Well, we’re getting down to crunch time here and one pie is done. My family is weird about the Pumpkin Pie. They basically want it Straight Up with No Chaser. In past years even though my crusts were not much better than a highway wreck, my fillings have always been good. It’s just that sometimes you needed a scoop of sorts to get it out of the pan. because the crust was so bad. This year though, a pie to be semi proud of. I had a little bit of leftover dough, used a small holly cookie cutter to cut out some leaves and scored them with a knife. If you need some laughs you can go to some of the early Pie posts here and have some good laughs.
Well back to my weird family. Back several years ago I made a pumpkin pie with a pecan topping. It was not well received. They said that “stuff” didn’t belong on top. One year I tried a pumpkin and cream cheese pie. They balked at that as well. So I’ve gone back to my grandmother’s old standard mix which is just milk, eggs, canned pumpkin, sugar, cinnamon, and a smattering of ginger and nutmeg. They also like the pie on the drier side which means I use more pumpkin and less milk. And talk about weird family – they want the cracks. Go figure that one. While I do try some new things for the holidays, it’s sometimes hard to beat the stuff you grew up with even if it is plain fare.
I wish you all a lovely Thanksgiving Day. Stay safe, warm, and happy!
Pie seems to be all the rage these days – big pies, mini pies, and recently when I was cruising the Martha Stewart website I came across Hand Pies courtesy of John Barricelli. They’re really nothing new, they’re just little one serving pies. Well I have been making Finger Pies for years. You can make an entire batch, or simply use up some dough left over when making your regular big pies. I was trying out a different dough mix the other day and made these. All you need is a scant teaspoon of jam or preserves and you have a nice little treat.I used Blackberry Preserves for my little batch here. I also filled some with Peach Habanero Pepper jelly and they were awesome!
I cut the dough here with 2 inch round fluted cutters, filled them, folded them over, and I’ve got a nice little treat. To seal you can brush the inside of the pastry with beaten egg. In my case, I just keep a bowl of tepid water on hand, moisten half of the inside edge, fold the things over, and press to seal. I do vent them with a sharp knife. Also don’t overfill. I find just short of a teaspoon is just enough in this little version. Used your best judgment based on how large you cut your rounds.
So just how big are the little finger pies? Well here you go.
This is really an excellent practice exercise for those who dread handling pie dough. You’re working on a smaller scale here, and it’s more like working cookies than making pies. And since Thanksgiving is upon us and you’ll be baking thise big pies, it’s a good way to use up those dough scraps.You’d be surprised at the small amount of dough needed to knock off a half dozen of these.
I don’t even remember how I stumbled on this, a bake pan for bread that emulates the look of a braided loaf. The baking snob in me says “What’s the point?”. Because for someone like me and for most bread makers I know, it would really take the fun out of things. And I really sort of don’t quite get the concept here. Do you “cap” the dough with pan as if it was a dome? Because if putting the dough in as in a normal loaf pan, well, the thing is going to rise and you’re basically going to have a rounded bottom. So what do you do to get the bread to lie flat — do you slice the bottom off? This is just plain silliness.
Yes, I do know some have a lot of trouble with the braided breads. Over time, I have learned a few tricks. When rolling your ropes, just a very tiny (and I mean Very tiny) bit of oil on the dough will help make the rope rolling just a little easier. After rolling the ropes out, a light flour dusting will help keep them separate when doing the actual braid. Well for those of you who just have to have it, here it is on Amazon. They do have a round ring mold which I do find somewhat interesting, and also — ok, wait for it — a loaf pan that emulates slashes. I guess someone didn’t realize you slash loaves for a reason. Oh well, here you go anyway.
It’s Sunday again and it’s time for another go round at some web links. This is just stuff that I’ve found while cruising the web. The content can be anything here – from fine pastry to mealtime, from the sublime and seductive to the absurd and abnormal, from heavy duty learning to the insane and ridiculous. Old posts or new, anything goes here. Here’s the roundup of things I’ve stumbled across during the past week.
Pilgrim Hat Cookies from Taste of Home Made with Peanut Butter Cups and Fudge Stripe Cookies. No baking required here – even my oven challenged mother could do these. I think I’d find a substitute for the Chicklets gum though. Orange gumdrops maybe? Great project for kids.
The Bakerman is Baking Bread – if you are a breadaholic and want to see the inner workings of Burbidges Bakery in Andover, here’s a cool video for you.
**Any commercial shopping links listed in this post are not endorsements as the products have not been purchased or tested. It’s just interesting stuff that I thought might be of interest. As always, investigate vendors before making any purchase.
