High summer at the market, in the kitchen

In the days of high summer, there are few places in Chicago I'd rather be than Green City Market. It is the real deal--small-scale midwestern farmers committed to their land, astonishingly good produce in abundance. Even early on a Wednesday morning, the market hums with quiet excitement. Rounding the corner to the next stretch of stalls, I, anyway, am always buoyed by the prospect of discovering something beautiful and unusual, something I've never seen before.

And I'm glad that Sandra Holl seems to share my feelings about the place. A few weeks ago, I was invited to tag along with her on a market trip. Sandra is chef and owner of Floriole, and I've long been an admirer of hers. Her bakery is incomparable in this city. It turns out such gorgeous stuff--canelés with custard-like centres, mahogany sourdough boules, the flakiest croissants. When I'm in the neighbourhood, I always try and stop in.

We met that morning at Floriole's market stall--it's where the bakery got its start--and then made the rounds. Sandra had already put in orders with some of the farms (peaches and green beans from Mick Klug, arugula from Green Acres), so we visited the stalls to collect them. (If you take your eyes off all the produce for a moment and peer behind the stalls at Green City Market, you'll see tall stacks of cardboard boxes scrawled with some very familiar names--these are all the restaurant orders from around the city awaiting pick-up.) But in between pick-ups and afterwards, we also spent some time looking at what else there was available that day. If something catches her eye, Sandra explained, even if it doesn't fit in with anything she has planned, she'll take it back to the bakery for her chefs to do with it whatever happens to inspire them. On this day, it was the indigo-rose tomatoes at Growing Home that stood out--small and inky purple with just a bit of a blush to them. (Sandra tries to source as much as she can locally for Floriole. And in the days of high summer, between Green City Market, her mother's garden just outside the city, and the bakery's own rooftop setup, that isn't particularly hard. But even staples like flour, eggs, and butter at the bakery come from producers in the Midwest.)

On our way out, we picked up a flat of fat blackberries from Ellis Family Farms and chatted with the Ellises about their teenage daughter Mary, who's in charge of the farm's laying operation. They showed us a recent photo of Mary scrubbing a hen with a toothbrush in preparation for a show. It was pretty clear that over the years Sandra's developed some lasting ties to the people at this market.

Back at the bakery, I was also invited to try my hand at some pastry-making in the kitchen. It was a bit of a dream come true, being there in the midst of that bustle, even if only for half an hour. There was a lot going on around us--challah being tested, tart shells being unmoulded, gougères coming out of the oven, sourdough loaves being sliced by hand. Our plan was to make some galettes with the fruit we'd picked up. The kitchen made it simple for us. There were already rounds of house-made puff pastry  dough ready at hand. All we had to do was slice some peaches for the filling (tasting as we sliced, of course--Sandra emphasized the importance of this) and assemble the galettes. So we spread the pastry-dough rounds with a thin layer of brown-butter custard, mounded each with a big handful of sliced peaches and blackberries, crimped up the edges over the fruit, and then slid them into the oven to bake. And, of course, they were phenomenal. How couldn't they be? Impossibly flaky pastry. Caramel-edged fruit. Nothing better together.

Sandra was kind enough to allow me to share these galettes with you (thanks, Sandra!). How involved you want the process to be is kind of up to you. I took this as an opportunity to make puff pastry from scratch for the very first time. And though I found the work really rewarding and totally worth the effort, I suspect that most of you won't have the time and/or inclination. It can be a two- or three-day process, just because the butter needs to be cold when you're working with it and the gluten in the dough needs a couple of hours to relax after it gets rolled out each time. Instead, you could try making Gourmet's "rough" puff pastry, which is not as demanding and has been my go-to for a long time, or you could buy good-quality ready-made puff pastry (Sandra and lots of others recommend Dufour). The brown-butter custard, as Sandra says, is also optional. It adds extra sweetness and nuttiness to the galettes and prevents the pastry from sopping up too much of the fruit's juices during baking. What's important is that you use the best fruit available to you. It matters here--these galettes are really all about the fruit. Speaking of which--in the time that it's taken me to try out these galettes at home, high summer has come and gone, which means you won't be seeing peaches and blackberries at the market for much longer. But the galettes are very adaptable--you could probably work just about any fruit into them. I made two kinds this past weekend, some peach-blackberry, some plum-rosemary. You should be able to find plums at the market for a good long while still.

The homemade galettes turned out really well. In fact, they might be the best thing I've made all year. Seriously. They were so good. Octavian and I greedily demolished the two we kept for ourselves in seconds and then almost, almost, regretted having given the others away.

When people ask, I always tell them that the best thing about running this blog has been the people I've gotten to know through it. It's always gratifying to find people who think and care even more than I do about good food, people who are completely dedicated to what they do. I feel lucky to have met the people I have. It's affirming and inspiring. And there's always so much to learn from them. Sandra is definitely one of those people. She is serious about good pastry--I've seen it. So, walking around the market with her that morning, it was heartening to see that a good blackberry could still excite her as much as it does me.

Summer Fruit Galettes
An at-home take on Floriole's sweet galettes
NOTE: While in Floriole's kitchen, we didn't do a whole lot of measuring, and afterwards, Sandra only gave me exact quantities for the brown-butter custard, so the quantities below are based on my observations while baking with Sandra and what I did at home. Floriole's galettes, I think, are in fact a bit bigger than the ones I made, but mine still make for nice individual portions. About the fruit. The galettes that I made actually had less fruit than I've called for below (I used about 225 g all in all), but I think they really could have used more. The fruit does reduce a lot during baking. Feel free, of course, to use only peaches and blackberries or only plums. About the temperature. If you have a convection oven, by all means, use the convection option. Just bake the galettes at 350 degrees F instead and for about 30 minutes. About the brown-butter custard. At Floriole, the kitchen goes through a lot of brown-butter custard. This is reflected in the quantities that Sandra gave me. For my batch of custard at home, I converted most of the measurements to grams and divided by eight. And still, I had way more custard than needed for these galettes. I put my remaining custard in the freezer for the time being. Unless you have ideas for what you might do with more than a pound of remaining custard (you could just make a ton of galettes), you might want to try scaling down the recipe more or just skipping it all together. Almond cream would also be a good substitute, if you happen to have any of that lying around. About chilling. It's really important that you chill the pastries after assembling them. This will help them keep their shape as they bake. I rushed mine a little, and they don't quite have the nice star-like shape they're supposed to.

