Bonjour, Pate A Choux

The other day I was thinking what could I do for a topic, and I'm thinking 'What could I make that's going to be in line with trying things for the bakery?' and it hits me.  Eclairs.  Lately I've seen a number of people lamenting the lack of gluten free options in the area and so I think I can take it a step further and try gluten free eclairs.  Because, why not?  Of course, making eclairs and the like is intimidating to me.  I see a lot of people say how easy it is, but I've actually seen them made successfully.

Anyways, the thing I love about eclairs, and profiteroles, is the number of variations you can do...but so rarely see.  I mean, who wouldn't love a banana split eclair with a banana cream and garnished with chopped walnuts, whipped cream and a cherry?  I'm going off on a tangent, so focus, Eric.

Pate a choux is the name of the parent dough that is used to make eclairs, profiteroles and croquembouche (Note to self, try that sometime).  The dough is partially cooked in a pan, when the flour is added to the liquid ingredients and then later mixed with eggs.  The end result is an emulsion basically, a very "wet" dough that uses the moisture as a leavening agent.  When the dough is initially baked at a high temperature, the water turns to steam and puffs up the dough which is then set, the temperature is then lowered to dry out the dough.

 Pate a choux is a pretty simple dough to make, only requiring 6 ingredients.

Back to work...

So, after a brief hiatus due to work, events and some orders, I've finally got some time to get back to posting.  This week's posting hails back to one of my original goals, to blog while trying to find recipes for bakery items.

I figured I'd resume with a rather important item, the brownie.  I think these are one of those hard things because everyone has a different expectation for a brownie.  I personally like a fudgier brownie and in the past I had made the recipe Ina Garten has in one of her books.  I remember it being really good...very rich, chocolately and fudge like.  I did a quick search for recipes though, just to see if anything else caught my eye and nothing really stood out.

Now going into this recipe, she calls for a lot of coffee.  Ina is a big proponent of using coffee to enhance chocolate.  Normally I am in agreement with this, but the amount in this recipe almost overwhelms rather than compliment.  So, I used only a third of the amount.  I also decided to add in some blackstrap molasses, just to add in a bit of a deep caramel undertone.  I also changed up the chocolate amounts slightly, mostly because I didn't want to buy 10 ounces of chocolate just cause I needed 2 ounces.

It's also worth noting that these brownies are insanely rich, I wanted to eat more, but I couldn't do it.  It was just too much.  So, in the future I will look to find a way to tweak this recipe to cut through some of that richness.

But let's get to baking...

Snow storm prepping

While everyone is out swarming grocery stores and doing their best doomsday prep impression for the impending Snowmageddon '14, I figured I'd get in the spirit of it too.   However, rather than buy enough toilet paper, water and batteries to last for a year,  I'd spend my time baking something that would make the snow more bearable.  Before I talk about what that is, let me preface it with this:

Few years ago I got the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook and fell in love with it.  The imagination and innovation that Christina Tosi shows in that book gives me something to aspire to.  I mean to come up with the apple pie cake that contains all aspects of an apple pie, but in cake form...  What the what?  I spent days trying out different recipes for cookies, pies, cakes and so on  (and the cornflake cookie, compost cookie and banana cream pie are among my favorites so make those sometime).  One of the more interesting things that I have fallen in love with is what they call a volcano.  It's wonderfully seasoned scalloped potatoes and caramelized onions wrapped up in bread dough that is topped off with cheese and baked.  It's like being hugged by grandma.

So, that's how I am going to prep for this end of the world snowstorm...with volcanoes.

Going nuts for doughnuts

Sure, St. Louis is known for things like gooey butter cakes, fried ravioli, and so on, but to me there will always be something else that stands out.  Granted you can find it anywhere pretty much, but it's home to me and was part of my childhood.  My grandmother would visit two of the local bakeries and get different things, bread, coffee cake, but the one that we all wanted was the sugar doughnut holes.  Little, simple, but so good.

When I realized I wanted a bakery, I knew I had to have doughnuts in some form.  Well, not any form.  Honestly, I wanted what I grew up with.  But, like many others, I thought it'd be more work than it's worth, and you have to deal with hot oil and frying them.  It'd be much easier to just do a baked doughnut.  It's not the same though.

