Scaling down a Pierre Herme genoise recipe

[Lee Gomes]

On the theory that a baker's reach should exceed his grasp, I just bought La Patisserie de Pierre Herme, which, sure enough, is in many areas beyond my quite modest abilities. I'm determined to press on, though, and decided to start with his basic genoise recipe. PH's note says the cake "is easier to make and has a more interesting taste" than the classic Genoise. It's obviously scaled to five or six cakes:

600 g almond paste

500 g caster sugar

330 g egg yolks

1,500 g emulsifier Peco 50

1 kg bread flour

350 g lukewarm melted butter

The recipe says to cream the almond paste and sugar, then add the yolks one by one, then the whole eggs. Replace the paddle in the mixer with the whisk, and then beat for 15 minutes. Fold in the flour and butter as normal, and bake at 180 C or 255 F.

I made the cake with a quarter of the listed ingredients, and it came out fine, in a bland Genoise sort of way; it's not the sort of thing you'd want to eat by itself, but it would be splendid in a bigger construction. While it hardly rose, it wasn't at all heavy, and it had a nice gentle dome on top.

I had a couple of questions, though.

1) I read elsewhere that I could just skip the Peco 50, so I did. I am curious about what it is supposed to do in the cake, and whether there is any sort of easily-available substitute. (Peco 50 seems to hail from France.)

2) The instructions say nothing about heating the eggs before beating them, so I didn't. Had I done so, would it have made a difference in how high the cake rose?

3) In a related vein, in Desserts by Pierre Herme, DG says to heat the eggs to between 130 and 140 F; that is considerably warmer than other recipes, which seem to average around 100 or 110 F. Any insights on who is right? Or do they all work equally well?

4) As I had been warned on this site, the book makes frequent use of ingredients not recognized by an American home baker -- syrups at various Baume degrees, invert sugar, sorbitol, HF, NH pectine, etc etc. Does anyone know of a link here on eGullet, or else an external site, that deals with many of these in one place? The alternative is lots of Googling, which I am happy to do but would rather be spared the need to if I could.

Merci mes amis.

[alanamoana]

1,500 g emulsifier Peco 50

1) I read elsewhere that I could just skip the Peco 50, so I did. I am curious about what it is supposed to do in the cake, and whether there is any sort of easily-available substitute. (Peco 50 seems to hail from France.)

←

did you mis-type the quantity of emulsifier? it would seem that one and a half kilos would be missed in a recipe...i'm assuming you meant 1.5 grams?!

there are other threads on eG that list sources for some of the ingredients you listed.

try:

Le Sanctuaire

or

L'Epicerie

or

Chef Rubber

to start.

[McDuff]

I think the 1,500 g is a convention in languages other than English. I was puzzled by all the seeming mistakes in this book until I saw a sign in Brazilian that used the same comma convention. If you look carefully at the recipes in the book they all use it and it cracked me up when I got the book that I needed to make, oh, a ton and a half of ganache.

130 to 140 seems awfully warm. that's almost cooked. I would stir the eggs with some of the sugar( the rest being used to cream with the almond paste), then put the bowl over barely simmering water and beat not too forcefully to very warm to the touch, then transfer to the mixer and beat, till no more than one drop falls off a spatula when lifted out of the eggs. You can overbeat an egg sponge, I don't care what they say. 255 seems awfully low for the baking temp too.

[alanamoana]

I think the 1,500 g is a convention in languages other than English. I was puzzled by all the seeming mistakes in this book until I saw a sign in Brazilian that used the same comma convention. If you look carefully at the recipes in the book they all use it and it cracked me up when I got the book that I needed to make, oh, a ton and a half of ganache.

←

Yeah, I know they use a (,) instead of a (.), but why the extra zeros?

[pastrygirl]

255 seems awfully low for the baking temp too.

