pastrygirl

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.

Lucy, have you taken any classes at the school? I'm hoping to visit Australia next February or so, and I would love to be able to take a chocolate class while I'm there.

Thanks, those both look promising.

I'm looking for a source for reasonably priced chocolate molds that will ship to Asia - the nice polycarbonate molds, not the cheap semiflexible thin plastic ones. JB Prince has a $200 minimum order for international shipping, which is likely more than I'm going to spend this go-round. I looked at chocolateworld.be, and aside from their prices being higher they don't include Bhutan in their list of countries when I try to check out to calculate shipping charges, so I'm not sure they're going to work. Tomric and chocolat-chocolat only ship to US and Canada. There was a UK site that only ships to the UK. Any ideas? Or do I have to wait until I'm back in the US?

No flavor really. The honey and citrus came through, so it tastes good but its not traditional. Being a Seattle-ite, I'm a big fan of Aplets and Cotlets (apple, apricot, and walnut more-or-less turkish delight candy made in Washington), so it's more of a childhood nostalgia for that candy than trying to create authenticity. I'll have to look around for some rose water or orange flower water or oil, I might be able to get them here if they are used at all in Indian sweets, or I'll see if our Bangkok buyer can find something, but she is neither a chef nor a westerner, so she sometimes has a hard time finding odd ingredients. Otherwise, I'll be back in the US in August and will have to do all my specialty ingredient shopping then, as international shipping tends to be expensive and still takes 3 to 6 weeks to get here. Where do you buy the rose otto? I really haven't done a whole lot of confectionery, I've been a restaurant pastry chef but there are still a lot of specialty products I haven't played with.

OK, so I used the Leon recipe, but tweaked thusly: 675 g sugar 540 g water 90 g honey 1 TB lemon juice Brought to a boil 150 g water 86 g cornstarch stirred in, then boiled the mixture to 236F (for 8000 feet altitude) on medium heat, then added 70 g pistachios. Nice texture, it did get golden without sticking to the bottom, and I didn't keep track of the time but it didn't seem like an hour (as specified in other recipes). Thanks again Kerry, Bhutan now has Turkish Delight, they didn't even know they needed it!

Is the Lindt 70% the chocolate you usually use to make your ganache? If it is darker than your regular chocolate, you'd need to compensate by adding a little extra cream.

Thanks, Kerry, the different method and having a temperature to shoot for might help. When I get bored with daily production and management, I turn to confectionery for entertainment, but it is a lot more entertaining when it turns out right!

I tried to make turkish delight for the first time a few days ago, and need some guidance. I started with the recipe in Claire Clark's Indulge because it's perfect, right? I started by boiling the sugar to 230F instead of 245F because up here at 8000 feet water boils at a mere 198. But then I mixed the 145 grams of cornstarch with 9 oz water, which made a super thick paste that was basically solid and not amenable to whisking in the syrup. That's not going to work. So, for the next batch I increased the water and decreased the starch, so that when it got hot it was more of a gooey, vaseline consistency, which was able to be mixed with the syrup just fine. But then I was having a hard time finding a heat level that would bring the candy to a simmer without burning it onto the bottom of the pan. The recipe says simmer over low heat for 45 min to 1 hour, stirring frequently. It seems like if you are going to simmer this stuff it would really need to be stirred constantly. The end result is a little too soft and has a bit of a pasty texture, I imagine I did not cook it long enough and did not really get the cornstarch boiling, next time i will make sure to get the starch fully boiling instead of just thick before I add the syrup. So, what consistency should the hot starch mixture be before you add the syrup? How much simmering and stirring does it really need? Are there other clues for doneness besides 'golden' (like a temperature)? Should one just expect that a lot of it is going to stick to the bottom of the pan? I did just get the Greweling book, but of course have no thin boiling starch, so his recipe is not going to help. Also no glucose, corn syrup, or other liquid or invert sugars besides honey (and even honey is in short supply right now). For thickeners, I have cornstarch, gelatin, and agar, also glutinous rice flour and possibly some tapioca flour, and I'm hoping our buyer in Bangkok can track down some pectin, but that may not happen. I am also interested in trying some pates de fruit. Does anyone have a good recipe for non-pectin PDF? If I want to try the interiors of Greweling's agar citrus slices, what could I substitute for the glucose syrup, maybe just a really heavy simple syrup?? Any advice? Thanks.

If there is a focaccia you like, maybe you can talk to the bakery about making some thinner. If you have a standing order, it shouldn't be too much trouble for them to make a few different. How thick do you want it?

It was probably a typo for 355F. Celsius is just about half of most Farenheit baking temperatures.

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?