Pandan Rice with Roasted Banana
As seen on TV
Which Show?
Who made this dish?
Duyen drew on a Vietnamese street vendor she had watched grilling bananas alongside tapioca pudding, layering vanilla pandan rice as the base, roasted bananas above, and a salted dulce de leche sabayon foam delivered through an iSi siphon.
{Duyen}: "The caramel cake is what a caramel cake sounds like. Just layers and layers of caramel with vanilla cake inside. But I want to take a Vietnamese spin on it." The caramel cake reference was meant to live in the foam. Judges struggled to find any caramel cake reference and faulted the texture as soft on soft, with the pandan flavour absent and the bananas grey.
{Judge}: "Gotta be honest, I was, like, a little confused."
{Judge}: "You’re not the only one. I did not find it visually appealing. It had no caramel."
{Judge}: "It almost felt like Duyen wanted to do the pandan rice pudding. And then she was like, we’re gonna just, like, shoehorn it into this."
{Judge}: "I was missing the caramel stickiness and that flavor."
{Judge}: "My issue was that the rice pudding had very little flavor."
{Judge}: "I struggled to find any reference to caramel cake. I got pandan rice, banana. Texturally, it was kind of soft on soft."
{Judge}: "Part of me just doesn’t believe that Duyen’s was the dessert inspired by the caramel cake."
{Judge}: "The dish was so poorly executed. The banana was just, like, gray and completely soft. And then the pandan had no flavor."
