alanamoana
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Posts posted by alanamoana
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Piping bags, hands down, especially the big ones that don't fit really well in my sink. After a buttercream, when they get all greasy inside? Yuck. I need an intern...
thus my completely lazy and un-ecologically sound use of DISPOSABLE PIPING BAGS!!!
anything that is oversized is my enemy: 60+ qt mixer bowls, etc.
anything that is undersized is also my enemy: little tiny tartlette molds
so, pretty much anything i have to clean
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Scones Question ...SOS
I made cream scones, they are perfect except that they have a bit stick to the teeth taste.
I tried to avoid dry scones, those that make you thirsty. So once they are brown and the top firmed but not crack-y.i took them out.
Any scone expert who can tell me if 'a bit' stick to the teeth thing normal?
If not, how to fix it? should i bake a bit longer?
They taste n look gorgeous though.
Thank you
a scone should be tender and crumbly, but neither wet nor dry inside.
sounds to me like your oven temp might have been too high: outside browned before the inside could finish cooking. try lowering the temp. i usually bake my scones without letting them get too much color because if i take them out too brown, they dry out as they cool down.
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Finally something I can show to such accomplished cooks...
May your days be as sweet as these desserts.
Jmahl
i don't think you've ever had to worry about what you've posted here!!! what a great looking tart
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do you have a mold for the cups, or are you making them with the "foam cylinder trick"?
Chris - I have a mould - I would never get them to look neat otherwise!
Alanamoana, I am testing my egullet skills now but I think this link will take you to the post where you can download the excel spreadsheet for checking ganache recipes.
schneich's balancing ganache post
The thread is titled Balancing your Ganache Recipes 2.0
You need to change the formulae to match the ingredients you are using ie cocoa butter percentages for your chocolate and fat percentages of cream etc. But I have found it quite fun to use.
thank you so much for the quick response!
beautiful capuccino (cappucino?!) chocolates, by the way!
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I have been using the ganache checker spreadsheet posted by Schneich to tweak the recipes and this has worked very well for the first few I have done.
can you point this out to me? thanks!
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also, chrisamirault's report from the Johnson & Wales campus has some great pictures of perfect baguettes (in the P&B forum)
edited to add: link to One Day at Jonson & Wales thread
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Rob,
Nice loaves! The crust looks beautiful, great color and blistering. To be honest though, they look more like batards than baguettes...but that's semantics!
Regarding your side-splitting...as you may have diagnosed yourself, probably due a little bit to underproofing and too much ovenspring (very hot oven) where the outside crust sets up too quickly in the oven, not allowing for full expansion of the gases and the spring causes the crust to split where it is weakest. The weakness along the bottom edge is common due to drying out of the top of the loaf during proofing and a skin forming on the dough. The bottom is kept moist due to contact with the paper/couche and when placed in the oven, the spring will split along this moist-dry seam. Less likely (from the appearance of your loaves) could be a shaping problem where you didn't seal your seams well enough and the split would occur along the seam.
edited to add: just went further upthread and read jackal10's post where he more succinctly wrote exactly what i just did...damn
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the appearance and consistency for piping will not be the same once it has been stored (to its detriment). usually buttercream needs to be 'reconstituted' before being piped...even if it is stored at room temp.
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Good point! I think you are right, because people were almost surprise that we had all the flavors available, so I had the feeling that I souldnt have sample everything
.As for the ganache sampling I had one of my customer ( that now is in love with my products and try to promote them ) said that when he was at the booth were they were sampling ganaches he saw at least 3 times in a row people that double dipped and was disgusted so just moved on , that was my fear, people grabs huge scoops of ganache and also double dip ( not all of them but you know ).
I think I would address that by keeping the ganache out of customer reach and scooping out a tasting spoonful to hand to the customer instead of letting them help themselves.
you could also get those cheap portion cups and just pipe some ganache into each one. use a start tip so it is slightly decorative. that way, you can bring your ganaches already made in piping bags for easy portability.
Sort of like this?
