$1,000 Strawberry Shortcake

strawberry shortcake it is a very simple dessert but oftentimes when it comes to food simplicity is best which means that if you make something that has such a small number of components like a strawberry shortcake you better make sure that each of the individual ingredients is top-notch you gotta have that chest kiss now let's quickly break down a strawberry shortcake what is it well it's actually pretty simple you got your strawberries which are sort of the key ingredient in this thing because without good strawberries what the heck are you doing then you got your shortcake which i do want to focus on because a nasty dry crumbly shortcake is not a good thing and last but not least you got that amazing whipped cream now if you haven't guessed already from the title or everything i've just said yes today we're going to be making a strawberry shortcake but it's not going to be just any strawberry shortcake we're going big and we're making it in a thousand dollar strawberry shortcake now here's the good news to any of you that want to make a really top-notch strawberry shortcake you can do the exact same thing as me because there's only one small reason that it's a thousand dollars and that's because of the strawberries now at first thought you might wonder how exactly are you gonna get one thousand dollars worth of strawberries but then you'll remember that we got a 2500 cheese wheel a fifteen hundred dollar leg of hormone a barraco a ten thousand dollar charcuterie board i mean come on we've already proved that we can do crazy things like that so that's why today after many many months of trying to find these i've secured what i think are the best strawberries in the world so let's check them out now on this table right here we have one thousand dollars worth of strawberries if not a little bit more in fact now i know it might look crazy with all the packaging that we have here but given how precious these are and you'll see in just a moment they need to be secured in packaging that keeps them nice and cool we are not messing around with these strawberries you know me and i'm not going to make you wait so let's open them up now with this entire process i want to be extremely delicate because i don't want to bruise or break any of these berries now i'll open these up in just a moment here but i hope right off the bat you can see how incredibly special these berries look now normally you can find these berries in the wild at the foothills of the japanese alps but oyshe decided they would bring these to new york city and created an indoor vertical farm that mimics all of those elements that you'd see in japan so think of rain air heat light nourishment pretty much everything that can perfectly mimic what's happening in japan i'm going to start by sliding off the sleeve here at which point we have the berries just in our container now i know i'm teasing you a little bit by not opening this up right away but immediately you should notice how much larger these dimples are than regular strawberries you might find at your local market let's open these up now that we've opened up our berries you can get a better glimpse of how perfect and beautiful these are to me honestly they all look almost like an emoji almost too good to be true too perfect these also come in sleeves of 11. and one thing that i do want to note is that i've always talked to you about how much i care about the environment and i get it i know this seems like a lot of packaging and it is we'll say it how it is but i've spoken with the company about this and across their packaging they'll put these recyclable icons so that you know this can be recycled so much time and effort goes into producing each of these strawberries that you have to keep them safe so i understand why the packaging is the way that it is and in fact now just quickly i want to show you how cushiony all this packaging is if you look really closely here you can see that in each bit of packaging there's almost this little cushion and when you put a strawberry or in fact your finger here it doesn't actually touch the bottom of the packaging it's also very light so they've tried to minimize the amount of plastic used here but again you do have to protect these strawberries it's just amazing to me how cushiony this is can you actually cut the camera for just one second i just want to see i just want to see if it cushioned my face dude now before i try one of these i want to go to the market and get some normal strawberries so we can sit and talk about those differences before we make this strawberry shortcake one second let me grab something did you see that you're fired what are you doing you're fired so we're in like the kind of the makeup hair cosmetics aisle whatever of stop and shop they don't like us filming in here we've been kicked out of here before for filming so i'm doing it in here but we got our strawberries you can see here i picked out a decent batch but you got those little white spots which means they're not quite ripened yet and this just goes to show you what we're working with in terms of differences in strawberry quality so let's go home try these out and see how they compare all right as promised we got these strawberries from right up the road and i just want to show you something you see the white