How to Make Panna Cotta

I’m Neil Haydock here with Rodda’s, and we’re going to make a fantastic dinner party dessert, panna cotta with Cornish clotted cream. The first thing we’re going to do is warm the milk. To that we’re going to add a vanilla pod that we’re going to slice down the middle, remove the seeds, pop those into the milk along with the pod. To that we’re going to add the caster sugar. So we’re just going to stir the milk to dissolve the sugar and disperse the vanilla. Next we’re going to soak the gelatine. People get really scared of gelatine. There’s no need, all you have to do is just pop it into a bowl of cold water and just let it soften. Next we’re going to stir the cream and as you can see we’ve got this lovely crust, and all we want to do is just sort of beat that together just so we have a nice smooth cream to put into the panna cotta. And into the pan. So at this point we can take the pan off the heat, just to incorporate the cream. And we’re getting really rich aromas from the sugar and the vanilla, really coming up from the pan now. So the cream’s incorporated and what we want to do now is add the gelatine. As you can see the gelatine’s really nice and soft now. What we want to do is just squeeze out that excess water. I’m just going to pop that into the pan, so the warmth of the cream will just help to dissolve the gelatine. We’re ready to fill the moulds now. I’m going to use a ladle, but you can pour this. About halfway up, you can go a little bit further if you like. So you can make this the day before, it’s a really impressive dish. And it looks like there’s a lot more work gone into it, but it literally it’s taken us five minutes to put together. You got this really great waft of vanilla coming up, really rich, really sumptuous. It really marries well with the cream. So I’m going to pop them on this tray, and then we’re going to put them in the fridge. These have been in the fridge a few hours, and now comes the fun part where we take them out of the moulds. Just going to dip them into hot water for a few seconds, bring them out. So you could turn this out onto the plate, but I prefer to turn it onto my hand and sort of get a little bit messy. All that’s left to do now is to dress the panna cotta, and it goes really well with simple berries, or we’ve got some lovely poached fruits which we’ve got here. Really simple, a dish to impress your friends, Cornish clotted cream panna cotta with poached plums.