The 5- Hour Barbecued Pumpkin

My backyard has these gorgeous climbers with pumpkin blossoms and no pumpkins. Digging deep into my reservoir of originality, I decided to serve them with a roasted pumpkin.
In all honesty though, pumpkin flowers when done up as fritters loose a lot of flavour.

I commenced by placing an entire pumpkin on my barbecue.
some 4/5/6 hours (the fire went out for an hour I think, also I have no idea when I put it on) later:

The gateway to the most delicious seeds you've eaten is the flesh of the pumpkin itself.

The skin looked near burnt but tasted like the sweetest pumpkin I had ever eaten- the darker the better. The pumpkins in India are grown for a tart sabji, so sweetness isn't exactly its prominent flavour profile.

Nevertheless, knowing how well fragrant citrus goes well with pumpkins, I had to give the combination a go. I somehow found some delicious, juicy grapefruit in my city and they're literally the best citrus I've seen around here. Seizing the opportunity to turn it into a sorbet, I really wanted to add some crispy caramel to this dish- the sorbet required it and so did the pumpkin. It was either this or honey. Guess what made it to the dish..
Initially the idea was to simply dry tapioca starch with some sugar and fry it up to get this nice, light cracker. I instead ended up with burnt sugar, floating around in smoking oil. The more you know...

Because they tasted great as they were, I simply let the sugar caramelize in the oven a bit longer. Inspired by my tapioca caramel, I decided to crisp up some yogurt the same way- and it worked wonderfully. Living in such a humid place, both the crisps stored extremely well too. For the first time- no weepy caramel, no sticky hands and zero frustration in dealing with an oven that can't seem to go below 160.
To end this post abruptly, a poached egg yolk for fat.

5 Hour Barbecued Pumpkin with its seeds. Pumpkin Blossom from the backyard, Poached Egg Yolk, Grapefruit Sorbet, Caramel Tapioca Sheet, Crispy Yogurt

Bitterness

Grapefruit. The only bitter fruit known to mankind.
I'm joking, of course.
Bitterness is something that people try to avoid as much as possible. Calibrated correctly, it can be addictive- with the right amount of sugar, salt and acid.
Nevertheless, a very, very, delicious citrus. I remember trying pamplemousse a few years ago, alas it was too bitter for my then young palate. We're talking about 'what's coffee?'era.
Facing  it again after so many years, I still somewhat feared the bitter. But bitter is delicious. And so is fruit that is hard to get a hold of.

I knew I wanted an aerated curd from the get go- I look for every opportunity to chuck a fat based element into the siphon as those are literally the only textures I can make work so far. But what is that supposed to go with.....

Well, I may have cheated a bit and have stolen an element from another dessert I was working on. Which also meant scrapping it. Now I have two containers of black/ purple rice pudding and no mangosteen ice to go with. Oh well, I guess I will leave that for another day.

Hazelnut cookies were purely intuitive, the marshmallows- not so much. I had to know what marshmallow cookies tastes like. Great, apparently.
And finally to diverge from giving acidity (not that there wasn't any before) through fruit, I decided to use yogurt water- something which I have leftovers of more or less everyday.


A bitter caramel is on there strictly for complementary purposes.  

Aerated grapefruit basil curd, hazelnut and marshmallow cookies, mangosteen gondhoraj ice, frozen and fresh grapefruit segments, wood sorrel, caramel, yogurt whey jelly.