650 g puff pastry dough, chilled
All-purpose flour, for dusting
4 tablespoons brown butter custard (optional - recipe below)

FRUIT FILLING
150 g blackberries and sliced peaches
150 g sliced Italian prune plums
1/4 teaspoon finely chopped rosemary
2 tablespoons sugar, divided
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour, divided

EGGWASH
1 egg yolk
2 teaspoons heavy cream

Coarse sugar, like turbinado sugar, for finishing

Lightly flour your work surface and rolling pin. Place the block of dough on the work surface and dust lightly with flour. Gently but firmly roll it out into a 12-inch square, about 1/4 inch thick, using only as much flour as necessary to prevent the dough from sticking. Using a 6-inch cake ring or an equivalently sized plate as a guide and a sharp knife (you want the cuts to be as clean as possible, so as not to disturb the layers of butter in the dough), cut 4 6-inch circles from the dough. Place the circles on a parchment-lined baking sheet, cover loosely with plastic wrap, and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.
Put the peaches and blackberries in one small mixing bowl, the plums and rosemary in another. Add 1 tablespoon sugar and 1/2 tablespoon flour to each bowl and gently toss to combine.
Whisk together the egg yolk and heavy cream for the eggwash.
Spread 1 tablespoon brown butter custard, if using, in a thin layer over one of the 6-inch circles, leaving a 1-inch border around the edge. Mound a quarter of the fruit in its centre. Then crimp the pastry in the following way. Start by folding up part of the edge about 3/4 inch over the fruit, then while keeping the fold in place, take another part of the edge, an inch or so to the right, and fold it up over the fruit so that it overlaps the first folded part of the edge. Now, where the two folds overlap, press down firmly with one finger so that the folds hold--you should be able to an indent from your finger. Continue folding and pressing until the crimp goes around the entire pastry. It should take about seven folds. (You may have trouble crimping the pastry with all the fruit mounded in the centre. If that's the case, remove some to make the crimping easier and tuck it back in afterwards. It may seem like too much fruit right now, but it will reduce significantly during baking.) Repeat with the remaining pastries. Brush with eggwash and chill in the fridge for 30-60 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
Sprinkle the pastries with coarse sugar and bake for 30-35 minutes, until puffed and deeply golden. The galettes are best eaten warm from the oven.
Makes 4 individual galettes.

Brown Butter Custard
From Floriole Cafe and Bakery

170 g unsalted butter, cut into chunks
Juice of a medium lemon
3 eggs
220 g sugar
1/2 tablespoon brandy
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Kosher salt, a big pinch
33 g all-purpose flour
45 g heavy cream

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. When the butter has melted, bring it to a boil, still over medium heat and whisking constantly to prevent it from separating. Continue cooking the butter, whisking occasionally to prevent milk solids from sticking to the bottom of the pan, about 5 minutes. The butter is ready when it is the colour of caramel. Check its colour by lifting some up in a spoon. Pour into a heatproof container, preferably something with a spout. Add the lemon juice and let cool.
Meanwhile, in a stand mixer fitted with the wire whip attachment, beat the eggs and sugar on medium, until pale and thick, about 3 minutes. Gradually incorporate the browned butter. Then add the brandy, salt, flour, cream, and vanilla and mix just until combined. If the custard starts to look grainy at any point, that's fine. Use immediately or store refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 week.
Makes about 585 g.

Pie season

I'm kind of crazy about fruit pies. They are pretty much everything I want in something sweet--just rich, flaky pastry spilling over with bright, luscious fruit. But I hardly ever make pies. I know, I know. A terrible shame. But you know how it is. Fruit pies are a finicky thing. Between pulling together the pastry, piling in the fruit, and letting it all bubble and bake, there can be a lot of heartbreak. So as much as I love them, I don't bake pies nearly enough.

But I'm hoping that will change, starting with this pie--peach-raspberry with pecan crumble. It is so, so good. It starts out with peaches--blanched and peeled, then roasted until silken and slumped. Then, come the raspberries, stirred into the still-hot peaches. These, once piled into a buttery shell, get mounded with pecan crumble, which bakes up golden and craggy. It's a bit involved, I know. A pie that will likely keep you in the kitchen all afternoon and leave you with a sink full of dishes. There's no hiding that. But this pie is also spectacular, quite possibly the best I've had. The peaches are intense, concentrated, deeply floral from their roasting. And the raspberries scattered throughout are so perfect with them, little pockets of jammy, puckery brightness. The pecan crumble too is spot on--it delivers needed crunch, with all that slumped, soft fruit. All in all, swoon-worthy.

The pie comes from the new Hoosier Mama Book of Pie. Hoosier Mama is local pie shop here in Chicago--an impressive sliver of a storefront and bakery that turns out wonderful pies all year long. They are very serious about their pie there. They are all about buttery, flaky pastry, all about intense, swoon-worthy fillings. It is my kind of shop. So I'm really glad that they've decided to share some of their pie wisdom in this book. Paula Haney and Allison Scott offer encouraging instruction. They recognise that pie-making is something that has mostly fallen out of favour at home and that the wisdom that went with it is largely lost to us. So they explain their process in detail and illustrate with lots of step-by-step photos. These definitely help with potential heartbreak. I am particularly thrilled to have picked up their crimping technique. The crusts at Hoosier Mama always have the most gorgeous, defined crimp. And now mine aren't so bad looking either.

I really would like to make more than one or two pies every year. Pie is just too good to not have around more often. And from here on out, I don't think it's going to be too much of a problem. The peach-raspberry pie is a bit demanding--one to keep in mind for when you want to make someone feel really special--but there are plenty of easier pies in the book. I'm already thinking about my next pie,  likely Lemon Chess with Sticky Blueberries. The gooey filling comes together in five minutes, and the blueberries should be a snap too. And then there's the pie after that. The first apples have already started showing up at the markets, and this book gives apples a lot of love. Classic apple, caramel-apple cider, apple and quince, dutch apple with sour cream custard, etc., etc. I can't wait! This, friends, is the start of pie season.

One final note. As you can probably see, my pie filling is a little runnier than it should be. I wasn't very diligent in following the roasting directions for the peaches. I didn't have an appropriate-sized baking pan and thought my peaches were cooking too quickly, so I pulled them out at the 25-minute mark. It didn't occur to me at the time just how important the long roast was. But this pie's crumble topping mounds over the entire surface. That means none of the water remaining in the peaches evaporates in the final bake. Those peaches need to roast for at least 40 minutes. My mistake.

Peach-Raspberry Pie with Pecan Crumble

From Paula Haney and Allison Scott's Hoosier Mama Book of Pie

NOTE: To peel peaches, bring a wide pot of water to a boil. Using a paring knife, make an X in the bottom of each peach. Blanch the peaches for 45 second or so, in batches if need be. Remove the peaches with a slotted spoon and immediately transfer them to a bowl of ice-water. Peel the peaches, starting from the X. If a peach is being stubborn, try repeating the blanching process. If this doesn't work, take your vegetable peeler to it.

1 single-crust, blind-baked All-Butter Pie Dough shell (available as a PDF here)

125 g / 1 cup raspberries

1230 g / 8 cups peeled peach slices (see note above)

15 g / 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

.5 g / 1/4 teaspoon almond extract

200 g / 1 cup granulated sugar

31 g / 3 tablespoons potato starch

Pinch of kosher salt

1 recipe Pecan Crumble (see below)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Pick through the raspberries, discarding any stems, leaves, or shrivelled berries. Set aside. (There's no need to wash them--the berries grow way off the ground.)

Place the peeled peach slices in a large bowl. Add the lemon juice and almond extract and toss until the peaches are well coated.

Place the sugar, potato starch, and salt in a small bowl and whisk until thoroughly combined. Pour the dry ingredients over the peaches and gently toss until most of the dry ingredients cling to the peaches.

Spray a 9 x 13-inch non-reactive baking pan with cooking spray. (I used butter without much issue.) Transfer the peaches to the baking pan and bake for 20 minutes. 