The phone rang. I answered with trepidation. The voice on the other end announced, “Hey, we’re coming over for dinner!” They don’t ask, they just arrive! Sure I had some steaks in the freezer and enough goods in the fridge to put together some quick sides, but I knew a dessert was expected. And since they impromptu guests were chocoholics of sorts, I decided Chocolate Cream Puffs would be just the ticket. You see Cream Puffs, Profiteroles, Eclairs and the like are the baker’s hidden secret. They are much easier that you think, and for me, much easier than doing a cake or a pie.
The house crashers have had the run of the mill Puffs before, so how could I change things up? How about some Chocolate Dream Puffs? Using a basic Pâte à Choux dough, batter, or whatever you want to call it, I decided to add some cocoa to the mix. I decided it would be a chance to try one of my favorite baking ingredients, Ramstadt-Breda Medium Dark Cocoa from the Prepared Pantry. If you’re stuck on store cocoa, get over it. Get this stuff. So here we go with the Chocolate Dream Puffs, because since making them, I’ve been having baking fantasies about what else I can do with the Chocolate Choux.
Chocolate Pâte à Choux
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
Dash of Salt
1 cup Water
1 cup flour
4 Eggs
1 – 1 1/2 Tbsp Sugar
2 Tbsp Powdered Cocoa
In about a 2 quart saucepan, combine butter, salt, and water. Bring to a boil. If you cut your butter into chunks, it will melt quicker.
Add flour all at once while stirring and then keep mixing well until dough leaves sides of pan. I use a large spoon. This is where part one of the little miracle takes place. What you thought was going to be a flour and water mess combines into a nice soft pasty mass. I usually give this mass a little cooking time, about one or two more minutes with the range heat lowered to medium. This will take care of any of the raw flour taste.
When your dough is cooked, remove pan from stove. Cool it down a little. Just stick your finger into the paste and ensure it does not feel stinging hot. Giving it some mixing helps cool it down. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition until the egg is totally incorporated. Do not try and add all 4 eggs at one time – you will have a giant mess on your hands you can’t find your way out of. This part can take just a little elbow grease, but I never bother to pull out an electric appliance for this.
If you want you can use a stand mixer, but I find it’s more trouble that it’s worth. Add your sugar and incorporate well by giving it another 60 second beating with your spoon. Dig into the mix all the way down so the sugar is evenly distributed. You can also add your sugar in with your flour when you begin the cooking. Either way will work. I tend to add at the end because I don’t like the puffs overly sweet.
You will wind up with a pasty yet velvety, somewhat gelatinous chocolate mess. Drop by spoonfuls onto a parchment covered baking sheet, 3 inches apart. I used a small serving spoon slightly larger than a tablespoon. I usually make larger sized puffs as they are more satisfying. Don’t worry too much if things look shaggy. They will even out a bit during baking. You can use a pastry bag with the coupler only to pipe the dough, but that’s one more thing to clean. You can clean things up a bit with your fingers if things get too out of shape.
Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake another 30-32 minutes. On my oven, baking an extra 2 minutes ensures good browning. Your own mileage may vary. When baking, don’t be discouraged if it seems like not much is happening in the beginning, because after about 40 minutes, you’ll get this!
When baking Choux, it is important that you do not open the oven door. As long as your oven is calibrated and working properly, you’ll be fine. With the chocolate puffs, it’s kind of hard to see browning. If you want to ensure you’re cooked, there are a couple of checks you can make. First, before opening the oven door look through the glass and look at the tops. They should look somewhat dry, not glistening wet. Look at the cracks. If you see just a few minor tiny moisture bubbles, that’s ok. You’ve got action going on in those puffs, and that’s good. If the moisture seems excessive, let things go a minute or two past the prescribed baking time. At the end of your baking time, open the oven and gently lift one of your puffs with a fork to get a look at the bottom. Even on the chocolate puffs, you’ll be able to tell if the bottoms have browned. Your puff should also feel light and hollow when baking is done.
It’s time to get these babies out and onto the rack. Make a slit in the side of each puff and let them cool, then fill them using the slit you cut. After I cut the slits, I face all the slits in the same direction on the cooling rack. For this batch, I used a pastry bag with a large star tip, putting it right into the slits I cut for cooling. If you have no pastry bag, you can slice the tops off after cooling and spoon your filling in. Then replace the tops. The pastry bag is more fun for me. I used some plain old whipped cream here and just pretty much jammed it in. Hold the puff in one hand and the bag in the other. You can gauge the amount of the filling by the weight of the puff in your hand. You’ll pretty much know when things are right.
There’s much debate on oven drying after baking. The Choux recipes of some chefs will demand it. The “webified” recipes that are passed around usually mention nothing about drying. If I make long Eclairs, I make a small slit on the bottom and oven dry them for a few hours. But usually on these somewhat small puffs I don’t find the need to do it. I just get them transferred to a rack quickly and cool them for at least about 30-45 minutes before filling. The oven drying will help get out some of the trapped moisture that can sometimes result in a soggy bottom, or soggy pastry in general.
