Grilled Banana Scallops w/ Maytag Blue Cheese & Guava Gelee

The Great Cooks Community has a challenge running on grilled fruit for dessert. If you have a second, please take time to join the community and vote for me (pretty please with maytag blue cheese on top?). I decided on a semi-savory but very fruity and sweet approach. I had already been researching some unusual flavor pairings with Guava and then ran across the announcement of the challenge, so decided to jump in with something that might take people back a bit.



The logic behind this dish is that banana, rum, guava, and (believe it or not) blue cheese share several common volatile flavor components that make them blend together somewhat magically. Certainly there is precedent for guava and banana pairing, but I decided to push the envelope a bit with the rum and blue cheese. The rum didn't seem like too far of a stretch from bananas foster, so I added a bridge element of brown sugar (which I use in my bananas foster preparation anyway). The blue cheese I knew would be austere, so I decided to sandwich that between the banana and the guava, with the idea that you'd spear these from the top and eat banana first, then blue cheese, then finish with the guava.

Here is the preparation (per person):

1 ripe banana, cut into 4 scallops (ok a little taller than a scallop), discarding the tips
¼ cup guava gelee
4 1”x1” slices of Maytag blue cheese (avoid stilton, fourme d'Ambert, etc, these are too musty for this)
½ cup spiced rum
brown sugar to barely coat the banana

For the guava gelee, use a non-concentrated pasteurized guava juice (which will be slightly blended with pear or apple juice), along with a ~0.9% mix of gelatin by weight: I used 300 ml guava juice & 3g of gelatin. Bring the juice to 180-200F then whisk in the gelatin. Let sit overnight in the fridge. Agitate before serving, you're going for a consistency that is thinner than jello, slightly thicker than jelly (though the heat of the bananas will melt this a bit, so work quickly and carefully when plating).

Macerate the banana scallop in the rum in a little bowl for about 2-4 minutes, you don't need much time to impart flavor, and too much time with leave the bananas as mush. Pull the scallops from the rum and coat gently with brown sugar, no clumps just a nice even coat that melds with the rum on the surface. On a 500F grill that is coated with a high temperature cooking spray (like PAM with Palm oil), place the bananas on their ends, then rotate 90 degrees every 30 seconds, and finally rotate to the back and front (leaving the grill open the whole time). We're going for a quick caramelization here that leaves some pretty grill marks. Remove from the heat after no more than 3-4 minutes.

I have to say that I love this, and I'm not a big dessert guy, mostly because I avoid the cloyingly sweet stuff. This experiment has me thinking I might be on to something with my research on flavor combinations, please let me know what you think if you're bold enough to try it!