Remove the pan from the oven and stir the peaches, making sure to scrape out any ingredients that stick to the sides of the baking dish. Return the pan to the oven and bake for 20 more minutes. 

Repeat this step until the peach juices are thickened and translucent. The peach slices should be tender but still hold their shape. Stir the raspberries directly into the hot peaches and cool to room temperature.

Once cooled, spoon the fruit into the pie shell and top with 1/2 of the Pecan Crumble. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until the crumble is lightly toasted. (I'd recommend setting your pie plate on a baking sheet--you might get a few drips over the side.) Top the pie with remaining crumble and bake 20-25 minutes more, until the top is crispy.

Cool for at least 1 hour before slicing. The pie can be stored at room temperature for up to 2 days and in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

Pecan Crumble

From Paula Haney and Allison Scott's Hoosier Mama Book of Pie

NOTE: To toast the pecans, spread them out on a baking sheet and bake at 300 degrees F for 10 minutes.

148 g / 1 cup all-purpose flour

100 g / 1/2 cup granulated sugar

30 g / 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

50 g / 1/2 cup toasted pecans

84 g / 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch cubes

Pinch of kosher salt

Combine all of the ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment.

Mix on low until the mixture resembles fine crumbs. Increase the speed to medium and mix until gravel-sized pieces form.

Chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes before using to top a pie. The crumble can be stored in the refrigerator for up to a week.

So I'll just say this

Heat here in the Midwest is a sticky, unrelenting thing. It hangs heavy in the air and clings to you. It leaves you feeling muddled and slow, thick as the air around you. On some days, by early afternoon, it is hard to string together sentences. You are reduced to a hot, sticky puddle of yourself. Kind of like today.

So I'll just say this. I am glad, so glad, that I churned out this batch of sour cherry frozen yogurt a few days ago (a rare moment of foresight on my part). A few spoons (or more!) snuck from the freezer at midday--clean, bright, and cold sliding down your throat--are utterly restorative. And best of all, the taste vividly recalls forkfuls of leftover sour cherry pie, eaten cold from the fridge for breakfast (an indulgent breakfast of the best kind, if you ask me).

And even if this finds you already a hot, sticky, muddled mess, not to worry. This frozen yogurt only calls for three ingredients, really--sour cherries, sugar, and yogurt. And the cherries, once pitted, need only a scant few minutes' cooking, just until they yield. Then, all you have to do is blend the cherries and yogurt together and get them a-churnin'. Relief--cold, sour, and electrically pink--is not far off.

Sour Cherry Frozen Yogurt

Adapted, just a little, from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop

Note: This frozen yogurt's consistency is best the day it's made, but that shouldn't stop you from having it around for a little longer.

450 g / 1 pound fresh sour cherries (about 3 cups before pitting)

150 g / 3/4 cup sugar

240 g / 1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt (Greek-style, if you'd like)

A splash of brandy or 2 drops almond extract (optional)

Stem and pit the cherries. Put them in a medium saucepan with the sugar and brandy, if using. Cover, bring to a boil, and then lower the heat and simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently to encourage the juices to flow. The cherries are ready when tender and cooked through. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.

Purée the cooked cherries and any liquid with the yogurt and almond extract, if using, in a blender or food processor until smooth. 

Chill for 2 hours, then freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Makes about 3 cups.

We did it!

Good cookbooks are like good friends. You want to surround yourself with them. They're the ones who will see you through, the ones who inspire you, the ones with whom you can spend long hours musing, late into the night. And, most importantly, they're the ones you can always count on--to pull you out of a slump or be a voice of assurance or, in my case most recently, help you make a few dozen pastries worthy of the fine and discerning folks that would be at No Dessert Left Behind.

So you can count Bouchon Bakery a good friend cookbook of mine...because we did it! ((I think.) If you snagged a piece of this tart at the bake sale, I would love to know what you thought of it.) See, it was less than two weeks ago that I received an email asking me to contribute to this bake sale for No Kid Hungry, and already I knew, it was not going to be just any bake sale. Most of the participants would be pastry chefs from around the city--talented people who make wonderful pastry everyday for a living. Big things were expected. But I didn't have the time to do any recipe testing (I had a big pile of final papers to grade), and nothing that I'd made in recent memory fit my requirements. Whatever I was going to make needed to be (a) something that I could easily portion and box to go, (b) eye-catching, preferably, and (c) would hold up for at least a good 24 hours (mostly so that I wouldn't have to start my baking at 2 am--I'm no professional). So I put my trust in Thomas Keller and Sebastien Rouxel and decided to make a half-sheet-sized tarte à la rhubarbe et au beurre noisette.

Even by my standards, making this tart was a monster of a project. In part, this was because I was doubling the recipe as written (at Bouchon, they do bake it in half-sheet pans, since, you know, it's a bakery, but the recipe for home bakers is scaled back to a quarter-sheet pan). I had twice as much rhubarb to trim and de-string. And rolling out enough pâte sucrée to fit an 18-x-13-inch pan and then getting it into that pan were not the easiest of feats. But these considerations aside, there was still a lot to do. Keller and Rouxel get you to cure your lengths of rhubarb--once trimmed and stripped of their tough outer layer--in sugar and grenadine for 24 hours. This process draws water from the rhubarb (the stalks are mostly just water) that would otherwise be released during baking, and the grenadine lends some extra colour to the stalks. There is also the pâte sucrée to pull together, a buttery, vanilla-specked dough that lines the bottom of the tart. Then there's the almond-brown-butter filling to make, some of which gets piped over the blind-baked pâte sucrée, the rest between and over the stalks of cured rhubarb. The assembled tart then gets baked to a deep, burnished gold. And finally, once cooled, it's cut up and mounded with crunchy almond streusel.

Like I said, it was a lot to do. And a lot to trust in too. I'd never made this tart before. And I didn't really have a back-up plan. There were definitely a couple of moments--like when my stand mixer was throwing up handfuls of flour onto the counter (the pâte sucrée doubled, quite frankly, is a bit too much for a standard stand mixer to handle) and when brown-butter filling (just a few drips, luckily) was baking over the edge of my half-sheet and onto oven floor--where I thought to myself, "This is going to be a disaster."

But it wasn't. The tart baked up beautifully. And with Octavian's help and that of a couple of other good-willed friends, I even got it portioned and packed up in time to make the Saturday evening drop-off at Little Goat. (See, good cookbooks and good friends!) 

I wish I could tell you more about how it tasted. But I didn't get a chance to buy back a piece (for most of the bake sale I was down on the first floor of the restaurant, directing people upstairs), and of the test square that I held back, well, Octavian did most of the testing. (He approved.) What I ate I did early Sunday morning still half-asleep. I remember it being deeply nutty and just sweet enough--the rhubarb was still emphatically tart. But maybe some of you out there are in a better position to say than me. (Speak up, please.)

To all of you in Chicago who came out on Sunday, thank you so much for your support! I hope you had a good time. And to Vanessa and Mike, who organized the bake sale, thank you so much for all of your hard work and for inviting me to bake. (And Tim, thanks for thinking of me and passing my name along!) It got a little crazy, but I had a blast.
AN UPDATE - 2013-06-12: Oh, and I got word today--we made $6,252 at the bake sale! Way to go, guys! (And here are some photos from the event.)

