Macerated Strawberry Pudding

Coca-Cola Product Placement

This week we get two recipes for the price of one! One of them I was pleasantly surprised about, the other sadly somewhat disappointed. Let's start with the good news, the first recipe and necessary to make the second recipe was macerated strawberries. Macerating is just soaking a food in a liquid to both soften the food and allow it to absorb some flavour. Macerating is very similar to marinading and the definition, as with a lot of things in the culinary world, can get a little bit fuzzy. Macerating usually involves fruit and a sweetened liquid, usually some kind of alcohol, where marinating is primarily done to meats (vegetables are often marinated as well) and involves an acidic liquid. To macerate my strawberries I used red wine, honey, sugar and lemon zest. I am not much of a wine fan, in fact I couldn't even tell you what kind of wine I used besides red. I found half a bottle in the fridge, I think it was left over from Christmas. Despite my aversion to the flavour of wine, the sugar and especially the lemon zest was an excellent combination with the flavour of the strawberries. This would be perfect for ice cream or yogurt or just right out of the container. Also the longer it sits the better it tastes!

Un-openable Can

Now for the bad news. The second recipe used the macerated strawberries to make a sort of no-bake bread pudding. The can with the pop can sticking out of the top of it is the rig used to create this dish. Rounds of stale bread are layered in the can with strawberries and the macerating liquid in between. The pop can is used as a weight to compress the pudding for the 8 hours it needs to sit in the fridge. The first problem with was that it was really hard to find a can (at least in my kitchen) that was openable at both ends and the right size for the loaf of bread. Most of the cans had bottoms like the picture to the left, that you can't use a can opener on or were way too big. Once I found a can assembly went smoothly, although I would recommend cutting the rounds and then letting the bread stale instead of the other way around. I was hoping for a creamy smooth texture when I pulled the can off but I guess there was not enough liquid for the bread to absorb. This left some tough and crunchy parts. Maybe with more liquid this would have been more successful (I did only make one after all) but the comments on foodnetwork.com said this recipe was hard to get right. This is not for the kids; there is no cooking involved so all the alcohol is still there.

And now in closing a few tidbits about strawberries:
- Strawberries get there name from the straw that is used to keep there vines from rotting when in direct contact with the ground
- A single strawberry contains about 200 fruits. The seeds are technically the fruit and the fleshy part is just there to hold them

I forgot to mention this recipe is from Good Eats: The Early Years and here is the link Macerated Strawberry Pudding.