pastrygirl

So, it sound like we have a lot of pro-seed folks here. Do you keep all of the seeds in or strain most of them out? I don't mind a little crunch here and there, but I prefer a mostly smooth experience. Same with kiwi, I'll strain most of the seeds out, leaving only a few for contrast. I was just straining the seeds out of 5 liters of passion fruit puree (that's what I got after straining, probably 2 liters of seeds in there). Do you leave the seeds in because you like the crunch or b/c they are so expensive you don't want to waste any? Do you strain for some things but not for others? In Bhutan, passion fruit are super cheap, so I can afford to strain - the locals finally figured out that they can sell them to the hotels instead of just feeding them to cows, but it's still only a dollar or two per kg - one of the few delights of cooking here. Thoughts?

Is the big table still available for reserved parties of 6 or 8 or whatever? You can't really count on it being open for sharing, if the big table is reserved, that leaves only what, 4 or 5 tables and the counter. Arrive early, flirt with the chef -if he's in a good mood : ) -, eat lots, and enjoy.

Chilling the custard separately overnight will be fine, just stir it before you pour it in the tart shell in case it has separated at all.

Greenbean, it came together fine with a spatula - luckily, as we don't have an immersion blender at that location.

The lemon with the pectin was cooked, but the others I just warmed a small portion enough to disolve the softened gelatin, then stir that into the batch. I haven't tried it with ice cream. Are you trying to use less fat or eggs and need thickener, or just trying to reduce iciness during storage? I do cook a lot of my fruit sorbets, just to break down the fruit more so I get a smoother puree, or I also make batches of fruit puree when I have an abundance and freeze them, then thaw and adjust flavors/consistency as needed.

Are you talking poured ganache, whipped ganache, spreading ganache between layers? You do need to use less cream with white chocolate. For a stiff ganache, 2:1 chocolate to cream for dark and 2.5:1 for white, more cream for pouring. I recently made white with that proportion (and lime zest) to ice some carrot cupcakes, it was good at room temperature, pretty thick and stayed on the cupcakes, and the cashews stayed in place on top. It was not totally opaque, but I was also in a hurry and used it still a little warm so it was a pretty thin layer (1/8"?). The extra was very solid after refrigeration.

I don't understand. Isn't the finished product what it's all about?

I've use gelatin in some watery sorbets to reduce iciness, maybe 2 or 3 sheets to a 2 quart batch, it seems to help. I've also added pectin to lemon sorbet, but of course pectin isn't as versatile.

After a 14 hour day at work today, I will say "damn right we work our asses off!" ← Maybe we need to get better at stereotyping savory cooks as alcoholic, dyslexic jocks who can't measure. Ahh, but I guess that doesn't accomplish any more than the FOH/BOH rivalry. But ust 'cuz they roll in at 2pm and don't see the first 8 hours of our day, doesn't mean it was all accomplished by magic elves.

Right, because baking is never stressful, hard work, or has deadlines. I think that there is a perception that pastry is easier, but if you think a good pastry chef doesn't work their ass off, you are wrong. Yeah, if someone sucks on the line, they get sent to pastry, where they generally suck too, only they are not in the sous chef's way, and isn't that what matters? If you're slow, you're slow, it doesn't matter if you're on the line and your entree is not up with the rest of them or whether you're taking an hour to scoop a batch of cookies that should have taken 15 minutes, it's not really more excusable in pastry, at least not to me. I think pastry is more likely (than the hot line) to attract the bored housewife type who makes great chocolate chip cookies and thinks it would be fun to be a baker/pastry chef but doesn't really 'get' the commitment needed. They don't always last long, and sort of water down the number of serious pastry chef who are women. And, like a friend from college once said, little boys growing up say 'I want to be a doctor/fireman/police officer', not 'I want to be a pastry chef', so a guy has to be much more serious about it (maybe that is whythey are all in NY), whereas wanting to cook or bake is much more acceptable for girls , even encouraged from a very young age. I had this extern who told me that he was thinking about studying computer science but pastry school seemed easier, less homework (he should not have told me that). He said he failed cake class, and I believed it. You don't get to just sit around and eat cake all day, you have to make some of it too!

