Well, he couldn't stay on vacation forever. My comeuppance was inevitable. Here is what a true Sacher torte aficionado (and home baker) has to say about what went on here last week.

* The combination of those three components (flour, meringue and "mayonaise") for Sacher Torte batter is the foundation of all good Viennese cake-baking. Every traditional recipe is based on that method, since we try to avoid baking powder, which is considered an unnatural, chemical leavener that skilled cake bakers don't use. And by skilled bakers I mean those folks who uphold the standards of traditional artisan baking.

* As for the chocolate glaze... hmmm...your recipe sounds far too sweet for me. Too much sugar. A simple melted chocolate coating with a little butter is what I use. (By the way: Sacher uses a particular blend of three different chocolates for their glaze...it's a very big secret!).

* Sacher vs. Demel.... please!!!! Demel is a tourist thing. No self-respecting Viennese person would ever go there. A totally unreal place. As for that thing they call "Sacher Torte" there, I won't even discuss it. Let the tourists have it.

* Concerning couverture. Funny, couverture over here is cheap chocolate for baking. The stuff that's not good enough for eating. It's really cheap in supermarkets.

* Lightly sweetened whipped cream with the Sacher Torte? HORRORS! A total no-go. Unsweetened cream is an absolute must, as you want to balance the sweetness of the apricot jam/chocolate combination. Oh god, sweetened cream with a Sacher Torte is as nightmarish as hot Apfelstrudel with ice-cream or [heavy] cream poured all over it. Tourist-food is what that is...nothing less than an abomination.

* Is Sacher Torte dry? Sure it is, since it is always accompanied by a cup of coffee and some whipped cream. That's the art: make it soft yet dry to create a balance with the coffee and the UNSWEETENED whipped cream. Pure joy. Here again I'll remind you that a moist, gooey cake like the American brownie is considered a major baking failure by Viennese standards. Fit only for the trash can!

That'll fix my britches. Actually some pretty valuable information here. Thanks Gerhard! I'll put this up in the permanent Sacher torte tutorial for the future edification of Joe Pastry readers. Also so that future generations can see exactly where I went wrong.

Martha writes in from Amsterdam:

Someone very nice brought a Demel chocolate Torte from Vienna for our Christmas dinner in Amsterdam. It came daintily packed in a signed wooden box.

I had never tasted a "real" one before, and it was very nice and not really dry or dryish, although we did have whipped cream with it. They (Demel) must use quite good chocolate, because the taste was deep and pure.

The chocolate glaze on top was not thick! The apricot glaze was only under the coating and not halfway through.

I have been baking "Sacher tortes" for years, (with the very personal secret of a few bitter almonds added.) and I will try your recipe!

Thanks Martha! Good luck with the recipe and tell me how it compares!

I was hoping to get one other small project in before the end of the year, but between my work obligations and my Santa obligations, it just isn't going to happen. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah — see you in 2010!

Yes, yes Gerhard, I know: Sacher-style torte. No one outside the Sacher and/or Demel enterprises knows the actual recipe. However I believe this formula to be quite close. It's certainly close to what I remember. In fact in some ways I think this is closer to what I ate in Vienna twenty five years ago than the most current photographs I've seen of "original" Sacher torte, for indeed lately it appears to me that the layer of chocolate on the exterior of the official tortes has gotten quite, quite thick. Is it my imagination? It could well be. I like a thinner glaze, however below I'll tell you how to make a thick one if you wish.

Start by preparing your springform pan (directions under How to Prepare a Pan for Baking in the Techniques menu), then melting the chocolate for your batter. Allow the chocolate to cool while you get everything else ready.

As I mentioned previously, a Sacher torte batter is a combination of three components: sifted flour, meringue and a chocolate "mayonnaise" which we shall now prepare. Put your butter and 1/4 cup of the sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle:

Beat until creamy and light in color...

...then switch to the whip. Add the room-temperature egg yolks one by one, then finally the whole egg. The mixture may look a little rough — not totally smooth — that's OK. Scrape the sides down.

Start drizzling in the melted chocolate. Ooops...that's more than a drizzle. No matter.

It'll still whip up just fine. Scrape the sides of the bowl and whip a bit more to make sure everything is incorporated. Set this mixture aside in a large bowl and wash and dry the mixer bowl and whip.

Wash and dry the implements thoroughly, because the next step will be whipping up your egg whites and you don't want any residual fat left in there. Place your room-temperature egg whites in the bowl and begin whipping.

You'll want them voluminous — around about the soft peak stage — before you start adding in the rest of your sugar.

Slowly pour the sugar in with the machine running. Whip about 30 seconds or so until you have a nice, glossy meringue.

With the three base components prepared, it's time to start folding. The idea is to alternate the meringue and sifted flour until everything is incorporated. Start by adding about a third of the meringue and fold until just a few streaks remain.

Sprinkle on a few spoonfuls of the flour and keep going.

As you get closer to using up all your ingredients, you'll notice the mixture becoming thicker and more batter-like. Fold until just a few small streaks remain.

Pour into your prepared pan and insert on the bottom shelf of a 300 oven. Prop the door open slightly by inserting the handle of a wooden spoon in the door. This will help ensure that the top doesn't "dome" too much in the oven. Bake for 15 minutes, then remove the spoon and bake about 45 minutes more, until the middle feels springy to the touch. Cool on a wire rack. At this point the cake cake sit in the pan — uncovered — overnight if you wish.

Of course it will dome somewhat. That dome will collapse a bit as the finished cake cools. It'll look about like this.

That's an unsightly top for a refined torte. The good news is it can be easily trimmed off. Remove the ring of the springform pan and break out your best serrated knife. (Save those scraps for your upcoming coffee break).

While you're cutting, carefully slice the cake in two horizontally (this is where you'll put the apricot filling shortly).

Now to get the cake ready for assembly. Place a sheet of parchment on top of the cake and flip the whole works over, pan bottom and all.

Remove the pan bottom and the parchment liner.

Place a 9" cardboard cake round (waxed side down) on the layers.

Flip the stack over again onto a sheet pan fitted with a wire rack. Take off the top layer and slather on some of your warmed, puréed apricot preserves.

Replace the top layer and enrobe the whole thing in preserves. And then it's coffee break time. Linger over your cake scraps and a nice hot cup for at least half an hour. If you wish, you can let the torte sit in the fridge, uncovered, for a day or more before applying the chocolate glaze.

To make the glaze put the sugar and water in a small saucepan, preferably taller than it is wide. You don't want too much evaporation while you "cook" your chocolate glaze, lest the chocolate solids start to burn.

When the sugar syrup starts to boil, pour in your chopped chocolate and stir until melted. Heat the whole mixture to 234 degrees Fahrenheit. What's being made here is a sort of chocolate candy.

When the target temperature is reached, remove the pan from the heat and let it cool down. This will take some time. Mine took half an hour just to get to 170. You'll want to stir it a touch every now and again to keep a skin from forming, but not too much.

Because of all the sugar, the syrup will start to thicken quit a bit at around the 150 point. You can pour it sooner or later according to your taste — a thicker texture will translate to a thicker coating. What you don't want it is a texture that's so thick you have to spread it with a spatula. That will ruin the even coating. So if you find it getting too thick, it's not against the rules to apply a little more heat to loosen it up.

When ready, just pour the glaze on, directing it a little bit this way and that with your spatula. I know what you're thinking: won't that warm glaze just melt the apricot jam right off? The answer is no, it'll go on like molten lava, and while the jam will soften, it won't have time to run.

When you're done pouring, there will be some glaze left in the pan, but don't scrape it off. It'll be partly solidified and will make your coating lumpy-looking. Let the torte sit on the wire rack for about 15-20 minutes to firm up, then gently pry it up with a spatula. Supporting the torte on the palm of your hand, trim off the excess glaze and place it on the platter of your choice. Let sit for a minimum of four hours before slicing and serving, preferably overnight.

Serve with a generous spoonful of — of course — lightly sweetened whipped cream.

In the event anyone out there is considering paying me big bucks for an endorsement — I'm all ears!

No, Rob P., I'm not being paid by Java Juice. I just like it. When I endorse something for profit, I promise I'll tell you.

One of the chief complaints Viennese bakers have about American Sacher tortes (and believe me, they have a lot of them) is that they lack the bitter tang of their Viennese cousins. This they usually attribute to the chocolate, since we here in America tend to prefer mellower-tasting chocolates than folks on the continent, or so it's said. I'm not sure that's true anymore, since everywhere you look now there are 60%, 70% and 80% bars and confections. You can eat yourself into cacao oblivion sampling chocolate at fancy food trade shows these days...which I can tell you from personal experience isn't nearly as much fun as it sounds.

One way to get that extra bit of Euro bitterness into your Sacher torte (or any chocolate preparation, really), is coffee. Coffee is a very close relative of chocolate, flavor-wise, and a little of it can give you that bit of astringency that Europeans tend to favor. The trick is to only add a little, but make sure it's strong. I have a can of espresso that I keep around for that purpose (mostly for flourless chocoalte cakes) so I can mix up a bit of concentrated brew if need be. Though I have to admit that not being a coffee (or espresso) drinker, it tends to lose its punch after a few weeks. A nice alternative that I discovered a couple of years ago are these little packets of Java Juice. They keep forever in the pantry and have far more coffee flavor than the typical "extracts" you find in stores.

But whichever route you decide to go, espresso or extract, all you need to do is sneak a tablespoon or so into your batter, and/or into your glaze mixture before you start heating it. It's not traditional of course, but since when has that ever stopped me?

Reader Peter T. wrote in overnight with the observation that most of the Sacher torte recipes he's seen call for couverture chocolate, but the one I put up doesn't. What's the deal with that? he asks. It's a good question, and he is quite correct, most of the better Sacher torte formulas do indeed call for couverture chocolate. But what is "couverture" chocolate and why would it make a difference?

Couverture, also called "confectioner's chocolate", is a special chocolate formulation made specifically for coating things (in fact couverture means "covering" in French). It's very high quality and expensive stuff, and can run you $25 a pound or more for the really god stuff. There are three things that I can think of that have historically made couverture different from standard eating chocolate. First, it's usually made from the very best cacao beans. Second, the chocolate solids from those beans are ground much finer than normal. Third, those solids are blended with more cocoa butter in the final formulation. Up to 40% of a bar of couverture chocolate is cocoa butter.

Add all that up and what you have is a chocolate that melts quicker, spreads easier, coats more thoroughly and lays on thinner. All those fat crystals also create a glossier sheen, especially when the chocolate is tempered properly. From an eating perspective a couverture chocolate is creamier (because of all the extra fat), smoother (because of the finer grind) and less sweet (because all the extra fat leaves less room in the formulation for sugar). When tempered, it also has a more brittle "snap."

So why not use it in the Sacher torte recipe? First, because couverture isn't easy to find. You can usually only find it at candy making supply stores or restaurant supply companies. Second, because it's expensive. Third — and this is just my opinion — I don't think couverture is the singular, essential product that it once was. Even a decade ago, there was far less choice when it came to buying chocolate in stores. Now even people living in smaller cities have no problem finding many kinds of very high quality chocolates, many of which make excellent coatings. A nice semi-sweet Valrhona, Callebaut or El Rey will usually do the job handily.

Will it create the precise same effect as a bonafide couverture? Maybe not, but as I've often argued before, obsession with details is the enemy of a pleasurable home baking experience. For us non-professionals, the idea is to have fun. So your torte isn't exactly what they serve at the Sacher Hotel — so what? It's not like the Sacher Hotel pastry chef is coming to your house for dinner. At least I don't think he is. If he is, you're screwed.

UPDATE: Jenni over at Pastry Methods and Techniques adds:

I just read your piece about couverture, and I have to agree with you. Unless the chocolate needs to be tempered, there's no reason to spend the big bucks for couverture. In all of his recipes for home use, Marcel Desaulniers (whom I love) recommends Baker's squares! Go, Marcel:)

Reader Natasha writes:

I just had to mention to you how amusing I find it that one can order an "original" Sacher torte directly from the Sacher Hotel in Vienna, from just about anywhere in the world! And the confection is quite refined and elegant as well. It comes in a nice hand made wooden box.

True enough. You can get a Sacher torte shipped by mail just about anywhere in the world these days. They come not from the hotel, but from one of two central commissaries in Vienna and Salzburg that do nothing but make Sacher tortes 24 hours a day. Sacher tortes can also be had at a few Sacher shops that have been put up in various locations in Austria. There's also one in Italy.

Surprising as this might seem, it should be noted that mail order tortes have been big business for more than a hundred years, and not just in Vienna. Pastry master Jozsef Dobos, it's said, created his famous Dobos torte specifically for that purpose. He even designed a special box that would keep his tortes fresh until they reached their destination. That was in the 1880's. Just more evidence that there's nothing new under the sun. Except iPhones. Those things are amazingly cool.

One thing that I tend not to like about those big, professional pastry manuals is how formulaic they are. To make product 1, combine components A and B. To make product 2, combine components B and C. To make product 3, combine components A, B and C...and so on. It's not that the people who write them aren't creative, they're simply being expedient. The vast majority of people who make desserts for a living don't work in boutique bake shops. They work in production kitchens or hotels and simply need to produce. If you can make a reasonable tiramsu by combining components that you already have on hand, that's going to be good enough for most people. An operation that has to retool its processes for every item it produces won't be in business for very long, because streamlined operations are the key to profitability. That's true for even the very best restaurants.

Still, some things are worth putting in the extra time and trouble. I don't think it's possible to make a good Sacher torte by using either conventional components or employing conventional mixing techniques. True, it's easier to make a Sacher torte if you do what a lot of bakers do, simply make a standard génoise sponge cake using 25% cocoa powder, but that to me seems like a cop out (it also makes a dryer-than-average torte that requires quite a bit of cake syrup). The best Sacher torte recipes I know are strikingly unconventional from a mixing standpoint, almost inexplicable. Yet their peculiar alchemy usually yields a glittering result.