Tarte à la rhubarbe et au beurre noisette (Rhubarb Brown-Butter Tart)

From Thomas Keller and Sebastien Rouxel's Bouchon Bakery

NOTE: Timing. There are lots of steps to making this tart. You'll need to give yourself at least two days--the first to at least trim, de-string, and start curing the rhubarb, the second to bake and assemble the tart. I also pulled together the pâte sucrée on the first day. You could also make the streusel then too. I just didn't have the time. Eggs. To measure out eggs for this recipe, first crack them open into a bowl and whisk them together. One large egg weighs about 50 grams or comes to about 1/3 cup in volume, so that should give you an idea of how many you need. Keller and Rouxel also have you push the whisked eggs through a fine-mesh strainer to remove any small bits of shell and the chalazae attaching the yolk to the white. (I find this step a little annoying to do for more than a couple of eggs. My feeling is that you could probably skip it.) Grenadine. The book doesn't really say anything about how to shop for grenadine. The most commonly available brand in the US is mostly just high-fructose corn syrup and food colouring and also tastes like cough syrup, which is kind of annoying. Traditionally, grenadine was made with pomegranate juice, and fancier brands, like this one, are returning to that practice. (It's also not difficult, I'm told, to make your own.) I debated a little bit about what to do here. Eventually, I found a grenadine at the grocery store that was at least made with sugar (though it also tasted like cough syrup), and given that the purpose of the grenadine here seems to be to colour the rhubarb, I'd say that you should keep the fancy stuff for imbibing. It doesn't noticeably affect the rhubarb's flavour, anyway. Fraisage. Below, pulling together the tart dough requires a French technique called "fraisage." Here's a video that might give you a better sense of what to do. The actual fraisage starts around 2:05. Scale. The measurements below correspond to those printed in the book. Like I said above, I scaled up to a half-sheet pan for the bake sale, but I assume that very few of you will need to feed 24-32 on any given occasion. But if for whatever reason you do find yourself in that situation, consider getting your hands on a good kitchen scale (I'm not sure that doubling the measurements here by volume will prove as reliable) and then follow the recipe as printed. It works! Just keep in mind that you will probably have to bake the tart shell, the assembled tart, and the streusel for a few extra minutes in each case, given that you've got more surface area and more volume to deal with. Use your judgement.

CURED RHUBARB
15 young stalks of rhubarb (about 2 pounds), preferably at least 13 inches long and about 1/2 inch wide

100 g / 1/2 cup granulated sugar

120 g / 1/4 + 2 tablespoons grenadine

PÂTE SUCRÉE

375 g / 2 2/3 cups all-purpose flour

46 g / 1/4 cup + 2 1/2 tablespoons + 94 g / 3/4 cup + 1 tablespoon powdered sugar

47 g / 1/4 cup + 3 tablespoons finely ground almonds

225 g / 8 oz unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise

56 g / 3 1/2 tablespoons eggs (see note above)

BROWN-BUTTER FILLING

235 g / 8.25 oz unsalted butter

75 g / 1/2 cup + 3 tablespoons finely ground almonds

75 g / 1/2 cup + 1 1/2 teaspoons all-purpose flour

150 g / 1/2 cup + 1 1/2 tablespoons eggs (see note above)

210 g / 1 cup + 1 tablespoon granulated sugar

75 g / 1/4 cup + 2 teaspoons whole milk

75 g / 1/4 cup + 1 tablespoon heavy cream

TOASTED ALMOND STREUSEL

40 g / 1/4 + 2 teaspoons all-purpose flour

40 g / 1/3 cup + 1 teaspoon finely ground almonds

40 g / 3 tablespoons granulated sugar

Pinch of kosher salt

40 g / 1.4 oz cold, unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

Powdered sugar for dusting

FOR THE CURED RHUBARB: Trim the rhubarb to fit the length of the quarter-sheet pan you'll be using for the assembled tart. Using a sharp paring knife (a vegetable peeler would remove too much), remove any tough strings and peel from the stalks. Do this by making just a few short cuts at one end to separate the peel from the stalk and then pulling it off the rest of the way with your fingers, following the length of the stalk. If any of the stalks are very young and green and don't peel easily, leave them unpeeled.

Arrange the rhubarb in a 9-x-13-inch baking dish. Sprinkle with it with the sugar and drizzle the grenadine over top. Cover the dish with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 24 hours, turning the rhubarb every 8 hours to coat it evenly.

Drain the rhubarb on paper towels, and discard the liquid remaining in the dish.

FOR THE TART SHELL: Place the all-purpose flour in a medium bowl. Sift the 46 g / 1/4 cup + 2 1/2 tablespoons powdered sugar and the almond flour into the bowl. Break up any lumps remaining in the sieve and add them to the bowl. Whisk to combine.

Place the butter in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and cream on medium-low until the butter is the consistency of mayonnaise and holds a peak when the paddle is lifted. Sift in the remaining powdered sugar and pulse to begin incorporating it. Then increase the speed to medium-low and mix for about 1 minute, until the mixture is fluffy. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl. Scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean into the butter mixture, and mix on low for about 30 seconds, just to disperse the seeds evenly.

Add the dry ingredients in two additions, mixing for just 15-30 seconds after each to combine. Scrape the bottom of the bowl. Add the eggs and mix on low until just combined, another 15-30 seconds.

Transfer the dough to a clean work surface, gathered in a mound close to you. Using the heel of your hand, smear the dough, a bit at a time, across the work surface. Gather the dough up again with a bench scraper and repeat until the dough is smooth and uniform. This technique, called fraisage, ensures a delicate and uniform crust. Pat the dough into a rectangle, about 3/4 inch thick. Wrap the dough in a double layer of plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm, about 2 hours, but preferably overnight. The dough can be refrigerated for up to 2 days or frozen for up to 1 month.

Butter the quarter-sheet pan or spray with non-stick spray. Line the bottom with parchment paper. Unwrap the dough and place between two sheets of parchment paper. With a rolling pin, pound the top of the dough, working from one side to the other, and then rotate 90 degrees and repeat. Roll out the dough in the parchment, from the center outward, rotating and flipping the dough as needed. Form a 12-by-16-inch rectangle, just less than 1/8 inch thick. Remove the top layer of parchment and carefully invert the dough onto the quarter-sheet pan, letting any excess hang over the edges. Run your hands over the parchment and smooth the dough and force out any air bubbles. Make sure that the dough at the corners of the pan is no thicker than elsewhere. Remove the parchment and run the rolling pin over the edges of the pan to remove any excess dough. Cover the dough with plastic wrap and chill for 30 minutes in the freezer or 1 hour in the fridge. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Line the dough with parchment paper and fill the pan with raw rice or beans. Bake for 15 minutes, then rotate the pan and bake for another 15 to 20 minutes, until the dough is set and no longer sticks to the parchment. Take the pan from the oven and remove the parchment and rice. Return the pan to the oven and bake for another 15 minutes, or until the dough is golden brown. (Don't worry if the edges of the tart have darkened further. They're unlikely to burn, and you can trim them away later anyway.) Set the pan on a cooling rack and cool completely.