←

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

Edited May 14, 2008 by pastrygirl (log)

[sugarseattle]

It seems like if you're really after a genoise, skip the fancy schmancy recipe with an "emulsifier" and find one that uses mostly eggs and sugar, a little bit of flour, and some browned butter. The cook's illustrated genoise is really well balance. Yes, you have to heat the eggs with genoise; it's the only way to get that choice foam that is the fabulous structure of genoise. I don't use a thermometer, I just heat 'em until they're almost too hot to touch, then let the beating begin!

Once you master a genoise; (my rule says do a recipe 3 times before you got it), then you can play with the flour; swap out some of the flour with almond flour or cocoa, or even walnut flour.

Good luck!

[ejw50]

On the theory that a baker's reach should exceed his grasp, I just bought La Patisserie de Pierre Herme, which, sure enough, is in many areas beyond my quite modest abilities. I'm determined to press on, though, and decided to start with his basic genoise recipe. PH's note says the cake "is easier to make and has a more interesting taste" than the classic Genoise. It's obviously scaled to five or six cakes:

600 g almond paste

500 g caster sugar

330 g egg yolks

1,500 g emulsifier Peco 50

1 kg bread flour

350 g lukewarm melted butter

The recipe says to cream the almond paste and sugar, then add the yolks one by one, then the whole eggs. Replace the paddle in the mixer with the whisk, and then beat for 15 minutes. Fold in the flour and butter as normal, and bake at 180 C or 255 F.

I made the cake with a quarter of the listed ingredients, and it came out fine, in a bland Genoise sort of way; it's not the sort of thing you'd want to eat by itself, but it would be splendid in a bigger construction. While it hardly rose, it wasn't at all heavy, and it had a nice gentle dome on top.

I had a couple of questions, though.

1) I read elsewhere that I could just skip the Peco 50, so I did. I am curious about what it is supposed to do in the cake, and whether there is any sort of easily-available substitute. (Peco 50 seems to hail from France.)

2) The instructions say nothing about heating the eggs before beating them, so I didn't. Had I done so, would it have made a difference in how high the cake rose?

3) In a related vein, in Desserts by Pierre Herme, DG says to heat the eggs to between 130 and 140 F; that is considerably warmer than other recipes, which seem to average around 100 or 110 F. Any insights on who is right? Or do they all work equally well?

4) As I had been warned on this site, the book makes frequent use of ingredients not recognized by an American home baker -- syrups at various Baume degrees, invert sugar, sorbitol, HF, NH pectine, etc etc. Does anyone know of a link here on eGullet, or else an external site, that deals with many of these in one place? The alternative is lots of Googling, which I am happy to do but would rather be spared the need to if I could.

Merci mes amis.

←

it's only 50g of emulsifier, not 1500g. 1500g is the eggs.

A few points

- "Larousse des desserts" by PH has a the same recipe without the emulsifer - "Pate a genoise a l'amande". I think you can skip the emulsifier.

- "Larousse" also lists the more 'classic' genoise right before, so PH thinks the classic one is good enough to list in his book.

- Larousse mentions a double boiler for the 'classic genoise' (with photos) and mentions the double boiler for the almond genoise too.

I substitute regular genoise for the almond one with no problems. Up to you if the almond genoise is worth it.

You can get most of the equipment in the book's photos (except the salamander to do carmelized joconde) from jbprince.com. I can second alanamoana's pointing out l'epicerie as a food vendor. You might also consider just doing substitutions - ie instead of making that ganache w/invert sugar just make a regular ganache.

Edited May 19, 2008 by ejw50 (log)

[Lee Gomes]

Sorry for the dumb mistakes == in the ingredients, it's indeed just 50 g of the emulsifier, and 1,500 grams (one thousand five hundred) of whole eggs; and the oven temperature is indeed 355F. I promise to copy edit my next post much better.

Thanks to all for the tips on vendors, as well as books.

[ejw50]

I'm gonna retract my recommendation of l'epicerie.

They recently substituted dextrose for atomized glucose without telling me (3 bags!). Then I emailed them but didn't get a response for 3 days. When I finally called them, they told me they were the same, but they're not according to a thread where I asked about it. @$@$@$@#$@#$