Look over the recipe below and you won't find even a vestige of the "Big Five" mixing methods. What you'll find instead is a strange combination of three base components: sifted flour, meringue and another concoction that can best be described as a chocolate mayonnaise. I prefer the muscle of a stand mixer when it comes to preparing the second two items on that list. However the last crucial step — the careful folding of the three of them together — requires the ginger touch of the hand. For those of you who aren't totally sure what folding is all about, I have a tutorial on the subject under the Techniques menu to the right. Have a look-see and prepare thyself for a mixing adventure!

A good Sacher torte, I admit, can be a bit of a beast to mix. I can't do much to simplify that. However you'll be relieved to know that I've simplified the assembly somewhat with a streamlined cook-and-pour glaze, which should help. Is it completely authentic? Maybe not, but the end result is excellent.

For the sponge cake:

5 ½ ounces bittersweet chocolate
5 ½ ounces butter
7 ounces (1 cup) sugar
2 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
5 ounces (9) egg yolks
1 ¾ ounces (1) whole egg
7 ounces (7) egg whites
5 ½ ounces cake flour, sifted
apricot jam, processed until smooth in a food processor

For the glaze:

7 ounces sugar
3 ounces water
6.5 ounces bittersweet chocolate

For the sponge cake:

Prepare a 10-inch springform pan by lining it with parchment paper and spraying with cooking spray (see How to Prepare a Cake Pan for Baking under the Techniques menu). Preheat the oven to 325 and position a rack on the lowest shelf. Next, melt the chocolate in the microwave by zapping it with 5-6 10-second bursts (stirring in between). Let cool until just warm but still flowing.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle, beat the butter with ¼ cup of the sugar on medium-high until light in color. Switch to the whip and add the egg yolks one at a time, scraping the bowl every now and again. Add the whole egg and whip until incorporated. With the machine on low, add the chocolate in a stream. Beat on medium-high until the mixture resembles chocolate buttercream.

Transfer the chocolate mixture to a large bowl, then wash and dry the mixer bowl. Affix the whip and whip the egg whites until foamy, not quite to soft peaks. Then, with the machine running, add in the sugar. Beat to soft peaks, the meringue will be sleek and glossy.

Gently fold 1/3 of the meringue into the chocolate mixture until almost incorporated. Sprinkle on several spoonfuls of the flour and fold some more, alternating with more meringue until both are completely incorporated. Pour the batter into your prepared pan.

Put the pan into the oven and prop the door open with a wooden spoon for 15 minutes (this will help the top rise evenly). Remove the spoon and close the oven door. Bake for 35-45 minutes more, until the top springs back when patted gently. Remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack in the pan. The cake will keep at room temperature overnight, uncovered, if you’d like.

When ready to assemble the torte, slice the cake horizontally into two layers. Spread the bottom layer with jam and replace the top layer (if it’s too thick to spread, heat it on the stove or in a microwave until to flows easily). Cover the entire torte with a thin layer of jam. Let sit until the jam has firmed, about half an hour.

Meanwhile, prepare the glaze.

In a heavy-bottomed 1-to-2-quart saucepan (any larger and there’ll be too much evaporation) bring the sugar and water to the boil. Add the chocolate and boil over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until the glaze reaches 234°F. Remove the glaze from the heat and allow it to cool, again, stirring occasionally. Let the glaze cool to below 150 before using it. The temperature isn’t terribly important so long as the glaze is warm and flowing when you use it. This will take up to half an hour.

Place the torte on a wire rack and pour the glaze over, evening out bald patches with an icing spatula. Allow to cool for about 15 minutes, then transfer to a serving platter. Allow to set up for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. Torte will keep up to five days.

Slice the torte with a sharp knife dipped in hot water. Serve with a generous dollop of lightly sweetened whipped cream.

So what are some of the ways in which pastry chefs have attempted to "improve" Sacher torte? Firstly, by adding more apricot jam. A Sacher Hotel-style Sacher torte has one layer of filling in the middle. Demel's modification is a full glazing of jam over the entire exterior. Most of the Sacher torte recipes you see in print call for both. Some bake shops have taken the more-is-better philosophy a step further by making the Sacher a 3-layer affair and inserting another layer of jam under the hood (as it were). This is considered an abomination by many. Yet it's tame compared to what is widely thought to be the ultimate Sacher torte desecration: cake syrup. Cake syrup is employed to add moisture and flavor to all sorts of cakes and pastries. The types that are most often painted onto the layers of a Sacher tortes tend to be heavy on citrus flavors like orange, as well as spices like cinnamon and clove. They add a great deal of sweetness, moisture and complexity. Yet they also take away what many consider to be a Sacher torte's authenticity, and as much as I dislike the word "authenticity" when it's applied to foods, I confess I'm inclined to agree.

The complaint that pastry lovers most often levy again Sacher torte is that it's dry. You hear that a lot from people returning from trips to Vienna: I went to the Sacher hotel and ordered Sacher torte and I was so disappointed...it was so dry. Is that true? No and yes. Defenders of Sacher torte maintain that it's only dry in comparison to the hyper-rich, hyper-moist pieces of confectionary that pass for pastry in the modern world, especially here in America. I think there's great merit to that argument. However if Sacher torte isn't a little bit dry, why is it tradition that it must always — always — be served with a good-sized dollop of whipped cream on the side? For what is whipped cream for other than to enrich and lubricate? The dryness contingent has a point.

Personally, I prefer to think of Sacher torte as "firm", for it is certainly that. Some have argued that the firmness was intentional on Franz Sacher's part, meant as a tribute to Metternich's masculinity and dominating will. That idea emits the distinct odor of rationalization to me.

So what gives Sacher torte its uniquely firm texture? The answer is: foam. The cake that forms the basis of Sacher torte is sponge cake, and sponge cakes are leavened with egg white foams. The trouble with egg white foams is that they are mostly air. Apply heat to them and they tend to dry out. That's why a good Sacher torte recipe has plenty of egg yolk and/or butter in there. The fat helps keep the cake supple and moist. Yet there's a limit to how much fat you can add to a sponge cake before it gets so heavy the foam can't lift it. Sacher torte batter has about as much fat as you can reasonably put into a foam-leavened layer of cake and still have it rise.

That hasn't been good enough for more than a few pastry chefs over the years, which is why many have sought to "improve" it with various additions and/or modifications. None of them are considered "authentic" by Viennese purists, of course. A real Sacher torte adheres strictly, absolutely to the original recipe (though it's technically still a Sacher hotel and/or Demel's secret). Everything else is a "Sacher-style" torte, as my friend Gerhard is very quick to remind me.

That's an excellent question (thanks, Christine G.), since the various distinctions between cakes, layer cakes, tortes and gâteaux are rarely discussed in the popular food press, or dare I say, even in most pastry departments. Most people simply assume that they're just different words that different cultures use for the same things, which isn't the case. The distinctions between them are often fine, but they are real and worth noting. Not having an authoritative guide to this topic at my disposal, I'll do my best to provide descriptions.

Classically, cakes are single-layered affairs. Usually round and almost always flat, their primary ingredient is most often some sort of grain flour (wheat, oats, barley or the like). They can be sweetened (with sugar or honey), enriched (with eggs and/or butter) or leavened (with yeast or chemicals).

Layer cakes are the same thing as cakes, only stacked on top of one another, then filled and iced. Compared to cakes, which are a mostly Old World thing, layer cakes are a mostly New World thing. They're almost always leavened with chemical agents.

Gâteaux have more in common with pastries than they do cakes, since they're composed of layers. Their foundation is usually egg foam-and-flour sponge cake, sometimes supplemented with ground nuts. The layers of filling in a gâteau — creams, jams, fruits or mousses — are usually quite thick, sometimes thicker than the baked layers that support them.

Tortes are similar to gâteaux in that they typically rely on a sponge of some sort for support. The difference, in my experience anyway, is that they tend not to be as tall or as amply filled as gâteaux, and their batters tend to have a higher proportion of ground nuts (Sacher torte is a notable exception). They can be either single-layer or multi-layer.

There. Not exactly academic, but at least I've stuck my flag in the dirt. All those who care to add to this or comment, please do.

How many Sacher Tortes does the Sacher Hotel sell each year? Through the Sacher hotel, the various Sacher shops and via their online store, some quarter million "original" Sacher tortes are sold each year.

Other than its flavor, texture, and historical and cultural pedigree, Sacher torte is notable in that it is the only pastry ever to be the subject of a nearly decade-long lawsuit. It seems that Franz, the son of Eduard the Inept Innkeeper (grandson of Franz Sacher, the inventor of Sacher torte) was himself a bit of a bungler, at least as far as intellectual property rights were concerned. For some reason, around the year 1955 — and this where the story gets murky — Vienna's most famous pastry shop, Demel's, acquired the top secret recipe. Just how Demel's got it, whether they bought it from Franz Jr., whether he gave it to them, had it stolen or lost it in a lightning round of strip poker isn't clear. What is clear is that for whatever legitimate or semi-legitimate reason, Demel's began making and selling Sacher Torte.

This cut into profits at the Sacher hotel. But more than that, it deprived them of bragging rights to the One True Torte. And so, over the course of the next many years, the high courts of Vienna were consumed with the knotty problem of what constituted a "true" Sacher Torte. In the end the courts ruled in favor of the Sacher Hotel, granting them the exclusive rights to call their torte the "Original" Sacher Torte, while Demel's had to settle for ignominious title of "Genuine". Broken and dispirited, the Demel's crew trapsed back to their bake shop and proceeded to make millions off their torte just the same.

The defeat was also a bit of a blessing in disguise as it freed Demel's up to make Sacher Torte the "right" way — or so they say — by putting their apricot jam on top of the cake layers instead of in the middle, which any idiot can see is the only proper way to do it. I mean really.

Other than the man for whom the first Sacher torte was made you mean? He was the most powerful statesman of his time, the so-called "arbiter of Europe" who oversaw the joint effort to redraw the map after the 25 years of turmoil that began with the French Revolution in 1789 and finished with the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. That joint effort was known as the Congress of Vienna (held in you-know-where) and it brought together the four main powers that were allied against Napoleon: Austria, Russia, Prussia and Great Britain.

Contrary to what you might think, the Congress wasn't really about punishing the French, even though Napoleon had pretty much managed to obliterate Europe trying to put all his crazy utopian ideas into practice. Rather the idea was to punish France just enough (and by extension reward the allies just enough) to balance the big five powers so they couldn't make war on each other. By that yardstick the Congress of Vienna was a smashing success, since nobody fought anyone else with any great intensity for 40 years.

From the point of view of social reformers, however, it was something of a setback, since from then on the governments of Europe were in no mood for anybody's big revolutionary ideas. Having harnessed the power of national conscription and industrial weapons production, Napoleon had managed to marshal armies of a size the world had never seen before. The destruction and upheaval were unprecedented. And then there were the revolutionaries, who'd tried to re-name the days of the week and the months of the year, for goodness sakes! No more. The message from on high was: enough monkey business, the grownups are back in charge. Old aristocratic families were returned to power. Social order, religion and adherence to tradition were the new ethos. It was called the Conservative Order and it prevailed in Europe until the masses rose again in 1848, but that's another story.

Metternich was the prime mover behind all of this, which meant he was no small-potatoes Austrian prince. He was the post-Napoleonic era's most powerful man. So if you're wondering how a simple chocolate sponge cake with apricot filling ever got such incredible name recognition, you might start there.

Reader Laura G. writes:

This weekend I was taken out for a VERY nice dinner in a super fancy and famous restaurant in the SF area. The pastry chef sent out macaron as an off-the-menu treat, as some chefs are wont to do. I found myself wondering, "does Chef ____ read Joe Pastry?" Further bonus points because I was able to speak intelligently (or so I thought after so much wine) about macarons and "feet".

Many of you surely laughed when I talked about the social benefits of being among the macaron "feet" cognoscenti. But who's laughing now, eh? All this trivial knowledge will serve you well one (drunken) day, mark my words!

Yesterday I wrote this about coconut fat:

Easy to extract, abundant, cheap, and above all solid at room temperature (a very rare thing for a plant fat), it was the perfect alternative to butter. Except that one day some food scientist somewhere realized that it was rather a bad thing as a regular part of the human diet. Amazingly high in saturated fat, it's artery-clogging potential exceeds that of even the most unhealthful animal fats.

It was the kind of breezy, blanket statement that's a mainstay of mainstream food journalism, something I'd have jumped all over a Times writer for. Imagine my embarrassment at having been called on it by my very own readers. Chef Tim has this to say:

There's a misconception that coconut oil is not good for your health. Contrary to the hydrogenated coconut oil which you described Joe, "virgin" coconut oil, seems to have quite a few health benefits as well as making your kitchen smell like a tropical day at the beach. It has a very low flash point, which you have to be aware of but the flavor takes my Indian, Carribean and vegetarian recipes over the top. True, coconut oil does contain high amounts of saturated fats, however, research indicates its such that it doesn't raise LDL levels. Additionally, coconut oil seems to have some heart-healthy benefits. It contains nearly 50% lauric acid, which aids in preventing a variety of heart ailments as well as reducing high cholesterol and high blood pressure. I used some last nite to gently saute some shredded cabbage with jalapeno, cilantro and lime. I enthusiastically encourage you to play around cooking with virgin coconut oil.

