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Patrick S

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Posts posted by Patrick S

  1. 11 hours ago, DianaB said:

     

    Did your choux keep their texture after filling @Patrick S?  I can make choux, with or without crachelin, that are beautifully crisp and stay that way if well packed unless I add cream, compote or any other 'wet' ingredient.  I guess I'm missing something fundamental, I'm sure we've all seen pictures of various ''pieces montées' where filled choux pastries are welded together with caramel to form a centre piece for a wedding or other celebration  

     

     

    I don't think you're missing anything. This is actually one of the main reasons I don't do a lot of choux. To my mind, if you fill them with anything with a good bit of liquid, they are only worth eating for a few hours, after which they get too soggy. Combined with craquelin, or caramel (as in croquembuche ir gateaux saint honore), or some chocolate mixed with feuelletine, you have some crunch that kind of compensates, but even then I find the soggy choux off-putting. Perhaps coating the cut surfaces with some melted chocolate might create a moisture barrier and buy some more time, but I've never tried that. I'd be interested to hear any ideas anyone else might have for preserving choux texture. 

     

    BTW, I love the Dulcey, and am looking forward to trying the Caramelia next. I hope your package makes it soon!

    • Like 2
  2. I was never a huge fan of choux, but every so often I'll make some. Made some eclair yesterday, with vanilla bean pastry cream and chocolate glaze. The glaze was a little too warm/thin when I glazed, so I couldn't really clean up the glazing by running my finger down the side. Even though I'm not a big fan of choux, Christophe Adam's creations are so gorgeous I'd like to take at least one shot at duplicating them.

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    • Like 23
  3. First shot. After some experiment, definitely think the TiO2 is necessary to get the opacity like that shown in Sattler's videos. This entremet consists of hazelnut dacquoise topped with feuilletine, Nutella and milk chocolate, chocolate mousse, an insert of chocolate cremeaux, more mousse, topped with chocolate mirroir. The color was made with clear piping gel mixed with 20% water, couple drops of TiO2, and gel color, slightly warmed. Used hair dryer, and I think I need something stronger- a can of compressed air I think. I have a little tweaking to do, but pretty sure I can nail it with a few more runs.

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  4.  I am on a quest for venoisserie perfection. The goal here tonight was not just kougin amann, but kouignettes, in the style of Maison Georges Larnicol. In the future, I will embellish with chocolate, and framboise, and praline, and pistachio. But for the first kiss, it is only butter and sugar and caramel. Deep, rich, caramel, pulled only at the last moment. 

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    • Like 20
  5. 9 hours ago, David Ross said:

    Boy would I like the recipe for the pretzel squares.

     

     

    No problem. This recipe comes from Lina Kulchinsky of Sigmund's Pretzels in NYC, via Martha Stewart Living. It's a great recipe, with great flavor and easy to work with. The recipe below is adapted from the February 2016 issue of Living.

     

    Dough

    2 cups 110F water

    2 packages rapid rise yeast (I use 14g active dry yeast)

    0.5 cup (packed) dark brown sugar (light brown works also)

    6.5C bread flour (1kg)

    4Tb coarse salt

    4oz/1 stick unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

     

    Boiling Water

    8C water

    0.5C baking soda

    0.5C pale ale beer (i just use any unflavored beer)

    0.25C dark brown sugar (again light works fine also)

     

    Method

    Mix water, sugar and yeast in bowl. Let stand til foamy.

    In your mixer bowl, combine flour and salt.

    Add butter and mix in with your hands or a dough blender (like you'd use to cut the fat into biscuit dough) til crumbly.

    Add in the yeast mixture, and combine slowly with hands or spatula to get a shaggy dough with most of the water absorbed.

    Mix with dough-hook on medium-low speed until you get a nice, tight, smooth dough. It should clear the bowl, but if not, add 1T of flour, and mix thoroughly, repeating if necessary until the dough clears the sides of the bowl.

    Cover and refrigerate at least 8 hours. I've held the dough up to a couple of days before using.