FOR THE ALMOND STREUSEL: Whisk together the all-purpose flour, ground almonds, sugar, and salt in a bowl, breaking up any lumps. Add the butter pieces and toss to coat. Work the butter in with your fingertips, breaking the butter into pieces no larger than 1/8 inch. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill for at least 2 hours, or up to 2 days, or freeze for up to 1 month.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Spread the streusel in an even layer on a parchment-lined sheet pan. Bake for 8-10 minutes, turning the streusel every few minutes, until it's golden brown and dry. Place the pan on a cooling rack and let cool completely.

Transfer the streusel to the bowl of a food processor and blitz to the consistency of brown sugar. The streusel can be stored in a covered container for up to 2 days.

FOR THE FILLING: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Line a fine-mesh strainer with a double layer of cheesecloth and set over a small bowl. In a small saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. As soon as it has melted, whisk continuously to prevent the butter from separating. Once it boils, stop whisking and increase the heat to medium-high. Continue cooking the butter for a few minutes, whisking occasionally to keep the solids that settle at the bottom of the pan from burning. Check the color of the butter by lifting some out of the pan with a spoon. The butter is ready when it is the color of caramel. Remove the pan from heat and pour the butter into the strainer set over the bowl.  Discard the cheesecloth and pour the browned butter into a heat-proof bowl, measuring out 165 g / 3/4 cup + 1 tablespoon. Set aside for a few minutes to cool. The butter should not have cooled completely when it is added to the almond filling--otherwise it will not incorporate--but it should not be hot off the stove either. 

Whisk together the almond flour and all-purpose flour in a medium bowl, breaking up any lumps. 

Add the eggs and sugar to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and mix on medium speed for about 2 minutes, until increased in volume and thickened. With the mixer running on medium-low, slowly add the milk and cream. Add in the dry ingredients and mix on medium-low speed for just a few seconds to combine. With the mixer running on medium, add the browned butter in a slow, thin stream and mix until combined. Transfer the filling to a pastry bag fitted with a 1/2-inch tip.

Pipe enough filling into the crust to cover the bottom with a 1/4-inch-thick layer and spread it evenly with an offset spatula. Arrange the rhubarb rounded-side-up on top of the filling, running lengthwise with the pan. If there are any pieces shorter than the pan, patch them up with a piece cut from another stalk. Pipe more filling around the rhubarb pieces, filling in any gaps. Then spread any remaining filling over the top of the rhubarb. There may not be quite enough filling to completely cover the stalks. That's okay.

Bake the assembled tart for 40 minutes. (Place another sheet pan on a lower rack in the oven to catch any drips. My filling overflowed just a little in the first few minutes of baking.) Rotate the pan, reduce the oven temperature to 325 degrees F, and bake for another 10 to 15 minutes, until the filling is set and deeply golden. Set the pan on a cooling rack and cool completely.

TO SERVE: Cut the tart into 12 pieces, dividing the tart in half along its width and then into six along its length. This way, each piece shows the long rhubarb stalks in profile. Trim the crust on the pieces, if desired. Mound some almond streusel onto each of the pieces and dust with powdered sugar.

SERVES 12.

You make strides

Things have been a little crazy around here lately. I've started a teaching-assistantship and find the dance of students' pens across paper as I speak a little disconcerting. I'm just not used to having anything I say aloud seem important enough for people to be taking notes. And I've been putting together my dissertation committee, which has also been a little terrifying. See, the dissertation, up until about now, hasn't been much more than a mythical beast. Sure, you start grad school knowing that this is what it all leads up to, writing a small book's worth of sound and original ideas, meticulously argued for. And, sure, you see the people around you, very smart people, muddling through. But, for you, it remains just a smudge on the horizon, like, when you were much younger, the prospect of growing up and leaving home--something you knew you would have to do someday but that for the time being was pretty well unfathomable. And so you're able to assure yourself that when you get there, you'll be ready. You'll be so much better read. You'll have it all figured out. And then one day, you wake up to find that you don't know where the days went, that you still don't feel quite ready, but that someday is now, the very day stretching before you. Like I said, a little terrifying. But a little exhilarating too.

In this way, starting to work on a dissertation is, I imagine, a lot like some of life's other milestones, the ones that we know to expect but never really feel ready for. Like turning 30. I'm not there yet, but a good friend of mine is as of this week. And leading up to it, he was, as far as I could tell, fine with it. But either way, I thought that he might appreciate a few macarons.

For this, I turned to Pierre Hermé's Macaron. I've had a copy for almost two years now (thanks to my friend whose birthday it was, incidentally), and working from it is still for me as daunting, as exhilarating as ever. This, admittedly, has something to do with the fact that I don't make macarons very often. Pastry bag in hand, I always feel like I'm at least a little out of practice. But this aside, making macarons from this book for me always has the feel of something like a high-wire act. You put a lot in at the outset--blanching and grinding almonds to a fine powder, aging egg whites, making ganache, and, in this case, candying some lemon peel--but then it all comes down to just a few moments in the process, and there's the sense that it'd be all too easy to misstep.

So why do it at all? It's not for everyone, admittedly. But I like the challenge. I like the constraints. On that narrow a wire, you only find ways to get better at what you're doing. You make strides. And, in particular, this time around, I just really wanted to know what a macaron avocat-citron would taste like. The avocat part is the ganache--mashed avocado whisked bit by bit into cream and melted white chocolate, then chilled until it attains a luxurious thickness. The citron part is candied lemon peel--bright little gems cooked with vanilla bean, star anise, and sarawak peppercorn, at the centre of each macaron. The overall effect is something marvellous, multidimensional. It starts with the avocado, whose presence is quiet and vegetal, adding a certain softness to the sweetness of the ganache. Then comes the pop of the candied peel--citrusy, bitter, floral. And like any good macaron, it has a way of almost disappearing before you know it, leaving behind just a few bright green shards of shell.

At my friend's party--a sprawling, unhurried sort of Sunday brunch--the conversation at one point turned to what it's like being in your thirties (most of the other attendees were already there). Another friend offered up the following insight--that what was important when turning 30 wasn't so much having everything figured out but being in a good place. And with friends, mimosas, and macarons abound, my friend, I thought, wasn't off to a bad start.

I don't pretend to be a macaron expert. Like I said, I don't make them nearly often enough. (And it shows!) So, if you're looking for pointers, Not So Humble Pie is a good place to start. 

Macaron Avocat-Citron

Adapted from Pierre Hermé's Macaron

Special equipment: scale, candy thermometer, stand mixer, pastry bags, no. 11 piping tip. About the aged egg whites. Hermé recommends that a week before you plan to make the macarons you separate the requisite amount of egg white from the yolks and age them in the fridge. Place them in a small container, cover it with plastic wrap, and puncture the plastic a few times with a sharp knife. After four to seven days in the fridge, the whites will lose their elasticity, making them easier to whip up and less likely to get over-beaten and dry. About the couverture chocolate. By definition, couverture chocolate is chocolate that is at least 32% cocoa butter. For the first time this time, I had some Valrhona Ivoire on hand. I can't say definitively whether it was the Valrhona, but this ganache set up far more nicely than the last Hermé ganache I made with Callebaut. About the food colouring: I've been using this set from Williams-Sonoma for my last few batches of macarons. The colours are pretty limited, but I haven't been dedicated enough to track down a fancier line.

