Do you know what odorokashi means? Well just take a trip to the kitchen of Japan, Osaka and you’ll know what it is. It is actually a Japanese term which means desserts with an element of surprise. This was what Osaka welcomed me with when I visit the city. The luscious Pablo is a Japanese cheese tart which is eaten lava hot and melts in your mouth with flavors that get stuck with your taste buds forever. There are many variations sold today like the green tea Pablo or the chocolate Pablo, which all are tough competitors of each other.
Pablo is not only popular in Osaka. Head to the Japanese capital of Tokyo and you’ll be surprised with the wonderful and delicious Pablo sold there in every dessert stores. In fact, the story of its adoration isn’t just limited to Japan. For its surprising attitude today it is a popular dessert in Singapore and Manila as well, where a new Japanese dessert café has named itself on the dessert due to its odorokashi nature. This dessert is actually with an element of surprise.
It is a twist to the regular cheese tarts and when you have a spoon of it your mouth dazzles with tantalizing sweet flavors. It is named after the Italian painter, Pablo Picasso whose paintings have a similar effect of miraculous astonishment on you like the luscious Pablo does to your taste buds. So today in adoration of both the Pablo’s I’ll share with y’all the recipe for this Japanese cheese tart.
Pablo-Japanese cheese tart
Ingredients:
- Puff pastry-1 sheet
- Egg white- 1 egg
- 30g or 1 ounce of castor sugar
- 130gm or about 4.5 ounces of melted cream cheese
- 20gms or 0.7 ounces of melted butter( use unsalted butter)
- 30gms - heavy cream
- Egg yolk of one egg
- Cornstarch – 50gms or 4tsp
- 200ml of milk
- For egg wash- 1 egg yolk with 3tsp of milk
- Apricot jam
- Softened Chocolate to garnish
Method:
- First, we’ll take a Springfoam pan and grease it with butter. Now we’ll wrap it with a butter paper.
- Now we’ll wrap the Springfoam pan with a single sheet of puff pastry sheet and use a fork to poke in some holes in the bottom of the pan.
- Now we’ll do something known as blind baking. For this, we’ll use another parchment paper and put in it some rice or baking weights and place it in the center of the puff pastry shell.
- We’ll bake this at 350 F preheated oven for a good 10 minutes.
- Now we’ll remove the weight and allow the pastry shell to bake for another 5 minutes.
- Once it gets all golden and crusty, we’ll get it out of our pan.
- Now well make the meringue. For the meringue, we’ll beat egg white until soft peaks start to develop. Now in another container, we’ll take egg yolks and beat it with castor sugar while slowly adding in the cornstarch until we get a smooth mixture
- Now we’ll warm our milk and add it to the yolk mixture and stir well
- Once it’s all mixed together into a homogenized mixture, we’ll put this back into the saucepan and over medium flame allow it to get thickened while stirring it continuously.
- Now we’ll mix this cooked batter with softened cream cheese and whisk it till they all mix in together. Once it forms a homogenized batter, we’ll add the fluffy mixture of whipped egg whites we had made earlier and fold it gently with the cream cheese batter.
- Once done, we’ll pour the batter into the pastry shell starting from the center allowing it to spread around evenly.
- Then we’ll simply bake it at 320 degrees F for 35 minutes
- For the glazing, we’ll warm our apricot jam and add about 20ml of water with 2tsp of yellow food color and allow it to cook into a thick paste over a low flame.
- Now we’ll just get our Pablo out of the oven and garnish it with the apricot sauce.
We can take some chocolate sauce in a piping bag and draw some interesting pattern or design on the Pablo for a delightful look and serve it hot and enjoy