     

    Turn on the oven to 450F to preheat, and get your boiling water on the heat to get that simmering. I use a large, shallow Dutch oven for the boiling.

     

    On a floured surface, roll the dough to a 12" by 14" rectangle.

    You can shape your pretzels in a number of ways. You can even shape them like pretzels if you are good at that sort of thing. Like I said, the dough is great to work with. The butter seems to make shaping easier, inhibiting gluten formation, so there's not too much shrink-back as you roll it out. I made squares just because I was running up against the clock and that was the easiest way to portion the dough, and I wanted to make the serving sizes small.

     

    To make the squares, simply cut the dough with a pizza cutter or large knife into strips about 2" wide, and then cut the strips into squares. If you don't want the blocky shape, then roll the strips into a rounded shape, then snip the strips into desired dimensions. I also like shaping the rounded strips into knots and pinwheels.

     

    Set up a sheet pan covered with parchment nearby. You'll probably need 2 half-sheet pans if you make the whole batch.

     

    Once you got your dough cut/portioned the way you want, boil a few pieces at a time for 30 seconds. Dunk the pieces to submerge while they boil.

    Remove the pieces from the water with a skimmer or whatever similar tool you have, and set on the prepared sheet. Sprinkle with some coarse salt.

     

    Once you've got the pretzels boiled and sprinkled with salt, bake for 5 minutes. Then, rotate the pan and bake for an additional 3-6 minutes. If you have 2 sheets baking at once, rotate the sheets 180 degrees, and switch the shelves at the 5 minute mark. This weekend I baked both sheets at once, and needed a couple of extra minutes to get a perfect dark brown, maybe 13 minutes cumulatively.

     

    We served with beer cheese and extra saurbraten gravy. A mustard dip obviously would be yummy as well.

    • Like 2
  6. Dinner from a couple of weeks ago - pizza with meatball slices, whole-milk mozz and parm. Made pies half meatball, half-cheese. I was craving pizza after reading Peter Reinhart's American Pie.

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    • Like 9
  7. I had the same frustration trying to make exquisitely smooth praline paste and Nutella at home. I just could never get the smoothness and small particle size at home that an industrial concher can produce, no matter how much I grinder, seived and smashed! 

  8. 11 hours ago, Panaderia Canadiense said:

     

    I always thought that if the presence of a certain ingredient is measured in fractions of a percent, it was classed as an "additive" - so in some of my recipes, that's salt, or baking soda.  I see no issue with adding these things, or L-cysteine if you've got it - it's part of the quest for the best product you can make.

     

    Now, when the majority of the ingredients in bread are listed as refined chemicals rather than the basic building blocks of bread, I'm probably not going to buy it.  But I'm not going to condemn the presence of those chemicals either.

     

    So, there are different regulatory definitions of food additive depending on your location in the world. In the U.S., the regulatory definition is given in the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA), section 201(s), as amended in 1958, which defines food additive as "any substance the intended use of which results or may reasonably be expected to result, directly or indirectly, in its becoming a component or otherwise affecting the characteristic of any food (including any substance intended for use in producing, manufacturing, packing, processing, preparing, treating, packaging, transporting, or holding food; and including any source of radiation intended for any such use)." There are exemptions from this regulatory definition, including substances that are afforded the status of GRAS (generally recognized as safe).

     

