into a granita to salvage what was a near catastrophe. When I finally insisted we cut it open, it was impossibly fragrant and sweet but also nearly liquid inside. So, there it sat in the refrigerator, getting riper and riper. Clearly, for my grandmother, something so expensive and rare was too special to eat. ![]() It was one of those Yubari green melons that are grown with just several to a vine so as to concentrate their flavor and sweetness. This created a problem when, in my early twenties, I presented her with a foil-wrapped “gift” melon, which had cost me, even twenty years ago, about $70. I swear, she could make one sad apple last a week. As a kid, I was appalled at how she would fetch half of a mealy apple from a dish in the refrigerator, cut a few slices for dinner, and then return it to the refrigerator for the next meal. For years following the end of the war, she, like much of the nation, often didn’t have enough to eat this later translated into extreme thriftiness when it came to food. ![]() Although she had never spoken to me or even to my mother directly about it, I gathered that she had lost her first family during the Second World War. My grandmother Fumie Mishima was from a different world.
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