I pipped some couverture chocolate into the candy cups; once set, starred in some ganache.
I used this technique to sample various ganaches this winter at the Chocolate Ball and a chocolate festival at Pastaworks, a local gourmet market here in Portland.
Very nice and you can really knock out a lot of these quickly. But you do need to use them pretty much right away (within 1-2 days?) because they'll dry out and/or spoil.
Not a bad idea to bring your ganache in a piping bag all set to go, with your trays of chocolate disks in the cups. Plus, I think folks would enjoy seeing you "work."
Leave it to John to have already come up with a clever/fast/nice looking solution!
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Good point! I think you are right, because people were almost surprise that we had all the flavors available, so I had the feeling that I souldnt have sample everything .
As for the ganache sampling I had one of my customer ( that now is in love with my products and try to promote them ) said that when he was at the booth were they were sampling ganaches he saw at least 3 times in a row people that double dipped and was disgusted so just moved on , that was my fear, people grabs huge scoops of ganache and also double dip ( not all of them but you know ).
I think I would address that by keeping the ganache out of customer reach and scooping out a tasting spoonful to hand to the customer instead of letting them help themselves.
you could also get those cheap portion cups and just pipe some ganache into each one. use a start tip so it is slightly decorative. that way, you can bring your ganaches already made in piping bags for easy portability.
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Rob, it could be in the shaping as well. If you aren't getting out all of the larger air bubbles during shaping, you could have a large gas pocket which will give you a tumor or blowout during baking. Really work for that nice surface tension and make sure to seal all your seams well when you're shaping your loaves.
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I think the 1,500 g is a convention in languages other than English. I was puzzled by all the seeming mistakes in this book until I saw a sign in Brazilian that used the same comma convention. If you look carefully at the recipes in the book they all use it and it cracked me up when I got the book that I needed to make, oh, a ton and a half of ganache.
Yeah, I know they use a (,) instead of a (.), but why the extra zeros?
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1,500 g emulsifier Peco 50
1) I read elsewhere that I could just skip the Peco 50, so I did. I am curious about what it is supposed to do in the cake, and whether there is any sort of easily-available substitute. (Peco 50 seems to hail from France.)
did you mis-type the quantity of emulsifier? it would seem that one and a half kilos would be missed in a recipe...i'm assuming you meant 1.5 grams?!
there are other threads on eG that list sources for some of the ingredients you listed.
try:
or
or
to start.
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oh and i love your votive holder...it is food related as you have dried beans in there, correct? very cute.
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Because I go through so much ganache at work, and I have to keep cost in mind, I use chocolate chips exclusively to make ganache. Of course, they're Callebaut chips...
I simply control the consistency of it by adding more or less cream.
I don't have the time to chop up expensive bars, and for ganache it doesn't matter much if you are using a less expensive chocolate. I save my bars for things that really need that little extra quality (and temperability), like when I dip items, or make chocolate mousse or decadence....
I'm going to argue semantics just for clarification:
while the op meant chocolate chips for cookies (semi-sweet morsels), this can be confusing to some since so many 'high quality' chocolates come in a non-block/non-bar form...often, each brand has their own word for this chip form:
Valrhona - feves
Callebaut - callets (sp?)
Michel Cluizel - mini-gramme
etc. etc.
These 'chips' are easier to use than bars as they don't need to be chopped, but they shouldn't be confused with chocolate chips which are meant for cookies as they are the same formula as the bar form.
And Annie, I know you know this
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The only right answer is - good! Actually though, to my liking, I would drop it down to 65% ganache. The bananas were very yummy as is. I really love the taste of palm sugar.
the boats are really cute, did you use a mold of some sort to keep the shape (standing up)?
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Wow...definitely a photo for the food pornographers! You can practically smell the cinnamon wafting through the monitor...beautiful!
(can I use this emoticon to represent my licking of the screen?!)Ah! I forgot I made cinnamon rolls on Saturday! Tasted great this morning for breakfast. Different recipe than usual, and my new favorite.