Reader Lexi also contributes this:

The bad rep apparently originated from research done around 50 years ago, using hydrogenated coconut oil. Once hydrogenated, the coconut oil becomes devoid of essential fatty acids. It's the essential fatty acid deficiency, as well as trans fatty acids, that causes higher cholesterol levels. Yes, coconut oil is high in saturated fat. However, it's simply not true that saturated fat (whether animal or vegetable sourced) = BAD and unsaturated fat = GOOD. Fats are a fascinating subject, and I am no expert, but it's much more complicated than that, as I've found from extensive reading. I think we should simply enjoying the many cooking and eating benefits of coconut oil, rather than rationalizing that just a little won't hurt. It's actually good for you (though I am aware many folks disagree).

What can I say? I got lazy and sloppy. As a staunch defender of fat under nearly all circumstances, I'm mortified. It shall not happen again...until next time.

Pastry Chef Philana weighs in from London with these thoughts on coconut macarons:

You can do the same for pistachio macarons (1/3 finely ground pistachios 2/3 ground almonds to combat the excess fat in the pistachios) Although Spanish or peeled pistachios are the only ones that look nice. If you use pistachios with skins - they look horrible. Ground Hazelnuts can be substituted 1:1 for ground almonds to make hazelnut macarons.

Good stuff. Thanks Philana!

Well, at least in the world of baking and pastry they do. I know what some of you are thinking: is this going to be another trip to the year 1683 and the Battle of Vienna — the most baking-intensive conflict in the history of man? This is one time when the answer is no. Sacher Torte only dates to 1832, the year a young pastry chef (very young in fact, he was a mere 16) by the name of Franz Sacher created the cake for Prince von Metternich (full name: Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar Fürst von Metternich-Winneberg- Beilstein), the second most famous diplomat of his time after Talleyrand (Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince de Benevente).

There are several versions of Sacher torte's creation. One posits that Sacher was Metternich's personal pastry chef when he hit upon his famous recipe, which seems unlikely since he was so very young. Another has it that Sacher was merely a hired hand in the kitchen of the Metternich estate at the time, which seems even less likely. A third maintains that Sacher was an apprentice baker at a pastry shop in Vienna frequented by Metternich, which seems the least likely of all, since it's hard to imagine a top diplomat of the Austrian Empire browsing pastry shops for fun (especially in those days when there were servants to do those sorts of things). But whatever the circumstance, all the stories share a basic plot line: that the master chef had fallen ill, Metternich was hungry, and Sacher was forced to deliver. And deliver he did, with a dessert that has since become the very emblem of Viennese pastry.

The popular notion that the Sacher torte was named for the Sacher Hotel is actually mistaken. The hotel wasn't built until 1876, by which time the torte was already world famous. Yet the family name is the same, the establishment having been built by Franz Sacher's son Eduard in 1876. Yet Eduard, it seems, wasn't exactly gifted in the art of hotel management. It took Eduard's death, and the ascension of his tough-as-nails, cigar-smoking wife Anna to turn the hotel into the world class institution that became around the turn the last century, and remains to this day.

What are these? Why, coconut macarons of course! I couldn't resist the pun. The meringues contain a 50-50 mix of ground almonds and ground coconut (if you want to try it yourself, I'd advise a mixture with more almond — about two thirds — since the extra coconut fat made for a less stable batter), and the filling is plain buttercream with about half a cup of cream of coconut beaten in.

I knew there was a happy mid-point somewhere.

I can't tell you how many requests I've received for this classic, but it seems only fitting that it should come up right around the Christmas holiday, when most home bakers are thinking about whipping up something special. Sacher torte is an excellent holiday pastry for several reasons. It's challenging without being overly so, it's satisfying without being over-the-top rich, and it can be made up to five days ahead of time and stored in the fridge without any noticeable sacrifice in quality. A winner all the way around.

I should insert here that this project, while it will be welcomed by many, is being dreaded by some, notably regular reader and contributor Gerhard. I don't think I'm giving too much away by disclosing that Gerhard is an employee of the city of Vienna. When I happened to mention this week's project to him in a friendly email last week, he had a small anxiety attack. Fortunately he's on vacation this week, traveling to a distant locale where he won't have access to the internet. I was deeply flattered that he regarded my attempt at Sacher torte to be a PR crisis of a scale that he momentarily considered staying home. Kinda makes a guy proud.

Anyway, with Gerhard safely out of the way it should be smooth sailing from here. Let's do it!

Pastry Chef Camille files this report from the Continent:

Funnily enough, I saw a pile of coconut macaroons in a bakery here in Paris yesterday. They were called "congolais." Just thought you'd like to know that even here in macaron land, macaroons do exist. :)

Turns out those Parisians really do have taste!

Toasted coconut is one of pastrydom's most beautiful sights, I think. These shaggy cookies resemble French macarons only in name, however they are a true pedestrian delight, at least if you like coconut. I think they deserve the royal treatment. Start by tossing your sweetened and unsweetened coconut together with the salt.

Next — and this is an important step — stir your can of cream of coconut. Some of the coconut oil always congeals on top.

Combine all your liquid ingredients together in a medium bowl...

...and give them a good whisk.

Add to the coconut mixture...

...and toss to combine.

Lay heaping tablespoons down on parchment-lined sheet pans (you'll have about 45).

Then with moistened fingertips, go back and form the heaps into rounded mounds.

Bake on high racks at 375 for seven minutes, rotate the pans back to front and top to bottom, and bake seven minutes more, or until the coconut is nicely browned.

If you want to gild the lily a bit, you can dip the flat bottoms of the macarons in a little melted semisweet chocolate, and cool them on parchment. Yow, that's good.

The question of fat was raised yesterday in an email. Specifically, where's the fat in the macaron cookie recipe below? Don't most cookies us butter as a base? The answer is that the fat is in there, just not in the form of dairy fat. The fat that macaroons contain — and they contain a good deal of it — is in the form of coconut oil. Dried coconut flake (or copra as it's called in the bulk grocery biz) is over 70 percent coconut oil. It doesn't seem particularly "oily" to the touch since coconut oil is solid at room temperature. Which begs the question why it isn't just called "fat." All I can say is that somewhere someone decided we'd call fats from plants "oils" and fats from animals "fats." It's not a texture thing, it's a source thing.

Not many of us remember nowadays that coconut oil was once as ubiquitous as vegetable shortening in food. It was in everything from candy to commercial baked goods, and was one of the primary fats in margarine. The reason, because once you refine coconut oil it's almost totally flavorless. That makes it handy as a general-purpose fat: for cooking, for baking, for frying, to spread on your toast...anything. Easy to extract, abundant, cheap, and above all solid at room temperature (a very rare thing for a plant fat), it was the perfect alternative to butter. Except that one day some food scientist somewhere realized that it was rather a bad thing as a regular part of the human diet. Amazingly high in saturated fat, it's artery-clogging potential exceeds that of even the most unhealthful animal fats. And so, quietly, coconut oil began to disappear from ingredient lists, to the point that today it seems like a rare and exotic substance.

A macaroon or two every so often, however, won't do you any harm at all.

Mexico Bob reminds me that in Mexico "coco" is also slang for "head" and also for "ghost" or "boogeyman".

People love to mock the Professor on Gilligan's Island for all his goofy coconut contraptions. I remember one episode where he made a transistor radio, and then there was the time Mr. Howell had those fainting spells, and the Professor built him that coconut shell MRI machine. Sure it was all a little far-fetched, but it underscored a very important point: that the coconut really is one of the world's most versatile plants.

The Sanskrit word for coconut is kalpa vriksha which roughly translates to "everything you really need in life". A coconut provides food (its meat), drink (its water), cooking and/or serving vessels (its shell), fuel to cook with (shells and husks) and building material for a shelter to do your cooking and/or eating in. People use coconut wood to construct houses, thatch to cover roofs and fiber to make mats, rope, brushes and baskets. Of course the coconut palm's utility doesn't stop there. People carve canoes out of them, make musical instruments...the list goes on.

Did you know that coconut water can be used as IV fluid? It's true. The roots can also be used to make clothing dye, tooth brushes and mouthwash. The meat and water can be made into laxatives and curatives for heart conditions, fevers and bladder problems and the oil is an antimicrobial. So you see, the Professor was really onto something with all those inventions of his. I like to think of him as a man ahead of his time.

Opinion is sharply divided on where the coconut originated, though the bulk of the evidence favors Southeast Asia and especially India. Because the coconut seems to have quite a few close relations in Central America, especially in the region of Panama, some cite the New World as its place of origin. But then there are also ancestors/relations in Africa and New Zealand, so it's really hard to know.

What is known for sure is that the coconut does extremely well in the tropics due to all the humidity, and very poorly everywhere else, which is why it grows nowhere in Asia west of India and nowhere north of the Philippines. But that leaves quite a heck of a lot of territory, and with the help of early traders and explorers, notably the Arabs and the Portuguese, the coconut has managed to exploit just about every available land mass, including Central America, the Caribbean and West and East Africa.

It was in fact the Portuguese who named the coconut, "coco" being sailor slang for "monkey face", owing to the three holes (actually germination pores) on its surface.

It was brought to my attention by no less than eleven emailers last night that apples are not drupes. Eight of those further pointed out that coconuts are not the only drupes whose seeds are more desirable than their fruit. Almonds are also drupes, I learned, as is coffee.

What can I say except that I had no idea that the biological sciences were so well represented in the Joe Pastry readership. I thank you all for writing in and keeping me on the straight and narrow. The corrections have been made for posterity.

The coconut isn't actually a nut, but the stone from a type of fruit known as a drupe. Collectively, we eat a lot of drupes. Nectarines, mangoes and olives spring to mind. Yet the coconut is one of only a very few whose seeds are more desirable than their fruit. Not that eating that seed all that easy easy to do. You usually need either a saw, a power drill or a machete to break into one.

The toughness of the coconut is what's thought to be behind it's extraordinary dispersion among islands in the South Pacific. Coconut trees are highly tolerant of salt water, and their shallow roots prefer beach sand. Combine those adaptations with tough fruit that floats like a football and high productivity (some coconut trees can produce 75 fruits a year), and you have one of nature's most effective seed dispersal machines. Fruit that drops off the tree into the surf (or gets carried out by the tide) can float for months at sea and still take root when it washes up on a distant beach. Caribbean coconuts have been found as far away as Norway, still capable of germinating.

All that toughness makes them a bit dangerous too. When you consider that a coconut tree can grow up to 80 feet or more in height and a decent-sized coconut can weigh between four and five pounds, they have some real injury-causing potential. A 4 1/2 pound coconut dropped from 80 feet is traveling in excess of 250 miles per hour by the time it hits the ground, and strikes with a force of just under 2,500 pounds per square inch. Ouch. Fortunately, human heads are pretty tough things themselves (especially among us thick-skulled pastry types). For that reason, death by coconut is rare, far rarer than the 150-per-year statistic Florida state officials once bantered about to make people feel better about shark attacks. Hey, ten times more people die from coconut impacts than shark bites every year, folks. Ah, but then coconuts don't rip your limbs off when you get too close to them, do they governor? That was always my problem with those press conferences.

Still, it's true that concussions from coconuts aren't at all rare in coconut cultivation locales like the Dominican Republic. No wonder people there associate coconuts with madness. Me, I think I'd wear a football helmet everywhere I went.

That's a bit of a toughie. The macaroon springs from the macaron, which means the origination point of the macaroon is somewhere in Italy. The French macaron was developed sometime in the 18th Century, so it's safe to assume that the idea of the macaron/macaroon had pretty well spread around all of Europe by the beginning of the 19th. However while almonds and/or almond flour might have been commonplace in the south of Europe, they were by no means everyday groceries in the North. Almond trees don't grow very well in cool, wet climates, which meant that if more than a few people in, say, the British Isles were going to enjoy the meringue-based sensation known (locally) as the macaroon, they were going to have to find another nut to base it on.

As it happened, an exotic new item was just coming up from the tropics that filled the bill perfectly. That nut wasn't really a nut (as I'll explain in more detail later), it was the giant seed of a tropical palm tree, the so-called coconut. Coconut meat made a big bang among confectioners in England starting in about the mid-1800's, the time when all sorts of strange nutmeats were being brought in by ship from all over the world. It combined perfectly with all that New World sugar that everyone was so excited about. The trouble with coconut was that it didn't ship all that well. The nuts themselves were round and mostly empty on the inside, making them costly items to transport, and when traders tried to extricate the meat and pack it in barrels, they found it spoiled quickly. Thus for several decades coconut only entered Europe in dribs and drabs.

That all changed when a Ceylon-based French company, J.H. Vavasseur & Co., invented a method for shredding and drying coconut, which made it a snap to pack and ship. The European taste for coconut exploded, and by the turn of the 20 Century, the Vavasseur company was shipping in an estimated 60,000 tons of shredded coconut annually. Exactly who first combined some of that coconut with egg whites and sugar to create the modern coconut macaroon is a mystery, however it's thought that it was a Brit, and more than that a Scot. It's been said that coconut macaroons were invented by a confectioner in Glasgow somewhere around the year 1900, though that claim is to my knowledge undocumented. Coconut was starting to catch on in America about that time (we were quite late to the coconut party), so it's possible that it was invented here.

Wherever it was invented, one thing is certain: the true bastion of the cookie-like coconut macaroon is America. Or at any rate that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.

It turns out last week's project was perfectly timed from a marketing standpoint, as Starbucks is preparing to test-market French macarons in many of their stores. To believe the reviews, the macarons are decent if not great. They are, however, very reasonably priced. Whereas macarons in Paris can cost several dollars each, Starbucks will sell you a dozen for $10. Not half bad. Be warned, however, that they'll only be on sale from December 13th until Christmas.

A combination of sweetened and unsweetened coconut creates the ideal texture for these macaroons, neither too dense nor too dry. The cream of coconut (drastically reduced coconut milk) provides the deep coconut flavor. Find cream of coconut either in the baking section of your supermarket, the international food section or the cocktail mixes section (it's most often used to make piña coladas).