After filling, your Cream Puffs should be refrigerated in an airtight container or on a plate covered with plastic film. Take out of the fridge about 20 minutes before serving. In my house when the vagabond dinner guests arrive, I rarely have to worry about refrigeration.
For the icing here I used the Ramstadt-Breda Medium Dark Cocoa along with some powdered sugar and some strong black coffee as the liquid. I only wanted a smattering of icing here because I wanted the star of the show to be the shell and the cream. For the icing I used about 1/3 cup of powdered sugar, about a teaspoon of the cocoa, and a little coffee – just enough to get things workable. Getting icing right can be an art in itself, and I’ll talk about that in another post.
Hope you enjoyed the post and that I didn’t get too wordy on you. I do try and make things pretty much idiot proof to try and help the beginner baker. But trust me, if you follow directions and understand the premise of what needs to happen here, there’s almost nothing easier than Pâte à Choux. You’re basically making a puffy egg thing and using a hot oven to convert the moisture in the dough to steam in order to get the puffs to rise. I made my first batch when I was 12 years old and they’ve never failed on me. Hope you have some great success with your Cream Puffs too!
I’ll try and do this as a regular feature each week and see how it works out. This is just stuff that I’ve found while cruising the web. The content can be anything here – from fine pastry to mealtime, from the sublime and seductive to the absurd and abnormal, from heavy duty learning to the insane and ridiculous. Old posts or new, anything goes here. Here’s the roundup of things I’ve stumbled across during the past week.
**Any commercial shopping links listed in this post are not endorsements as the products have not been purchased or tested. It’s just interesting stuff that I thought might be of interest. As always, investigate vendors before making any purchase.
I’ve been asked a few times why I do the food blog. It’s a complex question with a multitude of answers. And a post over Joy The Baker prompted me to write a little bit about it.
Vanity? Only in very small part. Commercial gain? Hardly. The small change gained from promotion here would never pay the bills. Well, maybe if I worked at linking and promotion 24 hours a day. But with job duties in the photo industry, I don’t have the luxury of that time.
The blog idea started to gain a little bit of traction a few years back. I was cleaning out my cupboard and found a half dozen cans of Spam tucked in the back of the cupboard. Each day for the next week, I opened up a can and made a different variation of Spam – Spam and Eggs, Spam Hash on Toast, Spam and Egg Terrine, Spam Pate on Brioche, you name it. I photographed them all, wrote up a little blurb touting Spam as the new Haute Cuisine, and emailed them to a list of friends. One of the crew said “Hey you should take pics and write about this stuff.” While that was encouraging, it still wasn’t enough. I do make whacky dishes sometimes and a few may even find their way to this blog. But I needed to have some more purpose. And since I had gotten back into the baking around that time too, the ATVY blog was born.
I had tried to combine the baking stuff with a local food blog. I trashed that idea after about two months. And here’s why. Bakers, chefs, cooks et all are on a mission of sorts. They want the Good Stuff and not the Fluff. One who is after a Danish Braid technique is not going to give a crap that I ate at the restaurant around the corner yesterday. So I try and get to the meat of the matter here. Whether it’s good or not is entirely in the hands of the readers.
The other and perhaps most important reason behind the baking blog is that while I’m a good cook, I have always been The Frustrated Baker. So I like to take what I’ve learned to help others realize that they’re not abject failures. It’s one of the reasons I post my failures in My Own Kitchen Disasters. I’ve learned a lot from failures and baking disasters over time. I’ve learned that I must cut steam vents for certain things. I’ve learned about leavening. I’ve learned about how different oven temperatures affect things in different ways. Successful baking does not evolve from a list of stuff written down on a piece of paper. It does not come from memorizing a bunch of steps. It comes from willingness to Learn, to Create, to Experiment. Otherwise you’ve got nothing much to say except “Hey look – I took this list of stuff and made the exact same thing like on that other blog!” Wow. How exciting. Heavy sigh… What else ya got?
Learning is probably one of the hardest things to try and explain to any new baker. “Recipes, recipes, recipes, I want the Recipes!” is the usual chant. What many beginning bakers fail to accomplish is Mastery. Taking one basic recipe, such as in the sponge cake here, and making the best sponge cake possible. Learn how to perfectly slice it on the horizontal. It is the base of your creation. You can’t afford to screw it up. Lots of sugar glop on a Bad Cake does not make it a Good Cake.