Turndown gift - the chocolate on your pillow in a nice hotel. What is the average stay of your guests? How many rooms? Remember that even if it gets repetetive for you, if they only stay 3 nights you really only need that many different gifts. How complex are you getting - just a few bonbons or a whole assortment? What do you have so far? We keep cookies in the rooms and different cookies and nuts in the cars, and chocolates or cake in the 'living room' common area, but luckily our turndown gifts are all non-food (except the chugo, dried yak cheese, but we buy that) and culturally related.

So to sort of summarize, the question was 'why must you whip until light' It sounds like we've decided: 1) you don't have to whip until light unless you want a little more air or a lighter color, so therefore not mandatory but optional depending on desired outcome 2) some people don't whip their eggs and sugar at all or even just their eggs, some opt to add the sugar to the cream Any other conclusions?

OK, maybe chewy was the wrong word. I just had a scoop of chocolate malted ice cream for dessert, and I really enjoyed the texture, it had some texture, not just melt in your mouth. It was made by whisking the yolks and sugar until smooth (but not fluffy) and spun in an Italian Musso Pola gelato maker. Now if only my girls hadn't put Szechuan pepper in the coconut florentine, I would have been happy. But also, different strokes for different folks, right? We all have different ideals so maybe we won't reach a conclusive answer to the original post, whether it is necessary or whether it is desireable. To the OP, which books or recipes give this instruction? Is it a particular author, or from a particular region? I can't say it seems like a common instruction in the cookbooks I use, or maybe I just don't read ice cream recipes beacuse I'm happy with my own, could be, I'll have to check when I get back to where my books are. Sorry if I'm sounding grumpy, It's not you guys, it's me (and the szechuan pepper, and Bhutan....).

I don't like fluffy ice cream either. But as it relates to this topic, I seriously doubt that making custard with foamed eggs would lead to a foamy ice cream. ← So then what's the point? More air? Is that desireable to most? Hey, I'm a lazy cook sometimes, why beat until fluffy if you don't have to? I don't think any of us have really come up with a compelling argument for beating until pale and fluffy.

← Thank you Tim, but I did actually read Morfudd's post before I replied with quote. I find foaminess undesireable in ice cream. I like a dense ice cream, therefore I am interested neither in creating a foam nor stabilizing it. I find that my gelato maker incorporates enough air that I don't want to whip more into the eggs. It just seems to me like a pointless waste of time to beat your yolks and sugar until light and fluffy. Those gelato shops where everything has the consisitency of meringue are extremely displeasing to me, no matter how authentic they may be. I want superpremium, low-overrun, dense and almost chewy ice cream, not a mouthful of foam. Oddly enough, I do enjoy putting various semi-liquids in my ISI canisters and making foams, and I find a savory foam on a restaurant menu a selling point more often than a deterrent, yet I do not aspire to make foamy ice creams. (I did enjoy the frozen foam on the anti-griddle at el Bulli, but that is the exception to the rule). See? Am I really strange and everyone else likes fluffy ice cream? Now I need to know.

But why would you want foamy ice cream? I 'm pretty sure I don't.

If you accidentally switch your baking powder and soda measurements, that can really mess up a cake. I was making this wedding cake once.... One layer was taking forever to bake, not rising right, browning weirdly, then it hit me that I'd switched my leavener measurements. Very coarse crumb, sunken in the middle, and tasted terrible too, not salvageable at all. Maybe you put the baking soda in the wrong jar or somehow got the measurements twisted around?