7.5 ounces cream of coconut
2 tablespoons honey
4 eggs whites
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
4.5 ounces unsweetened shredded coconut
11 ounces sweetened shredded coconut

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Stir the cream of coconut in the can, then pour 7.5 ounces (a cup) into a bowl. Add the honey, egg whites and vanilla and whisk to combine. Toss together the two kinds of coconut with the salt. Pour the liquid mix over coconut mix and toss to combine. Spoon tablespoons of the batter onto parchment-line sheet pans, then with wet hands, form them into rounded heaps. Bake on upper rackes of the oven for seven minutes. Switch the pans top-to-bottom and rotate, then bake for seven minutes more, until they're golden brown. Cool and eat.

Though I respect macarons, macaroons are much closer to my heart. My grandfather, a man of great dignity and taste, was crazy about them. Here I should insert that a really good macaroon is a rare thing. Too often macaroons are dry, papery and almost completely devoid of real coconut flavor. Thus, most people — quite understandably — avoid them. If you're one of those folks, I hope you'll at least try the recipe I'm going to put up. It'll change your mind about macaroons, I promise.

Macarons wouldn't be macarons if they weren't fussy things. Though they are at their core very simple little cookies, a variety of things can go wrong during their preparation, preventing them from achieving the Platonic ideal. Me, I don't see why that's the end of the world. However I confess that if mine didn't come out as I expected, I'd want to know why. So here are a few common macaron problems and their solutions.

1. No feet. This is very often the result of not allowing macarons to rest long enough before baking. Note here that macarons made via the Italian method don't need to be rested. If your Italian macarons don't have feet, it could be that your oven temperature is too low. Another possibility, of course, is over-mixing. Too many bubbles popped and the macarons didn't have the lift they needed.

2. Cracks. Very often the result of under-mixing. In other words, too many bubbles — too much air — in the macaron. The meringue gets dried out in the oven and cracks appear. Steam escapes and little if any rise occurs.

3. Runny batter. A result of over-mixing. This isn't necessarily a catastrophe. It might simply mean a thin cap with feet underneath. That's well within the bounds of a successful macaron. Bake, cool, fill and declare victory.

4. Feet that protrude sideways. This occurs when your oven is too hot. The batter at the edges of the macaron heats and expands too quickly, then explodes outward. Put the net batch on a lower rack. Some folks like to prop the oven door open slightly with a wooden spoon. The result is more even heat than the typical hot-cold cycling that goes in inside a closed oven.

Those are the biggies. Should you experience any other problems not covered here, send me an email and I'll do my best to help.

Given that so many of the world's great epicures now regard the macaron with the kind of reverence that was once reserved for the communion wafer, it only seems fitting to open this tutorial with a prayer. As we prepare to undertake this mystery, let us acknowledge our failures and ask the Lord for pardon and strength. Amen.

Now then, to business. What I'm about to demonstrate is the classic French method for making macarons. There's another method, called the "Italian" method because it employs Italian meringue. The French method, I think, is more straightforward if not as adaptable for incorporating exotic flavors.

Begin by arraying your ingredients. Those of you who are familiar with macarons will note that whereas most macaron recipes call for almond flour, I'm using slivered, blanched almonds. There are two reasons for this. First, because almond flour and/or meal aren't commonly available in America, even in specialty shops. And second, even when you can find one or the other, you can never be sure how old they are. Nut oil is critical to the success of a macaron, but it can go rancid and/or solidify over time. The best way to ensure freshness is to grind your own in the food processor. As you can see above, the homemade stuff will give you a slightly knobbly texture, so if you're really serious about macarons, order almond powder or flour or meal fresh from a good online resource. Here I have:

3.8 ounces blanched almonds
7 ounces powdered sugar
3.5 ounces egg whites (aged overnight at room temperature)
1.75 ounces granulated sugar

Start by grinding your almonds and powdered sugar together in a food processor. This is a good idea even if you're using pre-ground almond meal or flour, since it'll aerate it, mix it well with the sugar and reduce the particles to the smallest possible size.

This is about the best I can do with my machine:

Next, prepare a pastry bag, fitting it with just the coupler, no tip.

Stand it up in a tall glass for easy loading.

Now to make the batter. Put the egg whites in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a whip. This is a good point to add a few drops of coloring if you want to.

Whip to about the soft peak stage.

With the machine running, add the granulated sugar and whip to stiff peaks: the "bird's beak" stage, like this:

Next add your almond/sugar mixture...just dump it in.

Now, without regard to consequences, stir the mixture together. Don't fold at this point — stir. Because remember, this isn't spongecake. Part of the point is to break some of these bubbles. If the batter's too light it'll dry out in the oven and crack. That'll let the steam out and bye bye feet. So don't be delicate, stir for maybe 30 seconds. (Be sure to scrape the sides as you go).

When the batter is about to this point, you want to start folding (find instructions on how to fold under the Techniques menu). Fold four or five times, then start testing the batter for readiness.

How to do that? Why, with a spoon of course. You just scoop up a small portion of the batter and plop it onto a plate or sheet pan. What you're after is a small mass that settles down into a nice disk after a few seconds, but with a subtle peak in the center. About like this:

If your batter mounds up too high, go back and fold a few more times. If you over-fold a little and the batter runs a bit, that won't be the end of the world. Contrary to what you may have heard, a few extra strokes is unlikely to ruin your macarons. The biggest mistake most people make with macaron batter is that they baby it too much. I've said it before and I'll say it again: pastries can smell fear. Confidence is key.

Once you've arrived at the right texture, spoon the batter into your pastry bag, and start piping onto a parchment-lined sheet.

You want small disks — smaller than you may imagine — only about an inch and a half in diameter. Now then, here's perhaps the most important tip I have to pass on: let your macarons rest. For how long? About half an hour will suffice, though you can leave them up to about 50 minutes if you want. What will this do? It will allow the skins of the macarons to dry out. That will make them inflexible, constraining the rise as the macaron heats. With nowhere else to go, the expanding interior of the macaron will be forced downward, which will push the cap up, and the result will be feet. See?

You'll want to bake your macarons on a lower-middle rack of a 300 oven (you can get it preheating while the piped macarons sit) for about twelve minutes. Let them cool for a minimum of half an hour, then gently peel the parchment off the backs.

Grasping one meringue, apply the filling of your choice. Nothing exotic here, just raspberry jam. But oh, I do love it so.

Apply the top and your task is complete. Repeat until all your sandwiches are assembled.

And with that, this tutorial is ended. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord, make macarons, and brag about it.

This is something else you hear an awful lot about in regard to macarons. What we call "aged eggs" French pastry chefs simply call "eggs", since they tend not to refrigerate theirs. They just get them very fresh, use them relatively quickly, and order more. Here we're a little more uptight about maintaining egg freshness, which I don't think is all bad. However it does put us at something of a disadvantage when it comes to whipping up egg foams.

Why? Because as eggs age, their whites get runnier. This doesn't effect they way they taste or cook up, but it does affect the way they whip. Thin liquids can simply be agitated more briskly than thick ones. A whip will cut through a bowl full of water with much more force than it will through a bowl full of honey, if you follow me. That extra force, when applied to egg proteins, means a higher froth.

Being a skeptic by nature, I'm not totally convinced that aged eggs make that big a difference in a macaron batter. After all, part of making a macaron batter is popping a good deal of those bubbles. However aged egg advocates may have a point in that foams made from old eggs probably have a higher proportion of small bubbles in them, and those may make a contribution to the macaron's subtle rise.

Age your egg whites by putting them in a bowl, covering the bowl with plastic wrap, and leaving the bowl out on the counter for about 24 hours. At room temperature, eggs age one day per hour compared to how they'd age in a refrigerator. By morning those whites will be good and runny, but will not have spoiled. Oh, and don't fall for the myth that you can achieve the same effect by microwaving your whites for ten seconds or so. That may warm the whites, but won't have any effect at all on their viscosity.

I've been catching a lot of flak the last many months for not having a presence on Facebook. I've resisted it, frankly, because I have no idea what I'll actually do there. Today I can finally say to those of you who've been so adamant about it: you win. I've secured a Facebook page and will do my utmost to live up to the responsibilities entailed therein.

Ask that same experienced gourmand I referenced down below about what distinguishes the perfect macaron, and he'll tell you that the most important feature of a good macaron is its "foot." What are "feet" in the context of macarons? They're the rough, uneven bits on either side of the filling, the bottoms of the disks when they bake up on the sheet. Who ever decided that a macaron must have a foot in order to be great? Who knows? But somebody did, and now we're all stuck with it. (I'll have you know, however, that my grandmother's meatloaf has a distinguishing feature along its edge that I refer to as "the elbow", the secret to which I shall never divulge). Getting those feet is the obsession of modern macaron makers, as it is an emblem of both skill and cultural awareness. God knows I like to exhibit both of those things as often as I can. So let's talk feet!

The "foot" of a macaron — as unsightly and uneven as it may appear to the untrained eye — is a factor of the macaron's rising. The smooth "cap" on the top of the cookie is how it appears when it's initially piped onto the sheet pan. If a macaron is prepared correctly, that cap will hold its shape, immobile and without cracking, as it heats in the oven. Of course the interior of the macaron is a foam, containing countless bubbles of moisture-laden air. When the air inside those bubbles heats up, they bubbles are going to want to expand. But expand to where? If the cap that surrounds the macaron won't budge, they'll have nowhere to go but down. That downward force pushes the cap up, revealing the randomly formed interior of the macaron, otherwise known as the "foot." Not too complicated really. Anyone who's ever launched a water rocket as a child can see what's going on here. But how to create that effect? Better to show you in a tutorial, I think.

Another very good question, since a recipe for macarons — practically speaking — can be as few as four or five lines long. Strange then that most magazine features on macarons go on for pages as authors labor to explain the picayune nuances of getting a macaron just right. Some of them get downright mystical. Turn your bowl of stiffened egg whites upside down for five seconds. Knock your sheet pans together three times. Stand on one foot while reciting Pierre Hermé's middle name backwards twice. So OK, I made that last one up, but only to underscore how downright comical these recipes can be. Read them and several things become abundantly clear. Primarily, that there's a broad and unhealthy obsession with creating the "perfect" Hermé macaron. Second, that there's very little understanding among most home bakers about what macarons are and how they work.

As I've mentioned, macarons are simple meringue cookies, not unlike the little meringues that many of us grew up with. You know, those little blobs of sweetened egg white foam, often studded with chocolate chips. They're great. What makes macarons different is that they contain a high amount of ground nuts, which introduce a good deal of oil into the egg white foam and in the process create a very different texture: a shiny, eggshell-thin crust which yields to a soft and slightly gooey interior.

As I've discussed exhaustively in the past, foam and fat are natural enemies. Put a little oil or fat into a bowl with unbeaten egg whites and you'll have a job whipping the mix up into a stable foam. The reason in a nutshell: because fat molecules compete with protein molecules on the surfaces of air bubbles, undermining the fairly stable "films" that egg proteins create, and which hold the foam up. However there's nothing that says you can't add fat after you've whipped an egg white foam up, for once the protein meshes have formed, they do a pretty good job of crowding out the fat molecules, keeping the bubbles from popping. This is the science behind soufflées, buttercreams...and macarons.

Macarons (at least in the French version of the recipe) begin with an egg white foam to which sugar is added, both to sweeten and stabilize it. Once this basic meringue is created, a mixture of ground nuts (classically almonds) or nut flour are added, along with more sugar. The mixture is then folded together until the right consistency — not too stiff, not too runny — is arrived at. This step, according to most recipe writers, is the where all the magic and mystery is in the perfect macaron. I'm not necessarily denying it, however I will say that there's more to a successful macaron than just the mixing, as I'll discuss in the next post.

That question from reader Phil H., and it's good one. The thing is, in most of the English-speaking world, the term "petit four" refers to a very specific thing. That being a small, layered cake covered with poured fondant. Among the French, however, the term refers to an entire family of small sweets. The word "petit four" is thus used in the same way we might use the term "appetizer."

In France, petits fours come in two types, "iced" (petits fours glacés) and "dry" (petits fours secs). The little cakes we know as petits fours fall into the former category, and macaroons — along with cookies and small, laminated pastries — fall into the latter.

Regular reader and commenter Chana writes in with this:

You see -- you take a simple potato knish, change the dough a litte, fill it with something a little different, and everyone is screaming "you call that a knish? You call THAT a KNISH?? Are you crazy? That is NOT a KNISH!!"

You take a macaron, completely and unashamedly change the ingredients on both the inside AND the outside, and what do people say? "Oh, what a brilliant idea! What an absolutely magnificent macaron! Oh, I wish I could make macarons like that! Boy, these macarons are just incredible, aren't they?"

Too true. I tell you, the things I put up with for you people.

So. Two disks of almond meringue stuck together with a filling. Not terribly much to work with from a creative standpoint. Or at least that's the conclusion Parisian pastry chefs seem to have collectively arrived at in the decades after Desfontaines' innovation. For more than fifty years macarons remained pretty straightforward affairs. The meringue disks were generally flavored with the traditional almond (sometimes chocolate) and fillings consisted of ganache, buttercream or jam. Then Hermé showed up and really put the creative pedal down. Soon macarons of very different kinds began showing up at Parisian tea parties, from the conventional (chocolate, raspberry, caramel, coffee) to the adventurous (chocolate mint, mango, pistachio, passion fruit) to the exotic (jasmine, rose-lychee-raspberry, white truffle and hazelnut, lime-basil and violet-cassis) to the downright odd (olive oil and vanilla, chocolate and foie gras). Of course once that got started, ambitious pastry chefs the world over wanted in on the act. Today, depending where you go, you can find macarons made with everything from green tea and adzuki beans to roasted red peppers, whiskey and tomatoes. How far can it all go? Who knows? But personally, I sometimes wonder how much creativity one little cookie can take.

