pastrygirl

Another vote for El Rey. It actually has a bit of chocolate flavor. I had heard or read that they don't use deodorized cocoa butter, giving it that extra chocolate goodness. Anyone know if that is true?

Rob, is that a caramel cage dipped in white chocolate? It looks like there are two layers to it.

Whichever one you have the most of, or whichever one you like best for eating - the flavor is pretty undiluted in a molten cake. I think I used to use guanaja, but then I haven't made molten cakes in a while, and it may have been all that was available from our supplier.

OK folks, strawberries are here (or at least they are here). What's new and exciting - or old and exciting in the world of strawberries? So far I've only made jam, the local berries have decent flavor, not great color, and are extremely perishable. I never thought I'd miss those indestructible California berries! I need to create at least 3 different strawberry desserts and I'm just not feeling the love. I'm sure there will be roasted berries with panna cotta on my menus somewhere, and probably a strawberry trifle. I just made a szechuan pepper meringue that I think would be good with fresh berries, if I can keep them fresh (we get produce once a week). The import taxes on champagne are too high, and we have no fruity rose's - what other wine would go with strawbs? I'm thinking a wine jelly with strawberry sorbet. Anyone have any strawberry inspiration?

At my last restaurant, we'd keep flour tortillas and pepper jack cheese - along with a couple varieties of hot sauce - for staff quesadillas & burritos.

Kevin, I'm not sure what you mean by you don't cook your brulees (don't use a broiler/salamander?), but I feel that you really need to do an attentive sprinkling with your sugar to get a nice crust. Do some of your custards get a little wet in top? If you're not dabbing that off with a towel, your wetter custards are going to absorb a lot more sugar when you pour it on top, and your drier ones are going to absorb less - that may be part of your inconsisitency. I feel that creme brulee needs a bit more than just what will stick. If a layer of sugar one grain thick will stick to the top of a relatively dry custard, I think you need a layer about three grains thick, just enough so you can't see the custard through the sugar. Of course, you can do too much, then it will puddle and burn. Practice, practice!

Try decreasing the flour a little bit. Cocoa absorbs a lot of liquid. If you only increase your liquid, you're throwing off your other ratios a bit, like then there's less butter in relation to dry & liquid ingredients, and you wouldn't want less butter, would you? Also, scones do freeze quite well. Wrap in plastic and freeze, then let them thaw 15 or 20 minutes at room temperature, and bake as usual.

Absolutely. It seems whenever I get overconfident and test a full batch of a new recipe, it turns out less than stellar, or at least not how I'd hoped. Half batch, quarter batch, one sixth, whatever is practical. Of course things like cakes will bake differently if you do a small pan as opposed to a larger pan, so you have to be cognizant of that when you're scaling back up. If you're working at a place that keeps a close eye on food cost, all those test batches are going to go in the waste column, so you'd best keep them to a minimum!

Aren't digestive biscuits/graham crackers usually made from (whole) wheat? Or do you know of a GF version? You could do flan in a steamer on the stovetop, or of course any of your usual stovetop puddings. I do a polenta souffle cake that might work in the steamer - cook a littl epolenta in milk, mix in lemon curd & egg yolks then beaten egg whites (I'm visualizing small individual things steamed in custard cups). For something more cake-like, how about a crepe cake? Make crepes using rice flour or other GF flours, then layer them with chocolate ganache or lemon curd and stack them up into a cake.

The croissants I've had from Tartine (at their shop in SF) are very, very buttery, to the point of challenging the idea that there is no such thing as too much butter. So, if the recipe in the book is true to the original, the extra butter might make them a little more challenging to work with.

Awesome!

Don't be afraid of fish desserts! Some smoked salmon has so much sugar that it might as well be candied, actually some places sell it as 'salmon candy'. Inspired by a former boyfriend's young daughter, I once made salmon ice cream and served it with candied salmon skin and salmon roe. It was pretty good, but no, it did not make it onto my dessert menu at work. The flavor was pretty mild, you could make something that actually has fish in it but doesn't taste overwhelmingly fishy. Or think about lox and cream cheese - you could do a creme fraiche ice cream with bits of sweet lox or smoked salmon, with toasted brioche 'chips' - you could even deep-fry the ice cream. People will try almost anything in ice cream (evil laugh). I think if you're going to use apple for the 'chips', you'd want to dust them in flour or another starch to get a crisp exterior. Or, not very British, but I bet a nice sashimi-grade tuna could be made into a sweet tartare, with sweet potato or taro chips for scooping.

Alanamoana, that makes sense, in this case the shortcut sounds risky. That's OK, my staff does all the rolling anyway!

This is all quite interesting. The recipe we use requires kneading the dough for far longer than I am patient with, you need to get a really nice window. After a good rest it rolls out fine though. Currently, we do four single turns (folding in three). Is there any good reason not to do three double turns (fold in four) instead? Wouldn't you get the same number of layers with less time and effort? I don't mind doing it the hard way if there's a reason, but I also want it to not take all day.