CANDIED LEMON
4 lemons, preferably organic
500 ml water
250 g granulated sugar
1 star anise
5 black sarawak peppercorns
1/2 vanilla bean
2 tablespoons lemon juice

MACARON SHELLS
150 g finely blanched and ground almonds
150 g powdered sugar
55 g aged egg whites
1 g lemon-yellow food colouring
2 g pistachio-green food colouring
+
150 g granulated sugar
38 g water
55 g aged egg whites

AVOCADO-LEMON GANACHE
1-2 ripe avocados
25 g lemon juice
Pinch of sea salt
50 g heavy cream
Zest of a quarter lemon
250 g couverture white chocolate, preferably Valrhona

DAY ONE: Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. In the meantime, rinse and dry the lemons. With a sharp knife, trim the ends and cut off the skin from top to bottom in strips, taking a good centimeter of lemon flesh with them. Put the strips in the water, return to a boil, and cook for 2 minutes then drain. Repeat this blanching process two more times with fresh water each time.
Crush the peppercorns. Place them in a medium saucepan along with the water, sugar, lemon juice, and star anise. Split the half vanilla bean in two along its length and scrape the seeds into the pan. Add the empty pod. Bring the mixture to a boil over low heat. Add the lemon strips. Simmer gently on medium-low for about one and a half hours, partially covered. Pour the zests and syrup into a bowl and let cool. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave in the refrigerator until the following day.
DAY TWO: Place the candied lemon in a strainer over a bowl and let drain for about 1 hour. Then cut to a 3mm dice.
Meanwhile, prepare the ganache. Cut the avocados in two and remove their pits. Scoop out the flesh with a spoon and mash. Weigh 150 g of mashed avocado (set aside the remaining for another use) and stir in the lemon juice and salt. Heat the avocado in a small saucepan over a very low flame. Stir continuously until the purée reaches 40-50 degrees C / 104-122 degrees F. Remove from heat.
Unless using féves, give the chocolate a rough chop. Put the chocolate in a heat-proof bowl over a pot of simmering water to melt. Stir occasionally. In a small saucepan, bring the cream to a boil and add the lemon zest. Pour the cream over the chocolate and then begin adding the avocado purée, a little bit at a time. Whisk vigorously to prevent the ganache from breaking. Once the avocado is fully incorporated, pour the ganache into a wide heat-proof dish and cover with plastic wrap, touching it to the surface of the ganache to prevent a skin from forming. Chill in the refrigerator until thick and creamy, 3-4 hours.
Prepare the macaron shells. Sift the ground almonds and powered sugar into a large bowl. Stir together the food colouring and one 55 g portion of egg whites in a small dish. Add these to the almonds and sugar but do not mix them in.
In a small saucepan, bring the granulated sugar and water to a boil. Keep the sides of the saucepan clean to prevent the sugar from re-crystallising by brushing them with a wet pastry brush. When the syrup reaches 110 degrees C / 230 degrees F, begin whipping the second 55 g portion of egg whites using a stand mixer. When the syrup reaches 118 degrees C / 244 degrees F, slowly pour the syrup into the whites, letting the syrup run down the sides of the bowl so that it doesn't splatter. The whites should have barely formed soft peaks at this point. Continue whipping the whites on high speed for one more minute. Reduce the speed of the mixer to medium and continue whipping the whites for about 2 minutes. The whites are ready when they've cooled to 50 degrees C / 122 degrees F. Add the whites to the powdered almond mixture and fold in, running your spatula under the mixture and turning it over onto itself. Continue working the batter in this way until it reaches the right consistency. It will be the right consistency when it falls off the end of the spatula in a thick ribbon and sinks into the batter in the bowl. If the batter holds its shape, it needs to be worked for longer. Batter with this consistency won't produce smooth shells.
Put the macaron batter in a pastry bag fitted with a no. 11 tip. Pipe shells around 3.5 cm in diameter, spaced at least 2 cm apart on a parchment-lined half-sheet (doubled with another half-sheet for insulation). Let the shells stand for 30 minutes, and meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180 degrees C / 356 degrees F. Bake the shells for 12-14 minutes. Let the shells cool for at least 30 minutes before lifting them from the parchment.
Assemble the macarons. Fill a pastry bag fitted with a no. 11 tip with the avocado. Pipe a generous amount of ganache on half of the macaron shells. Add three or four candied lemon cubes to each ganache-topped shell. Sandwich these with the remaining shells. Leave the macarons in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Remove from the refrigerator 2 hours before serving.
Makes about 36 macarons.

That pâte à choux magic

There are the things that you outgrow, and then there are the things you know you never will. The former, for me, include wild hair colours, teenage crushes, the (over)use of twenty-dollar words, and cookies-and-cream anything; the latter, wooly scarves, long road trips made in the right company, French philosophy, and honey crullers.

The cruller has always been my favourite doughnut. I love its delicate egginess, its impossible airiness, the crackly glaze that clings to its winding, golden ridges. It, for me, is doughnut perfection. So, naturally, I was excited to see that it was among the doughnuts featured in this month's Saveur (for those of you haven't seen it yet, it is a veritable doughnut extravaganza). Before this, it hadn't occurred to me to even try making crullers at home. How, after all, would you be able to reproduce those distinctive ridges, that airy structure, in your own kitchen? Saveur had answers. A star piping tip! Pâte à choux! Actually, now that I think about it, it seems kind of obvious. Pâte à choux is the egg-rich pastry dough out of which éclairs, gougères, and gnocchi parisienne are made. You start, typically, with water, butter, sugar, and salt over the stove and add to that flour and then eggs to pull together a pretty soft, unassuming dough. But when that dough hits heat it puffs, airy, golden, ethereal. So, really, it should have come as no surprise that crullers are made out of pâte à choux. They have that same magical quality about them.

So I was all set to make my first crullers until I looked at the ingredients list. Vodka? Instant potato flakes? Now, I'm not one to baulk at an unusual pâte à choux, but I at least want an explanation. The head notes, however, said nothing, and I just wasn't feeling that adventurous. But I still wanted crullers, so I took this as an excuse to get a book I've wanted for some time, Lara Ferroni's Doughnuts.

Leafing through the book, I almost got sidetracked. There are so many doughnuts in it that I'd like to make. Apple-cider doughnuts made with graham flour, picarones, which are Peruvian winter-squash fritters, crème brûlée doughnuts--they all sounded fantastically good. But in the end, the thought of those swirled ridges, that pâte à choux magic, it got to me.
Deep-frying, admittedly, can be intimidating. That oil, after all, gets very, very hot. But common sense, a deep, heavy-bottomed pot, a deep-fry thermometer, and a spider skimmer are all you really need to keep things safe. And besides, making doughnuts is fun, especially with a friend in the kitchen to help out. For these crullers, one of you can pipe rings of pâte à choux onto squares of greased parchment, while the other takes care of the frying. It's pretty straightforward. Really, there isn't much at all  standing between you and a dozen fine and lofty crullers.

And now that I've made these crullers, I'm really curious about the recipe printed in Saveur. Has anyone tried it out? Can anyone tell me what the vodka and potato flakes do?