Once you become willing and are able to properly submit to learning and have mastered a specific technique, change it up. Create! Here taken a one layer sponge cake sliced down the middle and have done it up with fresh whipped cream, some drained crushed pineapple, coconut, and some toasted walnuts. It’s nothing I learned out of a book. It’s nothing I saw on a blog. I just did it. I wanted to get in some practice with the pastry bag, and this is what I wound up with. As I’ve said before, this stuff ain’t Rocket Science. And what did I learn here? That I really need a whipped cream stabilizer especially since this cake was done when it was about 90 degrees out in the middle of June.
After you’ve mastered a technique such the little one layer sponge cake, Experiment. The original cake recipe I started with is here in the post for The Little Apple Cake. Since then, I’ve changed up the mix and have changed it to 4 eggs and one cup of Cake Flour. For a basic plain vanilla sponge, I use a teaspoon or so of good vanilla and leave out the cinnamon. I’ve even cut back on the sugar a bit. When I want to do a cream cake with gobs of goo or sweetened whipped cream, this simple basic cake works everytime. It takes a syrup well, it stands up well to fillings, and there’s not so much junk in it that it takes away from my extra adornments.
Learn and Master your Basics. From there, you can take your creations in any direction.
Joy The Baker also made note of cameras in the post I linked. I’ll just leave you with one very important thing for right now. Photography is All About The Light, and not much else. So a $5000 camera isn’t going to do you any better than a hundred dollar point shoot if you don’t know how to use it. Yes you can get a lucky shot with the expensive DSLRs. But with a few food bloggers I’ve talked to over time, they’ve experienced nothing but frustration. Start with Good Light – that’s primary, even if you own a lowly point & shoot.
Well, it’s time. Over the past few years I think I’ve done almost every incarnation of “quick rye” known on the planet. It’s time to get serious now and go after the elusive NY Style Deli Rye. And you know what that means. Yes, I’ll be delving into Starters, Rye Sours, and other variations of pre-fermentation.
As far as decent rye breads to date, this one is probably my most successful so far. It has a really nice crumb structure. It was done using a stone ground rye flour soaker. Then a 50/50 flour and water mix was added to the soaker to preset a sponge. In reality it is easier than it sounds and there’s nothing very mysterious here. A lot of beginning bakers shy away from sponges, bigas, and presoaks etc because they read the directions and see difficulty ahead. Then they immediately turn the page. It’s really not hard at all. I have been doing haphazard sponges for a couple of years now, and the resulting bread textures and structure benefit greatly. As you can see here in my rye slices, I have a nice light and airy crumb structure. That’s because I allowed time, water and flour to do a lot of the work for me.
You can do your own Sponge with just about any bread recipe. What I usually do when making a sponge is put in all of the liquid, a teaspoon of the yeast, and about half the flour a recipe calls for. Then I mix it. It is usually something like a really gloppy cake batter. Then I sprinkle the top of the mess with couple of spoons of loose flour, cover the bowl with a plate (I use a glass plate) and just let it sit on the bench for at least an hour. If I have a more leisurely day, I’ll let it go up to 5 hours, usually knocking the dough down a couple of times with a spoon, giving it a mix, and letting it go some more. Something fantastic happens here. Gluten bonds start to form all on their own. Give it a try and you will see.
When I am ready to do the actual bread, I add the salt, sugar, any other additives like Diastatic Malt, and the rest of the yeast. Then I add the remaining flour and Do The Bread Thing. You will definitely notice a difference in your dough handling. Kneading becomes easier. You’ll get a nicer dough tension on standard hydration ratio breads. If you have a discerning palate, you’ll notice a better flavor too.
So back to that Rye. I.m going to start some experiments with what are commonly called Rye Sours in order to get that wonderful deli taste. In my own rye trials, the breads have been good, but they’re lacking that Jewish bakery snap in the taste. Yes, I’ve even tried the recipe that basically uses almost all sour cream as the liquid. It’s ok, but I’d like to go further. I found one rye method that took 4 days to complete. That’s more time than I really want to spend, plus I’d probably forget about it and then one day I’d probably walk past the fridge and find dough creeping out from under the door. So I’m going to try and develop a preferment method that works for me, that is, one that is easy to execute but still takes advantage of a longer fermentation in order to develop texture and flavor.
Braided Bread Loaf Pan – Now I’ve Seen It All
Yes, I do know some have a lot of trouble with the braided breads. Over time, I have learned a few tricks. When rolling your ropes, just a very tiny (and I mean Very tiny) bit of oil on the dough will help make the rope rolling just a little easier. After rolling the ropes out, a light flour dusting will help keep them separate when doing the actual braid. Well for those of you who just have to have it, here it is on Amazon. They do have a round ring mold which I do find somewhat interesting, and also — ok, wait for it — a loaf pan that emulates slashes. I guess someone didn’t realize you slash loaves for a reason. Oh well, here you go anyway.