Our parfait decorated with curly ears looks almost like a rabbit princess. The ice cream in the glass has a refreshing blueberry flavor, and the “ears” are made of a crispy, light cookie called tuile. The first bite welcomes a simple flavor of ice cream mixed with a tart jam. With a bite of the pie, the cream melts in your mouth. A slightly tart spoonful of ice cream, a piece of crispy tuile, ice cream, cream pie, mint, ice cream, cream pie, then ice cream again. Soon, you would expect a chill would hit a nerve… but it doesn’t. You think the cream to begin to feel heavy in your stomach… but it doesn’t. Oddly enough, you can comfortably eat as much as you like—it’s like magic!

    We asked our pastry chefs the reason for this. They said that they experimented on making frozen yogurt but no matter how many times they tried, their boss would ask, “Is this the best you can do?” We weren’t sure what he meant by “best.” After all, the ingredients are fixed, what else could we do? Then we thought, “Wait a second. What if we changed the producers of our eggs? Or extracted the fat from the milk? What about the amount of sugar being used? How would this change things?”

    Then we tried to completely skim the fat from the fresh whole milk from Kumamoto Prefecture to make our yogurt. We fermented several generations of Caspian Sea yogurt and added a hearty amount of Shigaraki yogurt cultures to create our smooth, mild flavor. From this batch, we further extracted the oils to see what would happen.

    We then ordered eggs from three different locations. All the eggs had different consistencies—rich, medium, and light. We experimented on sixteen different recipes and each of them was amazingly different. The surprised pastry chefs chose the most refreshing and simplest flavored blueberry yogurt ice cream.

    So how is this made? First, fresh cream is mixed into yogurt. Next, sugar is blended with egg yolk until the mixture turns white. Then the yogurt cream is quickly added to this to produce a soft milky fragrance. This is quickly strained and heated in a pot until it turns 68 degrees Celsius. Then it is immediately chilled on ice. The creamy liquid looks so luscious. After the cream is uniformly chilled, it is placed in the ice creamery, which goes round and round. And before we know it, we have our ice cream, which is mixed in with a jam made of fresh blueberry.

    Now, we come to the pie with unsweetened cream at the bottom. The pie is made of a butter and flour mixture that is thoroughly cut and blended together. When baked, it puffs up and looks like a little house. When you take a bite, it seems that it should be crisp but instead it’s soft and makes you wonder what you have bitten into. Inside are alternating layers of cream. Now we’re finished, so let’s go back to the beginning. The reason that this dessert is not heavy at all is because of the completely nonfat ice cream. And it doesn’t feel cold in your mouth because the soft pie melts in your mouth and coalesces with the ice cream so that your mouth returns to its normal temperature. The result is an exquisite parfait with perfectly balanced flavors and textures.

    Our pastry chefs said, “Once we removed the fat, it seems that the heaviness disappeared. And because we use only the best ingredients, it can only be delicious.” Then they laughed like little rabbits and quickly and delightfully made us our parfaits.

    Incidentally, a scrumptious strawberry yogurt parfait is planned to be coming soon.