So I was working on a panna cotta recipe yesterday, and I was getting an odd, really bitter flavor. The first batch was cream, sugar, vanilla extract and yogurt, the flavor was off but I blamed the yogurt (which tasted fine on is own, but hey gotta blame something, maybe my proportions were off). The next batch I tasted before adding the yogurt or extract, so just cream, sugar, gelatin, and it was again really bitter. That was the last of the cream ( ahhh, Bhutanese accountants) so I stopped there and decided to make ricotta instead, and couldn't taste the cream on its own. The cream is UHT aseptically packaged shelf-stable, and although it is crap for other reasons, I haven't found off flavors in it yet. So, does gelatin go bad? This stuff has been sitting in a really hot, humid kitchen for I don't know how long, maybe a year, possibly more. Everything else in this particular kitchen goes bad, so maybe sheet gelatin too? I kind of thought that stuff lasted forever.

I whisk my yolks and sugar, but just until combined. Even if you do want to whip a lot of air into your ice cream, wouldn't the bubbles pop when heated then strained? Maybe not 100%, but I like a dense ice cream, so whipping until pale seems like a big waste of time to me. I agree with Paulraphael's thermal mass theory. If you add the sugar to the cream, it will raise the boiling point of the cream, so it will be extra hot and you'll really need to be careful tempering it ino the yolks. With the yolks and sugar combined, I think the sugar acts as a buffer. I dump the entire pot of boiling cream onto my whisked yolks and sugar, whisk, then back in the pot to nape'. The only time I've ever scrambled eggs by pouring hot cream on was making caramel ice cream, where all of the sugar was carmelized and in the liquid and the egg yolks were naked. And I cook my ice cream on high. why stand there and stir for 15 minutes on low when you can get it done in 2 minutes on high?

I totally agree, what is it about coriander that ends up froot loops? Lavender can seem a little froot-loop-y to me sometimes too.

Yes, baked at a low temp for awhile (maybe an hour?), then the oven was turned off and left for at least two hours, I don't remember it being overnight, but possible. They were small, cookie-sized mounds, maybe 1/4 cup each, and would get crisp all the way through, even a little golden (not pure white like some meringues are supposed to be). My brothers and sister and I would try to get the ones with the most chocolate chips. We're from the West coast US, if geography matters.

My mom used to make little chocolate chip meringues she called 'forgotten cookies', they were one of my favorites. Maybe there are a variety of 'forgotten' meringue recipes?

Wear disposable latex gloves while handling your slippery disposable plastic piping bags - extra gripping and extra wasteful! Seriously, it works, no sweaty hands. I hate that my assistants don't use a plastic bowl scraper to scrape the extra dough out of the bowl before washing it, and instead get the steel wool and sponges all mucked up with wet dough then don't clean them out, but I suppose that's different from hating to clean the mixing bowls. I hate to clean up raw eggs dropped on the walk-in floor, it's about a 9 paper towel job for one lousy egg, and the nonskid texture of the floor makes it seem impossible to get it all. Oh, and I hate cleaning buttercream out of a big Hobart whip. PIA. I love to clean up chocolate hardened onto stainless tables by melting it with the propane torch and chasing with a wet cloth. Fire is fun!

Ha! Sometimes it does need hiding. Pricing is always so hard. I don't want to gouge people, but you also still have to price things to reflect the value of your ingredients and labor. Food cost for restaurants is usually 25 to 30%, but we all know how hard it is to succeed doing that. I think food cost on pastry can easily be lower, more like 20%. Of course it also depends on your local competition, what the market will bear, etc, but I think that people are getting more & more willing to pay for those good ingredients. And if you get your tartlette pans, individual tarts seem fancier and you can upcharge. I know you said you hate individual tart molds, but I really like my 90 cm flan rings for small tarts.

Rob, I think your packaging style looks great, but it's a little big and hides the product on the bread and cookies. With a little editing or smaller font size, you could show off more of the beautiful pastry. I'm the sort who wants to look at something and decide whether it appeals to me, not read the packaging and be told why it should appeal - a cute/pretty/sexy little pastry will sell itself, won't it? Also, I agree you could charge more for the chocolate torte. $3 in a small town, $4 if they think they're cool, $5 in the big city, $6 and up in NY or SF.