parts around the top of it here they've essentially pulled this off the vine and tried to let it ripen a little bit after perhaps on a truck all the way out from california to boston and when that happens you're losing tons and tons of that flavor flavor that photosynthesis would otherwise be pumping into these strawberries i mean just look at this one right here yeah it's a little bit red on this side but on the other you've got this really bright white strawberry that you just know isn't gonna have those amazing sweet sugars to start let's try this conventional strawberry just after giving it a little rinse sure so it's fine right i mean we've all had strawberries from our local market and they're okay they don't necessarily scream that perfect strawberry flavor that you can try to imagine but they're not bad they're all right but now let's try one of our japanese omakase berries before trying it i do want to tell you that i stuffed all of these into my fridge and now my entire refrigerator smells like strawberry in fact just sniffing over the top of these strawberries gives you that amazing strawberry flavor that true strawberry goodness that you've never ever experienced before but to start let's take a little bite [Music] okay i'll start by saying that those are so so sweet and sugary and perhaps more importantly they taste like a strawberry i mean i feel like tasting these now i've literally never had a strawberry in my entire life i just want to swim in a bath of these strawberries they're sweet they're delicious they have all that amazing strawberry flavor that you really just never feel like you've experienced they're also just softer and more delicate than these harder ones here which are almost difficult to bite into those aren't crunchy but they're not soft and creamy like these ones now as much as i'd like to eat this entire tray here i'm not going to i want to save them for our thousand dollar strawberry shortcake and before we really start cooking the last important thing i want to note is that in japan and many other countries and cultures fruit including of course strawberries it's a very rare thing and only really brought out on special occasions think things like graduation maybe the holidays that sort of thing now i know it sounds a little wild that i'm now taking all of these berries and throwing them into an amazing shortcake but today i just really want to make something truly spectacular i've been waiting a long long time to get some of these berries so perhaps aside from saving a few to hand out to people and let them try and hopefully experience true strawberries for the first time i want to use them in an amazing shortcake so without further ado let's start slicing some of those berries to start we're going to make a few macerated strawberries and basically what that means is taking off these stems here slicing them in half ideally not dropping any of them on the floor because of how precious these are and then placing these in a bowl with some sugar to let osmosis go to work and pull out all those amazing strawberry juices basically by adding sugar to these strawberries we're gonna let them start to sweat a little bit really let out more of that amazing strawberry flavor that we're looking for and now once our berries are chopped up we'll add them to a bowl then while mixing with our hands sprinkle over a really light coating of sugar here sugar has this amazing ability to draw moisture out of things so you should actually immediately start to see some of these berries get a little bit shinier we're gonna place these in the fridge to continue to let them glaze over with that liquid and ultimately these will be placed on our strawberry shortcake for our brown butter shortbread which i think is a fantastic type of shortbread given that it's minimal additional effort to get that brown butter but also tastes so much better we'll go into our mixing bowl with two and a half cups of all-purpose flour one half cup plus one tablespoon granulated sugar a nice little pinch of salt and about two sticks of cold brown butter which as you can see when i dig into it has all those beautifully browned milk salts on the bottom and is separated a little bit in the fridge i made this brown butter last night and let me just tell you it smells incredible now we're going to close this down with our paddle attachment and mix on medium or medium low until it comes into somewhat of a pea-sized texture now once it's in those pea-sized crumbles and kind of looks something like this we're ready to spread it out and at this point we're ready to crumble them onto our baking sheet notice i'm not really spraying this because of how much butter there is in here if you want to be really safe you can but i guess i'm just feeling a little bit lazy today this looks utterly delicious hey turn off the camera quick set now press down all that shortbread until it's nice and held together and you can even use your rolling pin a little bit if it's going to help you can see if you look closely all those little brown specks of the brown butter now last but not least before we put in the oven we want to very lightly score the tops of it and honestly it doesn't really matter what tool you use here but really we just want to see a little bit of texture on the top and then we just want to