Honey Crullers

Adapted, ever so slightly, from Lara Ferroni's Doughnuts

Note: About the piping tip. I used an Ateco no. 846, which is actually a closed-star piping tip. The equivalent open-star tip is the Ateco no. 826, but I couldn't find one of these in time. The only difference between the two, as far as I can tell, is that the closed-star tip produces more pronounced ridges in the pastry, which isn't a bad thing at all in this case. About the frying oil. I used canola oil, but I'm not sure that I would again. Though canola is a fine frying oil for some things, it isn't all that neutral, and with these doughnuts at least, its flavour was more noticeable than I'd have liked it to be. Ferroni recommends safflower oil, and I second that. About the parchment squares. If you end up with enough pâte à choux to make more than 12 crullers like I did, you might find yourself short on parchment squares. I reused a few. They were a little crinkly from the hot oil, but that didn't really pose much of a problem for piping.

1 cup water

85 g / 6 tablespoons butter

2 teaspoons sugar

generous 1/4 teaspoon salt

135 g / 1 cup all-purpose flour, sifted

3 large eggs, at room temperature

1-2 large egg whites, at room temperature and slightly beaten

Vegetable oil for frying

Honey glaze (see below)

Place the water, butter, sugar, and salt in a small heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a brisk boil over medium-high heat. Add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon until the flour is completely incorporated. Continue to cook and stir for 3 to 4 minutes to steam away as much water as possible. The more moisture you can remove, the more eggs you can add later and the lighter your pastry will be. The mixture is ready when a thin film coats the bottom of the pan.

Move the mixture to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Although you can mix the pâte à choux by hand, this can be rather arduous, so use a mixer if you have one. Stir the mixture for about 1 minute to allow it to cool. Then mix on medium speed and add the first egg. Let it mix in completely and then scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the remaining eggs, one at a time, and mix in completely. Add the egg whites, a little at a time, until the paste becomes smooth and glossy and will hold a slight peak when pinched with your fingers. Be careful not to add too much egg white or your crullers will become heavy. Transfer the batter to a pastry bag fitted with a 1/2-inch star piping tip.
To fry the crullers, heat at least 2 inches of oil in a heavy-bottomed pot until a deep-fry thermometer registers 370 degrees F. While the oil is heating, cut out twelve 3-inch-by-3-inch squares of parchment paper and lightly grease them. Pipe a generous ring onto each square. When the oil is hot, gently place one cruller at a time in the oil, paper side up. Remove the paper with tongs. Fry on each side until golden brown, 2-3 minutes. (Undercooked crullers will collapse while cooling, so observe the first one, and if this happens, increase your frying time and check the oil temperature for the rest.) Remove with a spider skimmer or slotted spoon and drain on paper towel for at least 1 minute. Leave on a rack to cool. Once cool to the touch, the crullers can be glazed.
Alternatively, you can bake the crullers. They will have slightly firmer crusts than fried ones. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and pipe the crullers onto it, at least 2 inches apart from one another. Bake for 5 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 degrees F and bake for another 15 minutes. Turn off the heat, open the oven door slightly and let the crullers sit in the cooling oven for 5 to 10 minutes. Remove, dip in glaze, and cool on a rack until the glaze has set.
Makes 10-15 doughnuts.

Tips for using a pastry bag. To fill the bag, first fit the bag with the tip and then tuck some of the bag into the wide end of the tip. This will prevent whatever you're filling the bag with from running out the tip as you fill. Second, roll down the sides of the bag a bit so that when you transfer your filling to the bag, it doesn't end up all near the wide opening where your hands will be. You'll just make a mess trying to squeeze its contents towards the tip. If you're working alone, stand the empty bag up in a tall glass to keep it steady as you fill. Regardless, a tall glass can be helpful if you need to put the bag down at any point in the middle of piping. Finally, with the bag filled, twist the wide end of the bag shut and hold it there with one hand (use your other hand to support and guide the bag by holding the bag closer to the tip). With the bag twisted and held this way, you should be able to easily force the filling through the tip.

Honey Glaze
From Lara Ferroni's Doughnuts

150 g / 1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted
1 tablespoon honey
3 to 4 tablespoons milk water

Place the sugar in a medium bowl and slowly stir in the honey and milk, a little at a time, to make a smooth, pourable glaze.

Above all, flakiness

When Octavian and I were in Berlin last summer, we were more or less on two different trips. He was there for a workshop and so was limited most days to a view of the city from a hotel conference room. I, however, was only tagging along and so had the luxury of spending my days wandering the winding streets, drinking in everything. There was a lot to the trip, then, that Octavian only ever saw in photos, heard about. And, unsurprisingly, there were spaces, moments, flavours, that were pretty well impossible to capture or convey, that he would've had to have just been there for.

One of those things was a pastry I had at Brot und Butter, a buttery, delicate swirl of a pastry filled with poppy seeds. I ordered it pretty much at random. It was one of my first days in Berlin, and I had been walking all afternoon, paper map in hand, and had already had a few awkward I'm-sorry-my-German-is-awful-sprechen-Sie-Englisch? moments that day. So by the time I'd found my way to the cafe, I was tired and couldn't quite find the courage to speak up and order something. (I also couldn't figure out whether I was supposed to order from the counter or just take a seat.) So instead I just stood there, looking at the pastries in the cases, then at the rows of canned and boxed goods, indecisive about what to do and on the verge of just fleeing the situation. Apparently, I looked pathetic and stricken enough that about ten minutes in one of the women behind the counter asked me if I needed help. So I fumbled my way through another conversation, pointed at one of the poppy seed pastries, and was relieved just to be able to sit down with something, anything, and not feel so much like the silly North American that I was. It helped that the pastry was good, very good. For a few moments, anyway, I forgot the awkward exchange, lost between flakey, poppy-filled bites.

I knew as I ate that this pastry wasn't one that I'd be content just to remember. I needed to be able to make more just like it at home, long after this trip was over. But given all the awkwardness that had just transpired, I wasn't about to start asking questions about pastry methods and ingredients. So I settled for scribbling down its name from the pastry case--Mohnschnecken--and retreated.

This brings us to this past week, when I finally accepted that I would have to pull together a laminated yeasted dough if I wanted more Mohnschnecken.* Now, just what a Schnecke is seems to depend on who you ask. Some recipes have you add sour cream to the dough, some have you make letter-folds with it for flakier layers, some have you laminate in the butter for even flakier layers still. Most agree that the dough should be rolled up with its filling and cut into spirals--hence the name Schnecke, which just means snail in German. But because I remembered flakiness above all, I decided I would have to make a laminated dough--beat cold butter into a pliable slab, tuck it into a yeasted dough, and letter-fold it for layer upon layer of flakey pastry. But honestly, the prospect of working with a laminated dough again scared me. I'd only done it once before, and as I knew, it could get messy. You need to work quickly, so that the dough and butter don't get too soft to work with. But you also need to be gentle. If there isn't enough flour on the counter and the dough sticks and tears, the butter will start seeping out, and you might not get those perfect flakey layers. (I don't want to overstate the difficulty of working with laminated dough, but it's definitely something that I'm still working to get better at.) So it took me a few days to work up the courage. Then I dove in.