    From a chemical point of view, just in terms of the physical properties of the substances themselves, I've always found it interesting how our food labeling conventions in some ways tend to perpetuate inaccurate conceptions of what foods actually consist of (not at all implying that you have any such inaccurate conceptions, just making a general comment!). So, for instance, I buy a loaf of bread, check the ingredients, see wheat flour listed as the first ingredient, and I naturally tend to think of it as a simple sort of thing, a single, uniform substance. But of course the physical reality is that wheat flour, like almost all biologic materials, is in fact a mind-bogglingly complex stew of hundreds or thousands of individual chemical compounds. If we represented wheat flour the same way we often represent food additives, as individual chemicals, the list would be too large to fit on any package, and the ingredient list would include hundreds of words like anthranilate synthase, ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase, palmitic acid, isopentenyl pyrophosphate, phosphatidyl ethanolamine, myo-inositol hexaphosphate, β-tocotrienol, and so on. I'm probably veering too far off-topic (if so, please delete this Chris). I definitely understand the elegance and attraction of simplicity of composition, and of using technique rather than chemistry to achieve a result. It's just that this discussion reminded me of the astonishing chemical complexity of biological materials, and how labeling sometimes tends to obscure that complexity.

    • Like 1
  9. Brioche honey sticky buns, without the pecans, from Dorie Greenspan's "Baking: From my Home to Yours." This was one of the first recipes I made from that book (Dorie, being the amazing and generous person that she is, sent me a copy back in 2006). Making this the other night really caused me to reflect back on days past here on eGullet, about Wendy and Neil and all the amazing, passionate folks I got to learn from in those early years. The brioche is very rich, with the butter at a baker's percentage of 70%. The dough has such a gorgeous sheen, such a voluptuous feel in the hand. I confess to eating about 3 of these right out of the oven, and feeling no guilt about it. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

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    • Like 14
  10. I'm probably beating a dead horse, as Phillip already pointed this out, but for the benefit of anyone who might not be clear on the matter, I'd point out that cysteine, being a semi-essential amino acid, is already a common component of the human diet, naturally, from both animal and plant sources. Wheat flour and dairy products already include some cysteine, so adding it as a relaxant would not amount to adding a whole new ingredient to the dough, just changing the amount of that AA in the dough.

    • Like 1
  11. I thought of a much better and less cluttered-looking way to do what I was trying to do with the first workbook. In the new and improved workbook (attached), just enter your ingredient names, and base-recipe weights for each, in columns A and B. Then, just enter the percentage change you want to that base recipe in the yellow cell, B12 (e.g. 200 if you want to double it, 50 if you want to halve it), and your new weights for each ingredient, as well as total ingredient weight, will automatically calculate in column C. Additionally, I've added two columns that will automatically calculate baker's % for each ingredient, and % of total weight for each ingredient.

    ingredient calculator2.xlsx

    • Like 2
  12. On 3/24/2016 at 9:04 PM, gfron1 said:

    Many of us keep an Excel spreadsheet to do just that. I'll attach mine here.

    PateDeFruitCalculato0r.xls

     

    I'm glad you posted this! At the end of 2014, for a project at work, I educated myself on Excel. I use pivot tables, pivot charts, and a variety of custom formulas to create quality improvement/risk management metrics and graphs. I took your Excel workbook, reworked it a bit, and created several template worksheets. So, on the template worksheets, if you just enter values for the ingredient names and the ingredient weights, the custom formulas in the adjacent columns will automatically calculate the ingredient weights for 75%, 50%, 25%, 12.5% and 6.25% reductions, as well as the total ingredient weights for each reduction. Just enter your ingredient names and the weights for the base recipe ingredients, and the rest of the values will auto-populate.

    ingredient calculator.xls

    • Like 3
  13. Shain, that babka looks delicious!

     

    Franci, I've never seen cornetti before - they look super.

     

    RWood, I adore the combination of peanut butter and chocolate, so I'm lusting for some of that Easter cake. Everything you post is so well-executed and artfully plated.

     

    jmacnaughtan, excellent glaze on your Easter entremet.

     

    After the caloric excesses of my own Easter weekend (I regret nothing), I had planned on adhering to a lower-calorie diet for the remainder of the week. But I had some pate de croissant left over from the Ispahan, and some chocolate glaze left over from the doughnuts, and both were at the point of freeze-it-or-waste-it. And since the freezer was full and I hate to waste things, I made chocolate-glazed cronuts on Tuesday night. I atoned the next day by eating a kale salad and extending my workout by 30 minutes.

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    • Like 17
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