I went online and looked up recipes and found some that had pretty good reviews and that gave me a place to start with.  I made my first batch, and it was great and the people I shared them with loved them as well.

So, I was sitting here earlier today thinking about what I could do for a topic and I was like "Duh, doughnuts."  and here we go...

From Paris with Love...and Hate

I have sort of developed a love hate relationship with a particular cookie.  I love the concept of it, as it can be changed to any number of flavor or flavor combinations, and it's honestly not hard to make.  However, it's finicky and weather plays a great role on how it turns out, creating the hate portion of our relationship.  So what particular cookie is this?  The french macaron, not to be confused with the macaroon, the almond and meringue based sandwich cookie.  There's a couple of different recipes out there for how to make the maracon cookie itself, some are as simple as whipping up the egg whites, and folding it into ground up almonds and powdered sugar.  While others have extra steps such as making an italian meringue (making a hot syrup and pouring it into mostly whipped egg whites) - this is the approach I've started using.

An italian meringue produces a more stable meringue due to the fact that extremely hot sugar syrup is poured into the egg whites.  This cooks the proteins resulting in whites that are more resistant to deflating, which works wonderfully for the case of macarons.

So, back to the macarons.  One of the things I love about these, and it plays so wonderfully with my personality, is that there is a myriad of flavor combinations you can do with them.  In the past I've done mexican hot chocolate, peppermint, orange cream, roasted pineapple, coconut lime and many others.  I've seen people do flavors like hibiscus and PB & J to name a few.  So pretty much anything works.

Of course, just don't make them on a humid day.  Meringues don't really work on humid days, and I've yet to have great success making macarons on humid days.   There's a few ways to combat this, which I'll try down the road, but for now...

Two for One Deal on Nolstagia

I'm originally from St. Louis, and in the world of food St. Louis is known for two things:  fried ravioli and gooey butter cakes.  Since this is a baking blog, ravioli doesn't really fit...but you should make it sometime, it is really good.  I want to talk about the other thing, which you probably haven't heard of in reality, the gooey butter cake.

Legend has it that this cake came by of accident in a 1930's bakery, where a new baker used the wrong type of butter smear.  There's two types of smears in this story, a deep butter smear and a gooey butter smear.  The later is used as an adhesive to make things like crumbs, nuts, ect stick to unbaked pastries and cakes.  This new baker was hired to make deep butter cakes, which use the deep butter smear, but the baker got them mixed up and used the gooey butter smear instead.  The mistake was eventually caught, but it was too late to do anything about it.  Rather than throw them away, the cakes were baked off and sold.  The cakes sold so well, they were kept and became a St. Louis favorite.

Of course there's several different versions of gooey butter cakes.  Paula Deen's very fond of them and her recipes, like a number of others out there, use a box of cake mix.  To me though, the authentic recipe uses a yeast dough as the base, so that's the recipe I'm using.  And since we're also talking about deep butter cakes...why not make one of those too?

It's worth noting that both of these cakes are actually considered coffee cakes.

Adventures in gluten free baking

I had originally intended for a different subject for this post, but it changed at the last moment due to a sudden idea that trying gluten free bread would be fun.  Of course I've never made gluten free bread.

Truth be told, up til about 4 months ago I would scoff at the idea of gluten free and refuse to do any sort of gluten free baking.  I will admit there were a couple of different reasons for that, from things like dealing with elitist health nuts to my sister's brief stint with being gluten free and sending me bizarre recipes and condemning me to a life of diabetes because I wouldn't give up gluten.

Anyways, obviously my views have changed since then and now I like to take recipes and try out gluten free versions of them.  I've had tremendous success with it, and for some things if people weren't told about it they would never know they were eating a gluten free cupcake for example.

On a related note.  I get asked what I use for baking, and currently it's Pamela's Artisan Flour Blend.  It's a mixture of rice flours, sorghum flour, potato starch and a few other things.  It's pretty bland tasting, unlike other mixes which contain things like garbanzo flour (which makes things taste like peas), so whatever  you make ends up tasting like what's expected.

So, back to the bread....