Here are the kind of posts I'd be putting up if I were four inches tall, made of clay and living in a cardboard box. The techniques are amazingly similar. Terrific stuff. Thanks to reader Lisa H.!

What do macarons and macaroni have in common? Not much, other than the fact that they're both made from pulverized ingredients (almonds and wheat, respectively). Though etymologists debate the subject, it's thought by many that the Italian word maccheroni comes from an earlier Italian word, maccare that means "to reduce" or "make smaller." The present day Italian word macarie, "rubble", lends credence to this idea. The Spanish word for "chew" — mascar — is quite similar.

Macarons are such simple preparations, their origins are fairly easy to triangulate. Their principal ingredient is sugar, which means they date no further back than the Colonial period, the time when cane sugar was flowing in earnest from the West Indies. That supposition is bolstered by the fact that they are meringues, which means they were probably invented in the 18th Century, a period known here at joepastry.com as The Century of Foams, the time when everyone who was anyone in Europe was eating trendy egg foam-based foods like mousse and sponge cake. Further, their defining ingredient is almond, which means they're from southern Europe, areas where the almond — a plant native to the Middle East — was either imported by invading Muslims (Spain) or brought in via trade (Italy). Their name is the giveaway there: macaron, a word that's strikingly similar to the Italian maccherone, singular of the word we English-speakers know as "macaroni."

There are a number of stories about the origin of macarons, all of them likely apocryphal. However they all trace their invention to Italy, where indeed macarons still exist in the form of amaretti, small almond cookies made from — you guessed it — almonds, sugar and egg whites. But amaretti, it's important to note here, aren't meringues. That technical twist was added almost certainly by the French.

Exactly when the macaron became a meringue is a mystery. What is known for certain is that simple, thin disks of almond-flavored meringue (then called "macarons") were common in France in the first few decades of the 20th century. It wasn't until the early 1930's that the macaron was transformed into the Parisian pastry shop staple that it is today. That's when an enterprising young baker by the name of Pierre Desfontaines, an employee of the legendary Ladurée bake shop and tea salon, thought to join two macarons together into a sandwich with a ganache filling in between. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Here it's important to note that not everybody in France considers the Ladurée macaron to be the perfect iteration of this classic snack. Plenty of folks still prefer the plain disks, and consider the filled, double-decker Parisian versions to be foppish, citified nonsense. To each their own, as they say. I'll eat them either way.

Tell an experienced gourmand that you're planning on making macarons for your dinner party this weekend and he'll look at you as though you've just announced you're going to jump the Snake River Canyon on a rocket-propelled sky-cycle. You can't! It's too dangerous! Such is the aura of fear that has come to surround this once-humble sweet, mostly thanks to one man: French pastry master, Pierre Hermé. For it was Hermé who, in the 1990's, set out to reinvent the simple macaron as a showpiece for his singular creative genius.

He succeeded. In fact he succeeded too well. So much so that in the process of updating a classic he — as my mother might say — ruined it for everyone. Now all but the most audacious professional bakers go limp at the very thought of making a macaron. Why? Because theirs won't look as good and taste as good as Hermé's, obviously. Even some of the world's best cookbook authors have bought into the mentality, omitting macarons entirely from their books — or worse — writing about them but declining to provide readers with a recipe. The message is unmistakable: if you can't make a world-class macaron, you shouldn't even try.

What hogwash. A macaron is composed of just three ingredients: sugar, almonds and egg whites. Exactly how they come together is, admittedly, a bit of a trick. However it's by no means beyond the ken of a careful and committed home baker. If you know what to look for, you can make up an excellent macaron batter in as little as ten minutes — and have them baked up in about an hour total. Heed the science and you can, with surprisingly little effort, produce a macaron that will amaze your friends and terrify your enemies. I'll show you how. Stay tuned.

Here are two projects that I couldn't resist lumping together since they're ostensibly the same thing, at least to an etymologist. In practice of course they are very, very different. One — at least if it's made by master pastry chef Pierre Hermé — is widely considered to be bakingdom's ultimate one-bite delight. It's also thought by many to be the world's most difficult cookie (though it's technically a petit four). The other is largely dismissed in elite pastry circles, a pedestrian concoction of baked, sweetened coconut and egg whites. Exactly which is which I'll leave to you to ponder for the moment. But let's just say I've been looking forward to this high-low matchup for quite a while.

Hope everyone celebrating Thanksgiving this past week had a terrific holiday. As for me, I want to offer my own thanks to yet another anonymous StumbleUponer whose posting of my jelly doughnut tutorial brought some 300,000 visitors to the site over the weekend. Now if I only could have persuaded each one of them to give me a dollar...

Reader Chana continues the conversation on Marie the Jewess (Miriam) and her connection to the bain marie:

In classic Jewish commentary, Moses' sister Miriam is always associated with wells and water. (Although I doubt the classic Jewish commentators cooked anything, much less in a bain marie.) The bible says that after Miriam died, the people were without water. The commentary takes it several steps further and says that throughout the 40 years of wanderings in the desert, there was always a well of water because of Miriam. When Miriam died, the well dried up. (Luckily it was toward the end of the trip.) Miriam's other claims to fame are checking up on Moses while he was hidden in the Nile (water, water), and "the song of the sea," leading the Israelites in a song of praise to God after the splitting of the red sea when they all escaped Egypt. And now we can add the bain marie to her list of accomplishments!

Do I have the world's most erudite readership or what? Great stuff, Chana — and thanks!

Chef Mike C. offers this:

My Banquets & Catering chef at the CIA would always sprinkle an initial layer of sugar onto his brulees as soon as they came out of the oven. This way, that sugar would melt and fill in the little pits or uneven bits on the surface. That way, he said, when you put another layer of sugar on top when they were all cooled, you would have a perfectly smooth, glass-like layer of caramelized sugar.

Another chef I worked with in California used brown sugar instead of granulated sugar. I don't remember them having an exceptional crunch (maybe because of the molasses?), but the flavor on them was great.

Great tips, Mike! I'll add them to the permanent crème brûlée tutorial.

It's Thanksgiving in the States, and the Pastry family is headed out of town for a few days. Back Monday. When I return: macarons — and macaroons!

Yesterday's pictures of crème brûlée in progress elicited this response from reader (and apparently working cook) Dennis J.:

This is off-topic, but your picture of egg yolks and sugar got me thinking. Recently I left a few yolks sitting in a bowl with some sugar while I was doing other things in the kitchen. When I came back there were light yellow curd-like bits at the point where the yolks and the sugar were touching. I asked the chef what happened and he told me that raw sugar reacts with egg yolks to create heat, and the egg had "cooked". Is that true?

I've gotten this question a few times, but never answered it on the blog as far as I know. It's common kitchen lore that egg yolks and sugar react to create heat. The truth is that they don't, though it can appear that yolk in contact with sugar has been cooked, especially if the yolks are a deep yellow. In the picture above I left an egg sitting on some sugar for about twenty minutes. You can see that there's a ring of lighter colored yolk along the bottom where the two are touching. What's causing that?

Sugar, as I've discussed on many occasions before, is a hygroscopic substance. Which is to say, it absorbs water. It absorbs it from the air, but it'll also absorb it from an egg yolk if the two are in contact, right through the yolk's membrane. An egg yolk contains a mixture of water, fat and protein with a few sugars and other miscellaneous nutrients mixed in. Take the water away and the long stringy protein molecules get closer to one another, to the point that they ultimately coagulate into clumps. Once they do that, there's no reversing the process. My best advice is to keep your eggs and sugar separated until you're ready to make your mix.

Thanks for the good question, Dennis!

UPDATE: Big Fat Dave points out that there's a term for the movement of water through a semi-permeable membrane: osmosis. You know, Dave, you're exactly right.

As I mentioned last week, it's a water bath (bain being "bath" in French). But then why do we use a French term and who the heck was Marie? I've wondered that for quite a while but have never found much on the subject. Leave it to Jim C. of Chez Jim to chime in with an answer.

Turning (OK, clicking) to the most authoritative online French dictionary, I find...that the bain marie - mentioned at least as far back as the 14th c. - was named for a very specific alchemist...Marie the Jewess, who supposedly came up with this technique. And you can bet she wasn't making creme brulee.

It points out that Marie (Miriam) the Jewess may have been a reference to the sister of Moses and Aaron, a prophetess, and supposedly the author of works on alchemy. From there to an association of the Virgin Mary with esoteric mysteries of alchemy "succeeding to the Egyptian tradition of the myth of Isis." One wonders: did [Carl] Jung ever investigate the bain marie?

Mighty deep thoughts considering a bain marie is such a shallow pan of water. Never let it be said that joepastry.com isn't an intellectual community.

My favorite crème brûlée is a very pain one, with just half a teaspoon of vanilla extract added. After that, it's crème brûlée scented with orange, like this one right here. Like an English pudding, crème brûlée somehow manages to pull off a sense of grandeur while still being an incredibly simple thing to prepare. Among its many virtues, it'll keep for several days in the fridge, making it an ideal dessert to serve at a dinner party. You simply pop them out of the fridge, caramelize the tops and you're good to go.

Start by preheating your oven to 325 and setting a pan of water on the stove to simmer. Next, infuse your cream. Put half a pint of cream in a small saucepan along with the rind of half an orange and half a teaspoon of vanilla extract (this recipe can be doubled if you like). Bring the mixture to a simmer and set it aside.

Add your sugar to your egg yolks...

...and whisk until light in color.

Strain the warm — now orange-scented — cream into the egg and sugar mixture...

...and whisk until the sugar is melted.

Now all there is to do is ladle the mixture into your ramekins. I've got mine sitting in a roasting pan here, but you can use a baking dish too.

Put the roasting pan on a low rack in the oven, then add enough simmering water to come half way up the sides of the ramekins.

Bake about half an hour, until the custard is set (when you move the ramekin it should jiggle, not slosh). Let the custards cool, then put them in the refrigerator for a minimum of four hours, ideally overnight. When you're ready to serve them, spinkle about a tablespoon of granulated sugar onto the top of each custard. Oops...I sort of overdid it here. Oh well, no biggie.

Now, apply the heat. As luck would have it, I ran out of propane about half a second after this picture was snapped. Not having a salamander handy, I went with the other, other option: the broiler. It works just fine, though you want to take care to get the sugared custard as close to the heat source as you reasonably can. You want a lot of heat delivered quickly, so as to caramelize the sugar without cooking — and breaking — the custard. More time in the broiler means a greater chance of curdling — so blast the suckers and get'em out of there.

Once you've got a nice brown top, let them sit for five minutes so the molten sugar hardens. Plate, garnish and serve.

Oh yeah, that's the stuff.

UPDATE: Chef Mike C. adds:

My Banquets & Catering chef at the CIA would always sprinkle an initial layer of sugar onto his brulees as soon as they came out of the oven. This way, that sugar would melt and fill in the little pits or uneven bits on the surface. That way, he said, when you put another layer of sugar on top when they were all cooled, you would have a perfectly smooth, glass-like layer of caramelized sugar.

Another chef I worked with in California used brown sugar instead of granulated sugar. I don't remember them having an exceptional crunch (maybe because of the molasses?), but the flavor on them was great.

Thanks Mike!

Sorry for that, all of you who were waiting for crème brûlée photos on Friday, but it turned out to be one of those sorts of work days: swamped. I'll have'em up shortly!

Which is a water bath to all of us regular people. A water bath is the classic way to prevent custards from curdling (or "breaking") because it keeps the temperature of the cooking custard at a constant low. How so? For one because liquid water —unless it's at a rollicking boil — doesn't get above 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Beyond that it becomes steam. Thus everything below the water line will remain below boiling, usually below the curdling point (which is around 190 for most still custards) even though the temperature of the oven is 325.

But then if the oven is that hot, what keeps all the water from just turning to steam? The answer is that some of it does, however as you may recall from high school physics classes, evaporation is a cooling action. As water molecules leave the surface of the water and depart for the air, the liquid water that remains behind is left cooler for the effort. Neat. Thus the best water baths for custards are very broad and shallow, since more surface area means more evaporation and more cooling.

I break from the early makers of crème brûlée in that I prefer a very smooth, silky texture without any "bits" in it. I also like a simple, clean appearance that's free of any flecks of this or that. The trouble is, it's those bits and flecks that add flavor to this chilly custard dessert. So what to so? The answer for me is: infusion.

If you're wondering what exactly an "infusion" is, it's simply a process by which flavor is extracted from one substance and delivered to another. The extractee is usually something fairly strong like a spice or an herb. The receiving substance is usually a liquid of some kind: water, vinegar or broth, but most of the time something fatty like cream, melted butter or oil. Why? Because the things that are being transferred from point A to point B are usually essential oils: volatile fat-like substances commonly found in plants (indeed, they're part of many plants' defensive systems). Being structurally similar to the fat molecules found in cream and butter, they disperse readily in them, creating a vast, rich sea of flavor.

It's fat's ability to dissolve and deliver flavorful substances that makes it such an indispensable ingredient in the kitchen. Of course that property can work against us too, as anyone who's ever left an uncovered slab of butter in the fridge next to some leftover Thai food knows. Panang gai is lousy on a sweet roll. Yet a little cream simmered with a sprig of rosemary is poetry in potatoes au gratin. Half-and-half that's been heated with thyme and lemon zest can become a sublime crème anglaise. And once the spent herbs, spices and peels are strained out, there's nothing left behind to ruin the presentation. Their flavors and aromas are the only evidence they were ever there.