Gfron - I'll bite! (Don't feel like working today. Unfortunately my Food Lover's Companion is on loan. What does your new favorite book, the PC Companion have to say?) I'd say it's mostly semantic, with some ratio thrown in. Pudding and custard are pretty general terms - remember the Brits file all desserts under 'puddings'. An American pudding is a dessert in its own right, probably thickened with cornstarch but possibly with eggs added for richness and served fairly simply, in a bowl, maybe with some whipped cream or a cookie. I tend to define custard as milk/cream thickened with eggs, it can be thick (creme brulee) or thin (creme anglaise), and baked or stirred. I would also classify flan/creme caramel and zabaglione as custards, even if zabaglione is made with wine instead of dairy, it is still thickened with eggs. Pastry cream is what it is, a thick custard with eggs and cornstarch or flour usually used as a component in a more complex dessert. It is not usually served as a dessert by itself, unless you are one of those cheater pastry chefs who keeps a huge vat of it around to pass off as creme brulee or thin down for creme anglaise when needed. Guynamedrobert - are you serving your puddings as a dessert or using it as a component? I think most of us will have slightly different ratios for eggs and starches depending on what we're using it for.

Aw, shucks, guys. I might have to try the spicy oatmeal raisin, but then we already have spicy brownies, don't want to go overboard on the spicy pastry! Here's the recipe for the nuts, the cookie dough recipe we use came from Gourmet or Bon Appetit but has been modified for high altitude, so I won't post that part (too lazy to figure out recipegullet right now, and too lazy to convert back to sea level and/or ounces): Spicy Peanuts for PB Cookies peanuts 200 g salt 1 tsp chilli powder 1 tsp sugar 2 TB Fry the peanuts in hot oil (180C/360F) until the nuts are lightly browned, then drain them on paper towels. Put the salt, chilli, and sugar in a bowl, add the hot peanuts, and toss to coat. Heat a small frying pan over medium high heat. Add the peanuts and spices and cook, stirring, just until the sugar melts. Immediately pour the nuts back into the bowl and let cool. ****** I'm sure you could just toast the peanuts (maybe with a light coating of oil?) instead of deep frying them, but the peanuts we get here are not great and seem to magically improve in the fryer. For non-metric users, 200 g is 7 ounces or about a cup and a quarter of peanuts. Enjoy!

I'm not crazy about PB, but my latest PB cookie version has fried peanuts coated in a thin layer of caramel and sprinkled with salt and chili powder mixed into the dough. Spicy peanut cookies!

Perhaps the custard itself was caramel flavored, not just the sauce. Redundant, yes, but possible.

You're going to want to increase your baking powder a little for the smaller cakes. Seems counterintuitive, I know, but according to RLB: the larger the pan size, the less baking powder is used in proportion to other ingredients. This is because of surface tension. The larger the diameter of the pan, the slower the heat penetration and the less support the rising cake receives because the sides are further from the center. Baking powder weakens the cake's structure by enlarging the air spaces, so decreasing baking powder strengthens the structure and compensates for retarded gelatinization and the decrease in support. I have a cocoa cake that I bake in 6 inch pans (adapted from a recipe for larger cakes), last time I used 1-1/4 tsp baking powder instead of 1 tsp and they rose higher with less doming. I'm tired of wasting the domes!

Oddly enough, I've been contemplating rice sorbet myself. I started with horchata, which I haven't spun yet and might be too cinamonny to go with sake, but it tasted good and I think it may work for me as a starting point. I took 1 cup rice, 75 g cashews, soaked them overnight with 4-1/2 cups water, then blended, added 150 g sugar and 1/2 tsp cinnamon, blended again and strained. I'll be really interested in your progress. The rice milk recipes I looked at all called for cooked rice, that would reduce the grit factor. I don't find a little grit unpleasant, depends on your vision. I'm thinking toasting the rice might add a nice flavor, think green teas with toasted rice. Hell, use Rice Krispies!

Although a picture dictionary would be even better, our internet access up here is not great, so it may still be useful. At best, we run around 100 Kb/sec on our satellite connection, our slowest connection is around 14 Kb/sec and the dial-up gets disconnected constantly (incredibly maddening, but worth it if you're stuck out at that particular lodge for a week and are desperate for email). Video is between frustrating and impossible. We discourage staff from using the computers for personal use, which is sort of too bad, because I don't think anyone is going to the 1 or 2 internet cafes in town and googling about food, and few people have much in the way of computer skills. Bhutan is 85% stuck in the 17th century and 15% learning about the 21st. Thanks all for the input, I will probably get both books.

Rob, How were you hoping for more? Are the definitions clear? Relevant? I'm going to help a few of my better staff buy some cookbooks, one was asking about a pastry dictionary. I've already plagiarized the relevant entries from The Food Lovers Companion (but haven't printed it all out yet). Do you think it would be useful as a dictionary for people with decent but not perfect English and a pretty basic understanding of Western food, or is it more esoteric, i.e. pentosam gum? McDuff & Alanamoana, Is the Figoni book pretty technical or could someone with a high school education understand it? Are there recipes or is it all theory? Thanks, Andrea

If you need more fat, you can add butter to your cream. Rose Levy Beranbaum has a method in her Cake Bible, basically melt some butter with a little cream, then stir that into the rest of your cream. Her method is for whipped cream, and you add the butter mixture at the end of the whipping.

Upside down frozen cake technique!?! Sounds exciting. Do tell/link!

Sure. Occasionally the end product even resembles the original idea! Rob, do you have the Notebooks of Michel Bras - Desserts? It's an interesting little book, with all of the desserts sketched just like yours. I don't have it with me here, but as I recall there are some unusual combinations and techniques. Brown butter ice cream? http://www.amazon.com/Notebooks-Michel-Bra...07394459&sr=1-2