Mike Nolan
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Gee, and I thought this was one of the easier questions I've asked.
Tomorrow's question was inspired by recent posts here.
We used two different formulas for pâte brisée (short crust pie dough) at pastry school, one had more butter with slightly larger sized pieces of it after it was cut in. It produced a flakier crust, though it was a bit trickier to roll out, and I've pretty much standardized on the other one. (I do add a little more sugar for a cherry pie dough. My wife's grandmother would roll in a little granulated sugar for a cherry pie crust at the end, I just mix it in up front.)
I've tried several other recipes for pie dough, including ones that used a combination of shortening and butter and Rose Levy Beranbaum's cream cheese one, I keep going back to the SFBI one. I'm probably going to try an all lard one once I render the 4 pounds of lard I bought a week ago. (I do like Susan Purdy's hot water crust recipe for pot pies, and it uses a combination of butter and shortening.)
At pastry school, they made us cut the butter in using a chef's knife several times. That's a lot more work, but it does teach you exactly what it should look and feel like.
It took me several tries before I got the technique down at home, formulas don't tell you everything, but at this point I can make it either in the food processor or in the mixer.
Here's the formula I use:
Pastry Flour 100%
Sugar 5%
Salt 2%
Unsalted Butter 70%
Water 30%I have tables in my notebook for 1-4 crusts, in metric weights. I measure the sugar and salt using a scale that has 0.1 gram increments. (In fact, any time I'm measuring less than 15 grams of something, I use the micro-scale. I have a third scale which measures in milligrams, but don't use it for baking.)
Most of the time I use KAF white Pastry Flour. I prefer the 8% protein pastry flour over the 10.3% protein one which they call their 'pastry flour blend', but I've also had good results using Gold Medal Unbleached AP flour. I may try a bag of Bob's Red Mill white pastry flour as I'm probably going to order semolina from them next time, and I can't get white pastry flour locally, only whole wheat ones.
I find I sometimes need an extra teaspoon or so of water. (As with all bakers percentages formulas, the water is by weight not by volume.)
There seems to be a divergence of opinion among baking experts about freezing butter, at pastry school we were cautioned not to use butter that had been frozen for making pie crust, even if it had been thawed. But I've seen a number of places recommending using shredded frozen butter for pie crusts lately.
A minor milestone: Today's quiz was the 50th quiz posted.
Although there's at least one day that I can't find records for, it appears that on average people are getting the right answer about 56% of the time.
I got some nice spinach at the farmer's market yesterday, so we had spinach salad with tuna and egg tonight.
Spaghetti with meat/mushroom sauce and oven cheese toast here.
We had theatre tickets this afternoon to Something Rotten, so we had Blaze pizza on the way home, since it's about a block from the theatre.
I’m enrobing what I can of what’s left of the sponge candy today, before it gets too humid and warm and the sponge turns to goo. After you enrobe it, it stabilizes the honeycomb a bit, thought it doesn’t tolerate heat well. (That’s why you generally don’t find it in stores during the summertime.)
There are a lot of really little pieces, so I’m going to try to make something like haystacks with them.
This recipe is as good as the commercial types of sponge candy I’ve had lately, though I do wonder how Rocky Mountain Chocolate Company gets theirs into nice rectangular bars. I will be making it again, but probably not until the fall.
1+Unsweetened applesauce is sometimes used as a substitute for oil, but I don't know if it works in brownies.
I would love to take the Beef 101 3 day seminar at Texas A&M some time.
The water bottle one or the bundt pan one? I've seen the water bottle one done, it works well with a 1 liter soda bottle. It also works better with fresh eggs, as eggs age the yolks are more likely to break.
It doesn't taste anything like a Butterfinger, though. No peanut flavor at all.
The CIA book I listed upthread has a recipe for Snickers-like and Milky Way-like candy bars. The chocolate nougat we made in the candy class I took a few weeks ago tasted a lot like the inside of a Milky Way. I never got around to enrobing any of it, I ate it straight out of the pan.
Enrobed candy packed up and ready for tomorrow's brunch
Attachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.Left-overs here, too.
I sent some of our left over Easter ham and rye bread in to my wife's office for an end-of-the-school-year pot luck. (The soon-to-be enrobed sponge candy, I'm just waiting for the chocolate to be properly tempered, is for another departmental get-together on Thursday.)
My wife says that one of the things someone brought on Tuesday was a candy made with oreos and rollos, she said they appear to be fairly easy to make and were awesome. I'll try to get a more complete description tomorrow.
There are several recipes for sponge candy online, but I used the one in Chocolates and Confections at Home with The Culinary Institute of America, by Peter P. Greweling. (2009)
I remember finding what looked like a good one by searching for 'buffalo sponge candy'. The book had a few useful details, like when to add the gelatin and putting the pan back on the stove after adding the baking soda to encourage it to foam up.
Years ago I had a pretty good recipe for making sponge candy in the microwave that I had found online and worked out the timing to my microwave oven, but the book I had all that written in vanished and I couldn't find the original recipe or reproduce it and the timing. Since I've made it before, the CIA recipe was easy to follow.
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