Every now and then, you stumble across a dessert that leaves an impression, not only owing to its taste, but also its conception, plating, and those other small touches that elevate it from mere greatness to sheer genius. I happened to encounter one such masterpiece during my meal at Farmlore, Bangalore. It was the penultimate dish of their 10-course tasting menu, sandwiched between the sorbet and petit fours.

The menu reads: Palkova, Meringue, Malt Ice-cream, Miso Caramel. Sounds good. As I see the dish being plated before my eyes, it looks simple enough: a smear of something that looks a lot like kalakand, a spoonful of luscious caramel that spreads out on the plate into a perfect disc, the picture-perfect quenelle of ice-cream, and the crowning glory of a disc of meringue, dusted with a white powder.

The dish isn’t trying to be flamboyant: no edible flowers, no dry ice, no meticulous dots or Pollock-esque splashes. This dish relies on minimalism of form, the visual appeal solely in the perfect disc of caramel and the skillfully quenelled ice-cream. The colours don’t “pop” either, in the conventional sense. There’s no bright red of raspberry coulis, no green sprig of mint. The dish celebrates a gradient of brown, from ice-cream, to palkova, to caramel, the white of the meringue blending into the white plate. Monochrome is at play, kinda.

Palkova is a traditional Tamilian dessert of reduced milk, a  word that derives from the Tamil “pal” meaning “milk” and “kova” meaning “khoya”, the common North Indian term for reduced milk or milk solids. The Palkova is made using high-fat milk from the Hallikar cows of their own farm, reduced to a deliciously fudgy consistency with the most voluptuous mouthfeel from the milk fat, with toasty notes from the caramelized milk and the subtle, piney perfume of cardamom.

But that’s not where the milk ends on the plate. Infact, every component of this dish uses some form of dairy produced from Hallikar milk. The ice-cream is made using the same milk and cream, and the caramel is enriched with Hallikar butter. As for the “meringue”, it is not made from eggs, but using up the whey from the same milk, the curds being used up in other applications, like their beautiful in-house bocconcini that features in their salad course.

The whey is mixed with methylcellulose, which allows it to the whipped up into a foam. The foam is then spread out into discs and dehydrated at a low temperature for a long time. The same meringue, slightly modified every time, is also featured in the first course of the meal, a wonderful  amuse bouche “sphere” of rose meringue adorned with rose caviar, as well as the petit fours, this time fortified with the tang of citric acid, and topped off with apple caviar.

The choice of meringue shape is really interesting: not shards, not delicate dollops, but a large disc, indented in the center, visually reminiscent of a pavlova, ready to be topped with whipped cream and fresh fruit. It is curious that this dish, served in a Bangalore restaurant is called “palkova” instead of “halkova”, the Kannada name for the same dish (“halu” meaning “milk” in Kannada). Sure, the main chefs are all from Chennai, but I’m sure there’s more nuance to the nomenclature than just that.

Laid daintily atop everything else and dusted with dehydrated yoghurt made from, you guessed it, Hallikar milk, the meringue is meant to be lifted up and eaten with the hand, an welcome aberration in a fine dining place. Removing the disc reveals the other components of the dessert. There’s the palkova, the Indian part of the dish, juxtaposed with two very Western elements, ice-cream and caramel. The ice-cream is malt-flavoured, and even if that name may sound foreign, the flavour definitely isn’t.

Malted milk has been a part of our childhood in the form of Horlicks, a flavour that works beautifully in the dish, helped to a great extent by the smoothness of the ice-cream. If the ice-cream flavour is reminiscent of childhood, the caramel is a lot more grown-up, flavoured with miso, the Japanese fermented soybean paste that lends a depth of umami to anything it is added to, a stroke of genius. With everything else on the plate rather sweet, the savouriness of the caramel helps balance things out, creating a more rounded flavour.

Not only do the flavours on the plate blend seamlessly, there is enough textural variation on the plate to keep the water engaged: the ice-cream is silky-smooth, the caramel syrupy, and the palkova itself thick and fudgy. All of this textural stodginess is beautifully balanced out by the almost ethereal crunch of the meringue, with a unique texture, reminiscent of a cross between styrofoam and sabudana papad, that melts away beautifully on your tongue like no egg-based meringue ever can, with the unmistakable yoghurty tang which, along with the savouriness of the miso, deftly reins in the sweetness.

This dessert ticks a lot of boxes. It is delicious no doubt, but it also stays within confines of colour and ingredient. Every component on the dish is either white or some shade of brown, and each one of the five elements made with locally procured milk. But these restrictions only heighten the appreciation for the dish. Not one element on the plate feels out of place, nor does the dish feel lacking in any way. Add to that the cheeky Palkova-Pavlova wordplay, and the fact that the combination of the malt ice-cream and miso-caramel is hands-down one of the best flavour combinations I’ve ever tasted, and you’ve an absolute masterpiece on your hands.