Reader Maria writes in with this:

I have a question about freezing yeasted bread dough. Is it ok to do, and if so, at what stage in the process should I put it in the freezer? I've been told a variety of things and it seems to me like it would make the most sense to do it after the 2nd rise (if there is one) and rounding process. It would be really handy if I could freeze things, since I have a pretty full schedule. I'm particularly interested in freezing sweet doughs, like for cinnamon rolls. Is there is a difference in freezing a sweet dough vs. a whole wheat bread because of the fat and sugar ratios?

Even though I'm talking crème brûlée this week, this question is well worth answering, for I get it a lot. The answer is that yeast doughs of all kinds freeze well, though I personally don't freeze unbaked bread very often. However I regularly employ the freezer for things like Danish, croissants, brioche and cinnamon buns. The best point to freeze a yeast dough is after shaping, just before the second rising (proofing) stage. Simply freeze the whatever-they-are on pans, then once they're solid, put them in freezer bags for storage

The night before you want to bake, lay out your rolls or buns on parchment-lined sheet pans and put the pans in the refrigerator. By morning they will have thawed and will be ready for proofing and baking. The proofing will take perhaps 50% longer than normal because the dough will be deeply chilled, but once proofed, they should bake up every bit as well as if they'd never been frozen.

Thanks for the question, Maria!

What are you kidding me? Other than making crème brûlée you mean? If you dig pastry, lots of things. You can makes s'mores without a campfire, for one. A blowtorch can turn a humble split banana and a sprinkling of brown sugar into a gourmet platform for homemade ice cream. It's also handy for toasting meringue toppings. On the savory side, it's great when you need to roast the skin off a chile pepper or a tomato and don't feel like heating the broiler up. Then there's melting or browning cheese, say, on the top of a bowl of onion soup.

And then of course there are tarts. This is where a blowtorch really shines, in my opinion, since I can think of a variety of tarts — savory and sweet — than are best served room temperature, yet benefit from a light top-toasting just before serving. Alsatian onion tart is a great example. Another is a tri-color pesto tart I used to like to make, since pesto (as many of you know) can't handle oven heat. It turns to a greasy, dark green smear. A quick brush with a blowtorch, though, will brown the very top without "melting" what's underneath.

I also apply mine to my mixer bowl when I want to warm its contents as the machine runs. That's a neat trick if you're mixing a batter but forgot to take the ingredients out of the fridge ahead of time (just be sure to wave the torch lightly so as not to cook anything delicate — like the eggs). I kid you not when I tell you that the biggest proponent of the kitchen torch was Julia Child. For her, a work area wasn't complete without one.

We live in an age of culinary overkill. Our waffles come stacked to the moon with toppings. Our tacos are stuffed with burritos stuffed with nachos. As exhausted as we get by our own over-abundance, it's easy to get lulled into the assumption that every food that came before our time was by definition a study in simplicity. Not so.

Take crème brûlée. Many of us recoil — and many of you folks out there did — at the notion of putting ingredients like whole fruits or peanut butter into the mix. Since I love an ultra-simple crème brûlée, I'm in broad agreement. However it's interesting to take a look at some of the early recipes for this particular dish. They paint a picture of a custard that could practically be mistaken for a fruitcake. This one is from Massialot himself, from the 1705 edition of his Nouveau Cuisinier Roial et Bourgeois:

Crême brulée

Eggs
Flour
Milk
Cinnamon stick
Limepeel/other preserves
Sugar
Orange peel/Lemon peel/pistachioes/almonds
Orange blossom water
Feuillantine
Fleurons

Take four or five egg yolks, depending on the size of your dish or plate. Mix them well in a pot, with a good pinch of flour, and bit by bit pour in milk, about a pint. Put in a little cinnamon stick, and chopped lime peel, and other preserves. One can also add orange peel, or lemon; and it is called Crême brulée à l'Orange. To make it tastier, one can mix in peeled pistachios, or almonds, with a drop of orange blossom water.

Put it on a lit stove, & keep stirring it, watching that your Cream not stick to the bottom. When it is well-cooked, put a dish or a plate on a lit stove; & having poured the cream into it cook it some more, until you see it sticking to the side of the dish. Then, take it off & sugar it well on top, besides the sugar one puts in it. Take the fire shovel, red hot, & at the same time burn the Cream, so that it takes on a nice golden color. As a garnish, use feuillantine, little fleurons or meringue or other pieces of crispy paste. Glaze your cream, if you want; otherwise serve it without that, always as an entremets.

So, not only was Massialot's crême brulée often brimming with candied fruits and nuts, it was adorned with pastry flourishes (that's what "feuillantine" and "fleurons" are). I'm sure it all made for quite a presentation. However it makes for an interesting study in the principle of "less-is-more." Very often, more is actually more.

(Hat tip — as usual — to Jim Chevallier.)

When it comes to a combination of utility and cost, I can't think of many kitchen gadgets to rival the blowtorch. And it feels darn good to buy one. I find that the manly satisfaction of a few minutes in the plumbing aisle looking over propane tanks and igniters offsets months of trips to the candy supply store picking out pastry tips.

When it comes to selecting a model, I highly recommend paying up a bit for a trigger-style igniter that doesn't need a separate spark-making striker to start. Though the bare bones "pencil flame" variety may make you feel like an iron worker from an Empire State Building construction documentary, take it from me they're a pain in the neck (and a little dangerous for a preoccupied cook). Simply head to your local hardware store and pick out a model that suits you. A decent igniter head will cost you about $35, a tank of propane about $3 (yes, they are disposable once they're empty).

Whatever you do, don't buy one of these silly little things from the cooking store. Fire may come out of them, but they have nowhere near the flame necessary to crisp the top of a crème brûlée. Where blowtorches are concerned, BTU output is everything, and more heat output means the job gets done quickly and effciently. A low flame from a cute little kitchen torch may eventually caramelize your sugar, but likely not before you've curdled and broken some of the custard beneath it. Nope, when it comes to buying a blowtorch, walk like a man.

Oh, and if you don't feel comforatble with an assembled-and-ready blowtorch in your kitchen (and I don't, since I have young children around), just unscrew the head from the tank after you're done using it (ignoring the little shoop sound of a small amount of escaping gas) and store the two pieces in separate places. I put the head in one of my kitchen cabinets and the tank on a shelf in the pantry. Well away from the stove, of course.

Reader Gerhard writes from Vienna to challenge me with this:

Tell us how to do a proper crème brûlée the old fashioned style... without using a torch to melt the sugar on top (anyone can do that, but who can do a classic crème brûlée?)

What Gerhard is referring to — I believe — is an item known as a salamander, which was used to caramelize sugar on top of a crème brûlée in the days before blowtorches. It's an exceedingly simple device, basically a steel or cast iron disk on the end of a metal rod. The idea is that you heat the salamander over a flame until it's red hot, then hold it about an inch over the top of the crème brûlée. The radiant heat cooks the sugar in no time.

Salamanders made a brief reappearance in gadget shops a few years ago. You couldn't escape them in kitchenware catalogs. They were sold with sets of ramekins and packets of turbinado sugar in little crème brûlée "kits". I never bought one then, since I was satisfied with my blowtorch, but after receiving Gerhard's message I decided it'd be fun to put one to work on the blog this week. After making a few calls to some of the cookware shops in the area, however, I've discovered there isn't one to be had in the entire Louisville market. I guess that'll teach me. Next time, Joe, get on the darn bandwagon!

There's a lot of tittering going on in elite pastry circles about crème brûlée these days. Just like molten chocolate cake, it's an item most restaurants put on their menus solely out of obligation — something for country rubes and tourists who want to feel sophisticated dining in the big city. Even now, snotty waiters all over Manhattan are traipsing back to the kitchen with their dessert orders, muttering to themselves. I'll be right back with that, Mr. Clampett.

But me, I never get sick of crème brûlée, NEVER. It's just too simple, too perfect. Add a little vanilla, a pinch of cinnamon, maybe a couple gratings of nutmeg and I'm a stone-cold goner. So snicker away, Helmut, I'll remember you in silky burnt cream paradise.

What follows is a basic formula for a very light crème brûlée. It has just enough egg yolk to hold the sugar and cream together, and not much more. It can be enjoyed plain, but makes an elegant medium for just about any flavor you'd care to infuse into it. It will accommodate a little extra sugar or a small amount of fruit pulp, liqueur, ground nuts, ground coffee or citrus peels. If you like really heavy stuff like pumpkin, whole fruits, whole nuts, chocolate or peanut butter, add a white to the mix.

2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
4 large egg yolks

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, set a small saucepan of water (or a teapot) over low heat.

Pour the cream into a small saucepan, along with any flavoring you'd care to infuse (vanilla, cinnamon stick, citrus peel) and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Immediately remove the cream from the heat and allow it to steep for 10-20 minutes, then strain through a fine sieve.

Meanwhile, whisk the sugar and yolks together in a medium bowl until they're light in color. Add the cream in a steady stream, whisking all the while. Pour the mixture into four 6-ounce ramekins. Place the ramekins into a roasting pan or baking dish.

When ready to bake, put on an oven mitt and open the oven door. Slide a middle rack half way out and gently place the baking dish containing the ramekins on it. Carefully pour in enough hot water to come half way up the sides of the ramekins. Slide the rack back into the oven and close the door.

Bake for 25-35 minutes, until the custard is just set (firm but slightly jiggly in the middle). Cool on a wire rack, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for several hours or up to three days.

Half an hour before you want to serve, remove the ramekins from the refrigerator. Take off the plastic wrap and spread a healthy tablespoon of sugar evenly over the top of each custard. Using a salamander or a blow torch, melt and lightly brown the sugar. Let the crème brûlée sit for 5 minutes, and serve.

Crème brûlée is one of those less-is-more desserts that really shines when it's done well. Like its name implies, crème brûlée is a French dish, dating to at least the early 1690's (though similar sweet custards were common in England and in Spain around the same time). It was first written down in French by chef François Massialot in 1691 in a book called Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (essentially "royal and bourgeois cuisine"). The title itself is notable, since chefs of Massialot's ability were almost always bound to one noble court or another. The fact that he wrote a book on noble and middle class cookery suggests he was some sort of proto chef-for-hire. An almost unheard of thing for the time.

The words literally mean "burnt cream" or "burnt custard" ("crème" can mean either one in French as I understand it). The "brûlée" of course refers to the fact that a thin layer of sugar is caramelized on top of the custard just before it's served, giving it a terrific, crunchy texture contrast. Just how is that caramelization achieved? By any one of three methods, but between you and me, I'd start shopping for blowtorches now.

Here's a classic. Some would argue it's an overdone classic, but how can anyone ever get sick of crème brûlée? And yes, I do have to use all the accent marks. Get used to them.

Another reader also named Suzanne, remarks:

That persimmon pudding batter was such a lovely orange color! The after steaming it was nearly black! You mentioned that baking soda ruins the color of persimmon, yet your recipe calls for it. Is there any way to make persimmon pudding whill still keeping that nice orange tint?

I'm honestly not sure, Suzanne, since I've never tried it. My feeling is that yes, if you were to use baking powder as a leavener instead of soda you'd probably preserve the orange color. One nice thing about using soda, however, is that even though it darkens the pudding (sugar caramelization is also responsible for some of it), it helps to neutralize any astringency that still might be present in the persimmon flesh, mellowing and sweetening it (salt accomplishes much the same thing, but who wants a salty persimmon pudding?). I myself don't miss the orange color. I like a dark-colored pudding.

Reader Suzanne writes in with this combination query/opinion:

Then, what’s the deal with Yorkshire pudding? Is it “pudding” because you can put stuff into it after it’s baked? Or because you can use beef drippings for the fat? To me, it’s a sorry, imploded substitute for a popover.

Now, now, Suzanne, I believe we put hostilities with Great Britain behind us with the Treaty of Ghent. However as to the first part of your question, I can't say I know for sure how Yorkshire pudding came to be classified formally as a "pudding." Over the weekend I devoted a little thought to the definition of pudding. I wondered if, even though the word pudding has come to stand for such a wide variety of food items, there was still some commonality between boudin, tapioca pudding, yorkshire pudding and persimmon pudding.

They're all cooked mixtures of several different ingredients, so there's that. None of them are prepared by the same method, however. Some are sweet, some are savory. Some contain meat, some don't. All vary widely in texture and appearance. One's either an appetizer or main course, another is a side dish, one a dessert and the last a special occasion sweet. The only thing I can come up with that's common to the group is that they all contain grain and they all contain fat. So...a cooked mixture containing grain and fat. Not exactly worthy of an entry in the Oxford Companion to Food, but there you go.

In Joe's Perfect Universe™ I suppose "pudding" would be a word that stood for a cooking method, sort of like the word "roast." It would denote a mixed concoction — either sweet or savory — cooked in a form by either boiling or steaming. That term would cover most of the foods that are truly in the spirit of the art, I think. Of course just about everything we know here in the States as pudding would have to be called something else. "Flop" or something, maybe. I dunno, I'm just throwing out ideas.

Oh, there's nothing like a warm slice of persimmon pudding on a crisp fall evening. Looking at this photo, you can see why a lot of folks confuse some puddings with cake. Indeed it has a crumb that's similar to, say, a dense Devil's Food cake. An English-style pudding is more sophisticated than that, though, at least to me. Easy as they are to make, they lend an air of elegance that you don't get from your average mix-and-bake dessert.

Here's how it goes. First combine your baking soda and water in a small bowl.

Add that to a larger bowl along with your persimmon pulp, eggs, vanilla and bourbon (or brandy or rum)...

...and blend.

Combine your flour and spices in a bowl and whisk to combine.

Next put the sugar and butter in the bowl of a mixer...

...and beat until combined and light in color. You can also do this by hand, of course. I'm just addicted to modern machinery.

With the machine on low, add half the persimmon mixture, then half the flour mixture and stir to combine. Scrape the sides of the bowl down. The batter might look a little lumpy and strange at this point. Carry on.