do a very light sprinkle of sugar filling in all those little gaps we just created then our shortbread goes in the oven at 350 fahrenheit for about 20 to 25 minutes now i guess we never explained how exactly we're gonna get to that thousand dollar strawberry shortcake and it's actually pretty simple each of these trays right here cost 50 i know that sounds crazy but again we've talked about how much goes into all these strawberries and they really are amazing they'll blow your mind and quite frankly kind of ruin regular strawberries for you for the rest of time so that's why we're using a heck of a lot of strawberries to make this sauce that's going to go on and around our strawberry shortcake now right here you're looking at close to 250 strawberries and again each of these trays is worth about 50 bucks so i'm working with some pretty pricey produce here it's going to take me a little bit of time to break all these strawberries down but in just a moment we're gonna throw them all into a big pot and make an amazing amazing sauce now to make this very powerful strawberry sauce we're gonna start with just a little bit of water across the bottom of the pan here then i'm gonna quickly go through my berries ripping off that top green part and throwing the berries themselves in what we're looking to do right now is concentrate as much of the berry flavor as possible and what's eventually going to be this very condensed liquid you'll see how quickly the berries break down and turn into almost a mush after which point we'll toss them in a blender and then strain them through a really fine shin wok now once this pot is full of all our berries i'm gonna go ahead and sprinkle a little bit of sugar over the top to start drawing all the moisture out again it's a very similar concept how we did those macerated strawberries and then we're gonna constantly stir these around and mash them as they cook and this will continue to let off water and reduce down until we have a gel let's check back in a few minutes now as you can see these berries have gotten really mushy but i don't want them to lose too much of their color so i'm going to turn off my heat come right over here to my blender and begin to pour some of these into my blender it wasn't working super well out of the pot but this works a little bit better and now we're gonna blend it up and once it's been heavily blended i'm gonna strain this through my chinwa to get it extremely extremely smooth but we're not just gonna strain it once we'll be straining it out until we've gotten every last solid speck out of it now once we've done this first training process i'll move my chinwa over to my other bowl and pour this mixture back into the chinwa strain we're then going to let this spin around and strain out into the new bowl going back and forth and back and forth until we've gotten out as many air bubbles as well as as many solids out again this dessert has to be absolutely perfect to respect the amazing strawberries that we're using in this video we'll continue doing this for about 10 minutes going back and forth and back and forth until we get the smoothest sauce we can possibly get eventually our sauce will look like this and we can set it aside for later use [Music] we'll let our beautiful shortbread rest until we're ready to cut into it with some nice ring molds now we'll make a very very simple whipped cream here starting with just some heavy cream and a generous amount of my vanilla bean paste which you should quickly see spread these little vanilla bean dots across my whipped cream now i'm going to take my funnel and place this vanilla whipped cream into my whipping canister believe it or not i actually don't want to add any sugar in here right now because we already have a lot of sugar and sweetness from the dish as a whole so i want to let this whipped cream be more of a texture than a bunch of added flavor these strawberries should stand out first i'll load up my canister screw on that cap that was really cold on my hands wow we're good let's do that again just bear with me here for a minute it's already well past two o'clock and we haven't had any lunch yet today so i'm a little bit tired and hungry first we'll screw on the cap of our canister here and then we'll charge it i'm gonna give it a couple of shakes here just to get that whipped cream going a little bit let me show you a good old party trick here real quick a little bit of whipped cream on top of your hand and then you whack it now for our beautiful crumbly shortcake it's time to cut out a few rings so i'm going to gently press my ring mold into the shortcake twist around a little bit so it dislodges itself and pull it right out if i'm very gentle with it we should have a beautiful ring of brown butter shortcake i'm going to use about three of these for the final product here so i'll dislodge this one again and place this off to the side to prepare for plating our shortcake so once i get this last one here we're ready to go ahead and plate now sadly the isi whip over whipped so i've taken matters into my own hands and whipped it by hand now to plate our strawberry shortcake i'm going to start by placing down one of our brown butter shortbread pieces in the middle of my plate and then we'll take all of our strawberries which have gotten a lot of that juice out and