And it wasn't all that bad. I had a bit of trouble towards the beginning getting the butter the right consistency, and there were a few minor tears in the dough, which I tried my best to pinch together and then forget, but that was it. By early the next afternoon, we were tucking into our first pastries, puffed, golden, still warm from the oven, and ever so flakey. Totally, totally, worth the trouble, awkwardness and all.
Oh, and for those of you unfamiliar with poppy seed fillings--well, I just think we ought to see more of them around here. Poppy seeds have a pleasant bittersweet quality to them, which I think lends itself particularly well to pastry. I saw poppy-seed-filled pastries everywhere in Berlin and poppy seed ice cream too. The Berlinners have the right idea.

Much of my success with the Schnecken, I think, owe to the step-by-step photos that Joe, the man behind the pastry recipe, took the trouble to take. You can find his instructions for pulling together the pastry dough here, his instructions for laminating (especially helpful!) here, and his instructions for shaping here. I am actually looking forward to my next encounter with a laminated dough. These particular Schnecken, by the way, are a marriage of two recipes. The poppy seed filling comes from a New York Times recipe for hamantaschen via Smitten Kitchen.

Poppy Seed Snails (Mohnschnecken)

From Joe Pastry and Smitten Kitchen

Note: About freezing. I have to say that in my experience, pastries that have been frozen and then thawed, proofed, and baked are never quite as good as ones baked fresh. They just never have quite the same airy crumb. But these Schnecken held up pretty well. I'm probably just being overly picky in saying that they're not quite, quite as good. About the raisins. The next time I make this poppy seed filling, I might consider giving the raisins a rough chop before adding them in. This filling is about the poppy seeds after all!

1 batch pastry dough, chilled for at least an hour (recipe here)

1 batch poppy seed filling, chilled completely (recipe here)

2 egg yolks lightly beaten with a splash of milk or cream

Roll out the pastry dough into a rectangle (the exact dimensions don't really matter--I'd aim for it to be at least twice as wide as it is long) just shy of a quarter-inch thick, dusting the work surface, the dough, and the rolling pin with flour as necessary. Gently spread the poppy seed filling in a thin, even layer over the dough, leaving a half-inch border at the sides and bottom of the rectangle. (You might not need all the filling.) Starting from the top of the rectangle, roll the dough up into a cylinder about 1-1/2 to 2 inches in diameter. Trim the ends and then cut the dough into 1-1/4 inch pieces with a bench scraper or a sharp knife.

Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, six to a sheet, and cover to proof until soft and airy, about 2 hours. (At this stage--before the final proof--you can also put them in the fridge overnight and then proof them the next day or store them in the freezer for up to three months. Just be sure to thaw frozen pastries overnight in the fridge before proofing and baking. From the fridge, the pastries may need an extra hour to proof.) Then brush with the egg wash and bake in an oven heated to 375 degrees F until golden, about 15 minutes.

Makes about 12 pastries.

*It occurs to me now that the Mohnschnecke I had in Berlin might not have been made with a laminated dough. Looking back at my notes from the trip, my guess is that that pastry was made with a sour cream dough, which made it crisper and less croissant-like. But hey, I'm not going to complain.

Breaths held, fingers crossed

When Octavian and I have friends over for dinner, we tend to be a little bold, a little reckless about it. We tend, that is, to turn to that stack of untried recipes, to those intriguing and unfamiliar methods we've only read about, and just go for it, breaths held, fingers crossed. And for the most part, it's worked out for us. Dinner never gets to the table on time, but luck has been on our side. 

That wasn't the case last Friday. Last Friday, cooking for friends was just disaster after disaster. First, our beloved workhorse of a santoku broke just as we were lining up some vegetables for chopping. Then the instant-read thermometer went berserk. And, of course, we found this out too late and wound up with some miserably overcooked duck. That was pretty disappointing. But the strangest and most spectacular failure of all that night was definitely reserved for dessert.

Christina Tosi's saltine panna cotta was one of the first desserts to be put on the menu at Ko (one of the more upscale outposts of David Chang's Momofuku empire). And sitting atop a layer of crumbly, peanut-brittle-studded nut crunch and a generous puddle of homemade concord grape jelly, this salty-sweet panna cotta should have been grand--a gussied-up version of an after-school-snack favourite. So I don't really know what happened.
It all looked like it might go just fine when I did a test plating early in the afternoon. I had just set the nut crunch in the jelly and was trying to unmold a panna cotta. I dipped the glass in hot water for a few seconds as directed and then inverted it, hoping the panna cotta would just slide out. I gave it a bit of a tap just to be sure. And it did come out--it just wasn't set and so collapsed on the plate into a sad puddle, dripping down the sides of my grape-jelly-nut-crunch stack.  This might not have been so bad--I could have just layered nut crunch and jelly into the remaining glasses--but it turned out this panna cotta was not just puddle-prone but way too salty. So I put some more saltines in the oven to toast and dashed to the store for more cream. I had just enough time to make another batch.

But I wouldn't have bothered had I known what was to come. We discovered this at the table after dinner--though the grape jelly was fine on its own, rather good in fact, together with the panna cotta, it started a volatile chemical reaction in our mouths. It stung on the tongue, in a sort of effervescent way, kind of like Pop Rocks, though not quite as explosive. And maybe this wouldn't even have been so bad--the reaction, admittedly, was kind of cool--but the effervescence made it impossible to taste the concord grapes, and peanut butter and saltines just aren't quite the same without grape jelly.

So I'm not quite sure what to say about last Friday--except that I wish things had gone better, at least for our friends' sake. I guess this sort of thing was just bound to happen with that bit of boldness, that bit of recklessness in our kitchen. I just never expected so much to go so wrong all at once. But even with Friday's disasters still smarting, I think I can say that it's unlikely that we'll change the way we cook for our friends any time soon. We'll admit it--we kind of like bold and reckless.

P.S. If anyone has any insight into what could have happened with the grape jelly, I'd appreciate it. Fellow food geeks, I'm looking at you.

Technical Notes for Milk Bar's Saltine Panna Cotta

For the first time cooking from this book, I found that I was hitting snags and inaccuracies all along the way. It was more than a little disappointing.

• Concord grape juice: the juice calls for 675 g or two quarts of grapes. I portioned out my grapes by weight, even though 675 g was far less than the two quarts called for. Subsequently,  I ended up with far less juice than expected.
• Concord grape jelly: it may just be that I didn't cook the jelly for quite long enough after it came to a boil, but for whatever reason, it was a little gritty, as though the pectin NH or the sugar hadn't quite dissolved in cooking.
• Nut crunch: this was by all counts delicious, though mine looked quite a bit drier than it is pictured in the book.
• Saltine panna cotta: Tosi recommends the use of silicone moulds, and having tried and failed with glasses and ramekins, I second that. These panna cotta will barely set and call for a light hand. Also, the recipe calls for 12 g or 1 tablespoon of salt, which I think has to be a mistake. My first batch of panna cotta was inedible. With only a 1/2 teaspoon of salt, the second batch was much better.
• Pop Rocks grape jelly: like I said in the post - grape jelly + panna cotta + tongue = Pop Rocks (sort of)! I don't have the food science background to explain what could have happened.