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ihatenougat

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Everything posted by ihatenougat

  1. I tried to make croissants at home a few days ago, and they were a quite a failure. I think from this thread I've been able to identify all the problems except one. Most recipes tell you to stretch out the triangles a little before rolling them up. When I tried this, the outer layer of dough ripped in several places, exposing the butter. What's the point of that? And wouldn't it be easier to roll out the dough a little wider as opposed to lengthening each triangle one at a time?
  2. At the French Pastry School, chef Dendauw taught us how to make brioche using the "slapping" technique and also in the kitchen aid mixer. The results were identical. I got so slap-happy that I lost track of time in class, but I would guess it took around 30-40 minutes. There were a couple of differences from the technique in this video though. We used a motion where you grab some of the dough, stretch it towards you, then cut it with a scraper. This was to cut the gluten chains and not develop too much gluten (I think). About halfway through the mixing, when the dough came together some, we added the butter (instead of at the beginning as in the video) and after that, used just the slapping motion until the dough was fully mixed.
  3. Thanks for the replies. I haven't yet read the Alinea book. Does it say what the function of the sorbitol is for this application? And if you didn't have sorbitol, could you replace it with something else that's cheaper or more widely available?
  4. On Top Chef this week, Bryan Voltaggio made a dessert based on a chocolate ganache with spearmint ice cream. I looked up the recipe here because I wanted to try to make it. As you can see, he used 100g of sorbitol, which is over 10% of the total weight in this recipe. Why would one use so much sorbitol? Since sorbitol can be used as a laxative, wouldn't this cause some unpleasant digestive issues? I'm also curious about the combination of gelatin and agar. I've never seen agar in a ganache recipe. Is that to make it set faster? Or for texture?
  5. The purpose of mixing sugar with the yolks is to help protect the yolks from curdling. You don't really have to do it as long as the milk isn't too far above 70*C when you add it to the yolks, and you add the milk slowly enough. Also, you don't want to whip or beat the yolk/sugar mixture. The only thing you want to do is dissolve the sugar into the yolks and mix them together, you don't want to increase the volume or develop air bubbles.
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