you can see how truly juicy they are in this bowl without having added any liquid and we'll gently stack up a nice little stack of these strawberries onto our strawberry shortcake now of course i want this to look nice but i'm also okay with it being a little bit messy next we're gonna go on with a nice spoon of our whipped cream smashing this down a little bit to make sure it's spread evenly across our strawberries and at this point we'll go on with another piece of our shortbread and then we'll finish it off with one of our perfect looking berries now last but not least let's of course go on with some of this very concentrated strawberry sauce i'm just going to sprinkle down the edges of our strawberry shortcake here getting a few nice beautiful delicious looking drizzles right down the side of the shortcake because this of course is our sauce and every great meal needs a sauce and now after all that incredibly hard work i present to you the 1 000 strawberry shortcake let's dig in shall we now before we do anything we need to let pesto get a little try and he was sleeping in his little container here but now he smells the amazing fragrance of strawberries and he can't wait to get out and get a taste i do want pesto before he perishes to experience the omakase berry so let's let him get a little taste at first glance it seems like he likes it a lot and i know i could easily rest a few regular strawberries over here and then he wouldn't go for them because these have so much more sugar in them now because pesto is pretty prone to diabetes i actually can't let him eat the entire thing but i just wanted to show you how a hamster reacted to the omakase berry and just try to look at this guy with a straight face and tell me that he isn't beyond happy right now i think pesto absolutely loved it to start the final part of this video i want to eat one of these strawberries one last time their website said is supposed to be a very sensual experience wait no that can't be right sensory experience so let's give this a bite it really is just crazy having what i feel like is a real strawberry for the first time i was lucky enough to visit japan for a short period a long time ago and i remember seeing the airport a bunch of individually wrapped strawberries my first thought was wow that's a massive massive waste why would you wrap a single strawberry in its own packaging and then i looked at the price tag and saw that each strawberry was about 15 or 20 us dollars now i have a really solid understanding of the fact that fruit is just a very precious thing at least in many places and for that reason you can see why a japanese strawberry which has been treated with this meticulous care and respect is so much better than the strawberries we can get at the market up the road it all kind of makes sense to me now now as for this amazing strawberry shortcake that we've made today i want to take a big bite out of it and dig in the important thing here is definitely getting a bite that has a little bit of everything we should get all sorts of flavors here and textures as well so let's see how this tastes biting into that gave me that same wow moment that i got the second i tried one of these strawberries for the first time this is of course the first true strawberry shortcake i've ever experienced and in every possible way this is absolutely a one thousand dollar strawberry shortcake that brown butter shortcake melts in your mouth gives you that full fatty coating that you're looking for when you eat a dessert that strawberry sauce that we put over the top of it may not have the most bright red appetizing look that we're looking for in a strawberry and that makes sense because we cooked it off a little bit to reduce it but let me just tell you each little bite of that has more strawberry flavor than any single strawberry ever could and we've concentrated it so intensely that that makes sense then of course you have that vanilla whipped cream which is very very simple and gives that creaminess throughout the whole dish as well as that foamy texture and of course those strawberries they let out all their amazing juices they're so sweet and almost just a slight bit of tartness and acid in there to balance everything out making this the perfect dessert now it's my hope that i can soon visit this actual farm in new york and give you a little bit of a better look at how they make japanese strawberries in the u.s i want to bring you closer and closer to that experience if you can't taste one of these for yourself right now but in the meantime you're just gonna have to imagine and look at all the flavors and smells that we're dealing with here and you're gonna have to trust me that they're pretty amazing thank you all so much for watching the video and thank you again to oishiberi for providing these awesome strawberries because they were delicious for those of you that are new here we are a family of two million and growing so make sure you whack that subscribe button and don't forget to click the notifications icon too and please please pretty please don't forget to like the video i'll see you next time

Channel: Nick DiGiovanni

Views: 859,156

Rating: 4.952662 out of 5

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Id: 8Sxrk3kuSHs

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021