Add the rest of the persimmon mixture followed by the rest of the flour mixture. Continue to stir until the batter becomes smoother and more homogenous. Scrape the bowl and stir about 30 seconds more.

Now add your fruit and walnuts. Yes, I ran out of walnuts and mixed a few pecans in there too. It's been that kind of day.

Gently scoop or pour the batter into your VERY well-buttered pudding mold.

Prepare a pot for the mold. Notice how little water it takes to come halfway up the sides of a pudding mold. This is an 6-quart Dutch oven, and I've filled it to about 1/4 of its capacity.

Affix the lid on the pudding mold and insert it into the pot. Put the lid on the pot and set in on the stove top over medium-high heat. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce to medium-low and simmer for two hours. You'll want to check in every 20 minutes or so to make sure the water isn't boiling off entirely. If the level is getting low, pour a cup or two of hot water back in.

When a sharp knife inserted into the pudding comes out clean, cool the mold on a wire rack for about an hour and a half. It's cool enough when you can comfortably pick the mold up with your bare hands (don't try that for at least an hour). Make your hard sauce while you wait.

When you're ready, pick out a serving platter or plate and place it upside-down over the mold. Then holding both firmly, flip the mold and platter over. If all goes well, you'll shortly hear a light thwump, indicated your pudding has de-panned itself.

Gently remove the mold. Hopefully, you'll be looking at something not unlike this:

If the pudding doesn't turn out when you up-end the mold, first try knocking lightly on the sides of the mold with your knuckles. No luck? Try turning it back over and jiggling and jostling the pudding from side to side to loose it. If it still won't come out, a bamboo skewer inserted down the side can sometimes help loosen a stuck spot. If that still doesn't do it, picking up the upturned mold and dropping it from a hight of about an inch unsticks the stickiest pudding (so long as it's warm). If pieces stay stuck to the mold's interior, gently pry them off and stick them back onto the pudding. Odds are, no one will notice at the table. Those bits will fall off when you cut the pudding, but you can claim you just forgot to get the darn knife sharpened.

Serve each warm piece with a dollop of hard sauce on the side.

Michael from Oxfordshire writes:

Just a quick note about your puddings post - savoury suet puddings are still popular in England, with our national favourite being steak and kidney. And very delicious it is, too!

I've never tried it, but I have no doubt whatsoever. Thanks Michael!

Now seems a good time to put up a question I got about a week ago from reader Kati:

I've been curious about English-style puddings for years now but I'm told most of them have things like beef fat in them, which doesn't like anything I'd want to eat. If puddings are supposed to be sweet, why do they call for animal fat?

The answer to that is probably obvious by now. Sweet puddings evolved out of savory concoctions and suet (beef or mutton fat) is a vestige of that tradition. More than that, though, our forebears thought a little differently about sweets than we do today. This is especially true of country folk. Go back a handful of decades and you'd find that lard pie crusts were common. A bit further, say 100 years, and you'd find suet as an ingredient in everything from fruitcake to mincemeat. Press on even further and the line between sweet and savory baking would begin to blur, until you got all the way back to the Middle Ages when there was scarcely any distinction between them at all. Pastry as a craft that's devoted primarily to sweets is a modern concept, which is why I'm forever wanting to do more savory baking on this blog.

All that said, there's really no reason to steer away from suet as an ingredient in a pudding. Contrary to what you might expect, it doesn't make dessert taste like steak. And if you're worried about its health implications, studies are increasingly showing that solid fats like lard and suet are better for your arteries than butter. So dive right on in, Kati, it's good for you.

One thing everyone must have agreed upon back in the early days of puddings: they were a very good idea. I mean organs, blood and grain all stuffed into a bladder and boiled? What's not to love? Yet the big problem for pudding lovers of the time was that puddings were prisoners of seasonality. I mean let's face it, the average person didn't have fresh blood, guts and bladders lying around everywhere all the time. On the farm, animals were only slaughtered in cool weather to prevent spoilage (refrigerators being in very short supply in the first few millenniums before Christ). Thus at the dawn of the Age of Pudding, it would have only been a once-in-a-while treat.

It wasn't until the 1600's (A.D.) that puddings became regular fare. That was the time that "pudding cloths" were invented — simple pieces of calico that you could spoon a batter into, boil and reuse. They were great stand-ins for bladders, and freed puddings from the seasonal cycle they had previously been trapped in. That freed cooks of the day to get creative with pudding. Instead of the same old blood and guts, they were at liberty to experiment with things that were available at other times of year: eggs, vegetables, fresh and dried fruits, nuts...you name it. In this way, pudding evolved from a what into a how.

This is how the sweet pudding was born. And it remains with us to this day. Of course there are still plenty of black puddings out there, notably among the Scots who still place a high value on foods like haggis, which if you haven't tried...is completely understandable. To the South, in England, sweet puddings now reign, some of the most famous exemplars being items like plum pudding and Spotted Dick (no snickering, you in the back). Only very few are made in pudding cloths nowadays, most cooks having gone over to tin forms.

Quite a few pudding makers have even dispensed with the form entirely. Today we have puddings baked in shallow dishes, or prepared in pans over a flame on the stove top. Most of these bear very little resemblance to that thing that was once knows as a "pudding", yet they can all trace their roots back to the same, ancient cooking tradition.

Some 10 years ago now, when the missus and I were footloose and fancy-free, we packed up our car and took a three-week road trip to what Northerners like to call the "Deep South." It was a mysterious place to us, and we feared it a little. Until that point in our lives, neither one of us had ever been south of the Ohio river save for the odd family trip to Florida or Texas. Everything in between was strange, untrodden, kudzu-draped territory. That first day, we passed through Kentucky alright, but I remember my moment of anxiety as we crossed the state line into Tennessee. Part of me expected rebel cavalry to descend from the hills and minié balls to start pocking the windshield. That's how a silly Yankee thinks.

I soon realized how utterly wrong the northern stereotypes of the southern US were, and how welcoming, fun-loving and sophisticated people in the South really are. By the time we got down to Mobile we'd shed all our worries and were yucking it up in high style over elegant seafood dinners. From there we ate our way along the coast to New Orleans, slurping up all the gumbos, étouffées and jambalayas we came across. As we pressed on into Louisiana, we discovered crawfish pies and soft shell crab sandwiches so fresh you feared to put them down for fear they'd stage a getaway. Everywhere we went we cooed about the food to any local who'd listen. And every time we did, we'd get the same question: Have you tried boo-DAN yet?

Boo-DAN? What on earth could boo-DAN be? We puzzled over the question for days, but were too embarrassed to ask, since we had no concept at all of what it was. For all we knew it could have been a stew, a bread, a dessert or a Cajun sexual practice. Boo-DAN? It wasn't until I finally saw the word in print on a drive-through restaurant menu board that it made any sense at all to me. Boudin. Pudding.

It turned out that Louisiana boudin was a pudding of the classical type, a Cajun pork sausage made with liver and rice. And it was great. It had no blood in it (which was a great disappointment to the missus, who's loved black puddings she first tasted them in Spain) which technically made that particular Cajun boudin a "white" pudding (boudin blanc). Though I never saw them, I'm told that Cajun cuisine does include a black pudding (boudin noir) and even a red pudding (boudin rouge) that doesn't have quite as much blood as a black pudding (perhaps a nice mid-point for squeamish carnivores working their way up to the real thing).

For all those wondering why they should care what color Cajun sausages are, I should point out that it was the development of white pudding that ultimately led to that bowl of tapioca custard we're all so worried about. More on exactly how that happened soon.

The word "pudding", it's thought, comes down to us from the Latin word botellus which basically means "sausage." Boudin is how the word occurs now in French. Pudim is the Portuguese version, pudín the Spanish. Sound familiar? Thought so. But did tapioca pudding really start out as sausage? Yes. Sort of. Here it helps to take a brief — and very general — look at early days of sausage making.

Say you're a Bronze Age subsistence farmer living somewhere in Europe. It's fall and you've just slaughtered your pig. You've taken all the choice cuts off the carcass for the season's big feast, but you've still got plenty of other stuff left. The meat scraps you chop up and stuff in a casing with fat to make hard sausage that'll last maybe a year. But that still leaves you with the organs and blood. You hate to waste it, but that sort of offal will start to spoil in a matter of hours if it isn't either eaten or cooked. What to do?

There aren't any pots or pans laying about. The stable you're working in certainly isn't a kitchen. And anyway, it's the Bronze Age. So you pick out a bladder or a stomach, wash it in a nearby stream, and stuff it with the organ meat and blood plus and a few handfuls of grain or bread crumbs to bind the whole mixture together. You tie it up, boil it and presto — you've got a stopgap solution that will feed your family for week or more.

These were the first puddings. Known as "black" puddings today, they were distinct from typical sausages in that they weren't part of any long-term preservation strategy. Rather they were a short-term keeping tactic that prevented the waste of valuable protein. Here is where the origin of pudding starts to resemble the beginnings of pie, at least for me. Both were common methods for extending the shelf life of scraps and leftovers. The main difference is that where pies were baked, puddings were boiled.

So fine, pudding and pies, lovely. How do we get from there to tapioca??? More on that in the next installment. Gotta get some work done.

Reader Linda writes in with this discovery she made at a Whole Foods in Nashville, Tennessee:

After reading your posts on knishes last week, I was absolutely amazed to find knishes on the hot food bar at Whole Foods! They not only had the traditional one, but a veggie version as well and they looked exactly like your photo of the traditional knish. Well, I had to try one and it was just as you described it. Obviously someone there knows how to make them and must have been reading your blog as well. It was very exciting as I had never tried one before.

I'm not sure I can take credit for that, Linda, though I probably will at some point later today. If you liked those, then by all means try making them yourself. You'll be amazed at how good a homemade knish can taste.

Pudding is a problematic word for the dessert taxonomist. For depending on where you happen to be in the English-speaking world, it can mean quite different things. In England the word "pudding" can stand for just about anything sweet, especially if it's eaten after the main meal. What we in the States would call "dessert." If that's far too broad a definition, the American one is perhaps a bit too narrow. Here, "pudding" means a very specific sort of dessert: a custard, one thickened either with eggs or with a starch of some sort. It's not as though we don't understand when someone uses "pudding" to indicate a cake-like object, it's more that we just don't fathom the reason for it. It's a needless complication. Fancy talk.

That said, I've never known an American, once he or she has tasted a classic English-style pudding, to ever think it wasn't just plain fabulous. English puddings are rich, sweet and extremely moist, just the sort of item that folks like us love. In fact one could make the argument that the more exposure Americans have had to English puddings, the more we've tried to incorporate the aesthetic into our own layer cakes. Indeed, whereas once American cakes were measured by their height and lightness, today they're measured by density and richness. I personally lament that. I think we've pushed the idea of richness and sweetness way too far in over the last decade or two. But then it probably isn't fair to lay the blame for all that at the feet of English pudding. It leaves precious little room for the hard sauce.

Puddings are as much a method as they are a food. Making a pudding requires a vessel specially made for the purpose: a pudding mold (the standard is a 2-quart, which is what this recipe calls for). You'll also need a pot that will contain the mold with the lid on. A deep dutch oven should suffice.

4 ounces unsalted butter
7 ounces (1 cup) sugar
5 ounces (1 cup) all-purpose flour
1 cup persimmon pulp
1 tablespoon bourbon whiskey
2 eggs
2 teaspoons baking soda mixed with 2 teaspoons warm water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup golden raisins

Combine the eggs, persimmon pulp, bourbon, vanilla and soda mixture a bowl and set aside. In another bowl, whisk together the flour and spices. In the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle beat the butter and sugar until light in color. With the mixer on low, add half the flour, then half the persimmon mixture. Turn off the mixer and scrape the bowl down. Turn the mixer back on and add the remaining flour, then the remaining persimmon mixture. Scrape once again, and with the machine on low, stir in the walnuts and raisins.

Pour the mixture into a well-buttered 2-quart pudding mold and affix the lid. Put the mold in the pot and pour in enough water to come halfway up the sides of the mold. Turn the heat up to medium and bring the water to a simmer. Turn the heat down to medium-low and simmer for 2 hours, until a sharp knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Let the pudding cool (about an hour).

Prepare the hard sauce while the pudding is cooling. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle, beat 4 ounces of soft butter with 6 ounces of powdered sugar until fluffy. Beat in 1 tablespoon of brandy.

When the pudding is cool, unmold it, cut it into slices and serve with dollops of hard sauce on the side.

Business calls. I'll be out all day. Back with lots more about pudding on Monday. Great weekends all around!

It's obvious, right? The hachiya persimmon on the left is bright orange, firm and smooth while the one on the left is darker and starting to look like a balloon with some of the air let out. The skin looks a little loose, plus it dimples under the slightest pressure. That persimmon is ready to be made into pudding...if I can keep my grubby hands off of it that long.

...you can drink persimmons too? Plenty of Americans in the East and Southeast once did. As mentioned, persimmons, when ripe, are incredibly sweet fruits. Only dates contains more natural glucose. And where there is sugar there is (at least potentially) alcohol, yes? Those who were with me through last month's posts on apple cider know exactly how this process works. Juice a ripe persimmon and "'simmon" beer or wine are only a few ticks of the clock away. Both were extremely popular types of homemade hooch in 18th and 19th centuries.

Or at least that was the conventional wisdom back around the turn of the century in American persimmon country. Most people, it seems, had either forgotten or never knew all the potential uses for the persimmon. One region that never seems to have forgotten is southern Indiana. Especially the town of Mitchell, which hosts a persimmon festival every year. As it happens, Mitchell is almost literally a stone's throw from where the Pastry family is going to be spending Thanksgiving this year. I wish I could say I was going to be stopping by to sample the puddings and pies, and shake the hand of the Persimmon Queen, but alas it's been over for more than a month now. Next year for sure!