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Burger King in the early 80's orange drink from the fountain with separate water/syrup switches.....
Creamsicle Milkshakes...I still dream about them
tracey
now that sounds delicious!!!
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this is way old school, but when i was in high school and worked at mcdonalds we used to make all kinds of things...my favorite was the filet-o-fish with ketchup, lettuce, cheese and onions instead of tartar sauce and on a toasted bun (it was normally served steamed).
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I made the Tartine croissant recipe a couple of weeks ago and had a fair amount of butter leakage during baking, which prompts what may be a dumb question. No matter what specific technique you use to incorporate the butter, you eventually cut through the laminated layers when you form the croissants, so why doesn't every recipe end up with puddles of butter (this would be true for puff pastry as well)? Seems to me the butter leakage might be more related to proofing or baking temperature.
you answered your own question.
leakage is usually due to proofing at too high a temp and baking at too low a temp
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you could probably talk to chef stamm and find a wholesale source...
but here's another link for a scoop. i think the one you initially linked to is the same thing...just a slightly different shape or perspective of the photo
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i wouldn't get the magic bullet. doesn't really work very well. instead, i'd recommend a version of an immersion blender/stick blender/burr mixer...
i really like my Braun Multiquick hand blender. this isn't the exact model that i have, but the one i do have has the larger blender attachment with an ice crushing insert as well as a small multi-purpose chopper. everything is lightweight, durable and easy to clean. i think this type of thing would be perfect for someone a bit older. from what i can tell, the braun really gives you bang for the buck (while not cheap).
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professional kitchen convection ovens are gas. i don't know anything about consumer versions. i would think that you'd get decent air flow and even heating to an extent, but there isn't an oven made in the universe that bakes perfectly evenly!
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Mitch explains why a tightly rounded dough rises with greater happiness...
Chris,
Can you expand a little on this comment, please. Thanks!
while i'm a firm believer in surface tension giving structure to hand formed bread, how does this compare with 'no knead' recipes that don't require any shaping at all? i know they're baked in a vessel, but certainly not in a loaf pan. and even doughs like brioche that are baked in a loaf pan are shaped first (with proper tension and technique) before being placed in the pan to proof.
Pre-heating v. Cold oven
in Pastry & Baking
Posted · Edited by alanamoana (log)
the necessity of preheating your applies to the chemical and physical changes that take place within your product when it is placed in the oven:
1. fats melt
2. gases form and expand
3. sugar dissolves
4. microorganisms die (yeast)
5. proteins coagulate
6. starches gelatinize
7. gases evaporate
8. caramelization or maillard browning occurs
9. enzymes are inactivated
etc.
edited to add: all of these processes take place at a specific temperature. if it takes too long to get to that temperature, problems arise. of course, you can start at too high of a temperature as well. baking is really the ability to control oven temperature to get the desired result from your product.
with very few exceptions (i think there's a recipe in recipeGullet for a cold oven pound cake), if you start your oven from cold, the process takes too long and you end up with an inferior product.
example: meringue - you spend time whipping a meringue, carefully adding sugar and creating a stable foam. if you want to end up with a crisp light product but start off with a cold oven, the foam breaks down before the proteins surrounding the air bubbles can coagulate. the bubble breaks, the gases escape and the foam deflates. you end up with a dense cracker instead of the nice light meringue you were looking for
example: puff pastry - time spend rolling butter into dough to create hundreds of layers. when placed in a hot oven, the butter melts, the moisture turns to steam which expands and separates the layers of dough. the proteins in the dough coagulate and set which results in a light flaky and crisp pastry. if you start in a cold oven, the butter will melt out without allowing the moisture to turn to steam. the proteins not being able to coagulate, will stick together and you'll end up with a greasy mass of grossness.
i could go on and on. i think some of these processes are easily translated to meat and vegetable cookery as well.
edited to add: a good book to read about all of this is "How Baking Works - Exploring the Fundamentals of Baking Science" by Paula Figoni