Not the cartoon character, the writer. Some scholars speculate that the persimmon was the fruit that the "lotus eaters" ate in The Odyssey. As you may recall from high school lit class, the land of the lotus eaters was one of the stops Odysseus made on his meandering trip home from Troy. On landing, his men disembarked and were immediately handed samples of a strange fruit by the layabout locals. The fruit turns out to be so delicious that the men immediately become dreamy and lethargic, forgetting all about their homes and responsibilities. Odysseus eventually drags them back kicking and screaming to the boats, where he's forced to tie them down to their rowing benches to keep them from diving overboard after more. That, my friends, is good fruit.

Of course no one today really knows what the magic "lotus" really was, or if the strange land Homer described even existed. The Odyssey is fiction, after all. Yet what keeps people guessing is that the land of the lotus eaters also appears in the writings of Herodotus, the Western World's first genuine historian. Herodotus claimed that the land was real — a peninsula somewhere on the North African coast. This has led many scholars to speculate that the "lotus" Homer wrote about was actually some sort of locally-occurring plant, a natural sedative or psychedelic. A mere fruit, they say, could never make a man fall into a hopeless stupor, forget who he is and what he's supposed to be doing. Whoever these people are, they've obviously never had a really good persimmon pie.

The missus never goes anywhere without noticing sweet things to eat. It's one of the reasons I married her. In addition to last week's knishes, she snapped a few pix of some interesting baking action in Manhattan. The first one isn't new, but it's one of my must-eats whenever I get back to New York: mini-cannoli at Veniero's in the East Village. I'd whack my own brudder (if I had a brudder) for a handful of those right now!

And of course New York is on fire for cupcakes these days. It has been ever since Sex in the City made the Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street more famous than even they wanted, probably. Cupcake mania has spread to many other spots since Sarah Jessica Parker and Co. started perching on the Magnolia's front bench. This place, Crumbs, has gotten quite a bit of attention for their cupcakes, and it's easy to see why. Those things are loaded!

Leave it to the missus to stop passersby and ask for photos of the foods they're carrying. These cupcakes are from a hot "dessert club" called ChickaLiscious. Only in New York.

Last we have an example of something that might best be termed "guerrilla baking." This is Scott Alexander, a musician from Brooklyn who is gaining notoriety for sitting on a green inflatable couch in places like Central Park and Union Square and handing out his own homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Why? To promote his music? Sort of, but mostly he says to make new friends. The way he sees it, friends make a great audience, so why not build an audience by making as many friends as possible? It's so crazy it just might work! Go Scott! Follow him ("Free Cookies NYC") on Twitter and/or Facebook.

It's a St. Louis thing, and boy do they love it. It can be deliciously rich or way, WAY over the top depending on where you get it. This week's New York Times food section has a good article on the subject if you're interested.

Most of the non-native persimmons that North Americans find in stores — when they find them at all — are hachiya persimmons. They're astringent, which isn't a bad thing so long as you consume them when they're ripe. But then that's the problem. Not so much that astringent persimmons don't ripen, but that there's no telling when they're going to ripen. For hachiya persimmons are like cats, they have minds of their own and do nothing in groups. Buy four or five together and one may ripen the next day, another the next week and another the next month.

What can you do to hasten the ripening of a hachiya persimmon? Nothing. Yes, you can put it in a paper bag in an attempt to concentrate the ripening ethylene gasses they give off. You can even put a big-time ethylene producer like a banana in there with it. That'll help some, but for the most part you'll still be at the mercy of the hachiya persimmon's own mysterious biological clock.

That's not a problem if you're the type that likes to be surprised by a perfectly ripe persimmon every once in a while. I sure do. The challenge then is to sneak the thing into my pocket without anyone noticing, then divert the family's attention long enough so I can skulk off to the garage or the basement with a spoon. What?

But what if you need a bunch of ripe persimmon flesh for a recipe? There you're stuck. For once a hachiya persimmon is perfectly ripe, it'll only keep a couple of days, even in the fridge. The solution, though rather unromantic, is to buy your persimmons well ahead of time and as they ripen scoop out the flesh, put it into an airtight container and freeze it until the next one ripens. In time — a couple of weeks, usually — you'll accumulate enough for your recipe. And yes, persimmon flesh freezes very well.

Fuyu persimmons, if you can find those, are usually ready to go right out of the produce bin. As for the American variety, you can ripen — "blett" — them yourself if they aren't edible when you pick them. Just put them in the freezer and let them freeze solid. When they thaw they should be ready to use. If not, repeat the process.

Persimmons come in two different types: astringent and non-astringent. Astringent varieties taste pretty much the way they sound: mouth-puckering to the point of inedibility — at least if they aren't completely ripe. It's the tannins, you see. Phenolic compounds that are enjoyable in small amounts (say, in good red wine) but offensive in concentration. When astringent persimmons are perfectly ripe they are incredibly sweet and jammy in the center. Hachiya persimmons are the most common astringent persimmon found in stores. Longer and more tapered than other persimmons (almost like a bell pepper) they need to be ripened to the point of extreme softness, almost mushiness, before they can be eaten. But when they get that way, Lord are they good.

American persimmons are of the astringent variety, which is why they're harvested extremely late in the growing season, after a few good hard frosts have "bletted" the fruit, rendering it soft and sweet. American persimmons aren't often found in stores, probably because by the time they're ripe they aren't terribly pleasant looking. If you want some, you usually have to go to a tree. But be quick about it, because humans aren't the only critters waiting around for persimmon season to start. Squirrels, possums and raccoons find them every bit as appealing as we do.

Of the non-astringent varieties, Fuyu are among the most popular. These you can eat like apples as soon as you buy them. They're also great in prepared desserts.

One of the things I personally love about the flesh of any kind of ripe persimmon is that it's a ready-made sorbet in a skin. You simply freeze the whole fruit and eat it (or scoop the frozen flesh out if you prefer). Another very interesting quality of persimmon flesh is that once it's pureéd, it can be whipped all by itself into a foam that will last for hours, making it outstanding for garnishes or toppings. Lastly, since persimmon flesh doesn't discolor when it's exposed to oxygen, a purée of persimmon will tint any cake or pudding orange (assuming it doesn't get overheated or exposed to an alkaline like baking soda). All in all it's an extremely versatile, underutilized fruit.

A roundish, orange-ish, sweetish fruit of about medium size (which is to say, neither largish nor smallish). Its skin is glossy like a tomato's, though that's pretty much where the similarity ends. Persimmons are unique in that varieties of them occur naturally all around the northern hemisphere. They're native not only to North America, but to Mexico and many parts of Europe, North Africa and Asia.

They vary quite a bit in size, taste and appearance depending on where you find them. In America persimmons grow in the eastern and southeastern part of the country, and as a rule are quite small, rather hard and usually dry (the word "persimmon" is in fact a Cree Indian word for "dry fruit").

Asian varieties, on the other hand, tend to be quite a bit larger and more succulent. This is why, when you go searching for persimmons in grocery stores, you usually find cultivars named things like kaki, hachiya and fuyu (hey, fuyu too, buddy!). Many of these varieties were imported to the West Coast in the 1800's, where they are still grown.

What do persimmons taste like? Not entirely unlike an apricot, though they can be a lot sweeter. They're also more gelatinous on the inside, which can give one the impression that persimmons are actually small containers of jam that grow on trees. That's how I think of them, anyway, at least when they're ripe. And therein lies the rub...

And no, not instant pudding, but English-style pudding. The timing on this is excellent, since we're getting into that time of year. It's hard to know where to start with pudding, since it's like trying to tackle the subject of "cake" with just one recipe. However I know what my personal favorite pudding is: persimmon. The persimmon happens to be in season right now, and as it happens, is a fascinating topic all by itself. So...shall we?

Having been blogging almost daily for some four years now, I've really gotten to know my readership. When I put up my Kentucky Knish post last Friday, I had every expectation that I'd be getting a lot of grief for it. Sure enough, within minutes the first complaints came trickling in. "Too flat", "too French","too fluffy", "too fancy", "on the line between knish and calzone", "not Jewish enough", and perhaps my favorite so far: "borderline racist." I was prepared for all that, so those shots just bounced off me like so many howitzer rounds off of Megalon, the giant subterranean insect terror. One email, however, managed to penetrate my meters-thick exoskeleton and strike tender flesh. It was this from reader Paula:

These travesties show very clearly that you have never made a real knish, nor have slightest concept about what a real knish is about.

Madam, I'll have you know that I did my baking training on Chicago's North Shore. So out of the way, please, baker coming through. I need to use the hand sink.

Using the standard knish dough recipe below, whisk together your dry ingredients.

Then make a well in the center and add your beaten egg...

...followed by the wet ingredients.

Bring the dough together with a spatula...

...then knead it lightly into a ball. It will be somewhat oily feeling. That's what you want. Let the dough rest and hydrate for an hour. It may weep a little bit of oil as it sits. That's perfectly OK.

Meanwhile make your filling. Here I've got three medium red potatoes (cooked), about half a cup of deeply caramelized yellow onions (one onion diced finely, cooked gently in two tablespoons of vegetable oil over low heat for a little over an hour), about a two-ounce blob of goat cheese (OK, not traditional), and a teaspoon of salt.

Mashed. This isn't nearly enough filling for this amount of dough, but it's a good "for-instance." Knishes are great stuffed with just about any leftovers you have in the fridge.

When you're ready to shape your knishes, generously flour a dough board. Pull off a piece of dough from the ball and start rolling. You'll find that as long as you use enough flour, it's a very flexible and forgiving dough that rolls out easily. Roll it out as thin as you can without the dough tearing. The precise shape of your sheet isn't important. A rough rectangle is just fine.

When the dough is nice and thin, apply a long mound of filling to the bottom edge. I'm making rather small knishes, so my filling mound is small. For bigger knishes, well, you know what to do.

Then — and you can probably see where this is going — enclose the filling to form a long roll.

Roll the dough up in the sheet, but not terribly tightly. Knishes tend to want to break open in the oven. A little slack will help prevent this. Since this dough sheet is very thin, I keep rolling until the tube has about two layers on it. Some people really go nuts in this step and roll their dough out even thinner so as to give the tube four or five flaky layers. Me, I'm happy with two. Some like a thicker crust in just one layer. It's really up to you.

When you've got as much crust on your knishes as you like, use a pizza cutter to trim off the excess. Add the scraps back to the dough ball for re-rolling.

Trim the excess, if there is much, from the ends.

Now to shape the actual knishes. This is very like making sausage. You want to pinch off about a three or four-inch length.

Give it a twist.

Then using your pizza cutter, cut it off.

The result is indeed like a small sausage. Pinch the ends shut to enclose the filling.

Turn the knish end-up on the pastry board...

...and with your palm push it down to form a squat cylinder.

Poke the top down with your finger to keep the center from crowning in the oven.

Lay the knishes out on sheet pans — these don't need any proofing — and either bake, refrigerate (up to three days) or freeze (up to three months).

When ready to bake, paint with egg wash...

...and bake 30-40 minutes at 350 Fahrenheit until the crusts are golden brown.

No concept of a knish. Indeed.

One of the nice things about this dough is how easy it is to prepare and store. You just mix it up, let it sit for an hour, and it's ready to use. Or, you can refrigerate it until you're ready to use it, up to several days.

11 ounces all-purpose (AP) flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup vegetable oil (very soft rendered chicken fat [schmalz], if you can find it, is even better)
1 tsp vinegar
1/2 cup lukewarm water

Whisk together your dry ingredients, beat the egg in a small bowl, and combine the vegetable oil, vinegar and water in a separate bowl or measure. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the beaten egg and the wet ingredients. Bring the dough together with a spatula, then knead lightly into a ball. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough sit for an hour at room temperature to relax and hydrate.

The nice thing about these sorts of brioche pocket pies is that they keep well and don't take much time to proof, only half an hour. Thus it's easy to make a large quantity and bake them off as needed. Once they're shaped, they can be refrigerated for a day or two, then simply removed from the fridge, allowed to proof, painted with egg wash and baked. Alternately the shaped pies can be frozen for two to three months. If you want them ready for, say, your kids' lunches in the morning, just put a couple of frozen knishes on a baking sheet the afternoon or evening before and put the baking sheet in the fridge. By morning they will have thawed, and will be ready for proofing and baking. Assuming you get up at least an hour before the kids leave on the bus, you can get them proofed and baked off with ease, then congratulate yourself as you watch your children walk out the door with a fresh-baked lunch. Ha! Top THAT Dinkelberg! you can say to yourself as you watch your neighbor's kid traipse forlornly out the house with his usual peanut butter sandwich. Already-baked knishes will keep well enough in the refrigerator for the next day's lunch, but don't provide the same kind of smug satisfaction.

That question from several readers so far. If so, what's below is a pocket pie. But you know, I can live with that. It's been a fun week.

As I've been saying, I don't make "authentic" knishes most of the time (I think I've cast reasonable doubt as to whether such a thing even exists). My little ones turn their noses up at traditional pocket pie crusts. I don't know if it's the color, the texture or what. Who can fathom the depths of a toddler's tastes? However they love brioche. And while brioche isn't as easy as a simple stir-and-roll pie dough, it tastes a lot better. It's also a very handy thing to have in your baking repertoire. There's a tutorial for it under Pastry Components.

Begin by generously flouring a pastry board.

Apply a lump of brioche dough, straight from the fridge (about half of your standard recipe)...

...and rolling it out very thin, about 1/8 inch

Apply a round cutter to the dough. Here I'm using a 3 5/8" ring, but you can go bigger if you like a bigger knish.

Apply a heaping tablespoon of your choice of filling. To go traditional, combine about two cups of cooked red potato with half a cup of finely chopped caramelized onions. Salt and pepper to taste. (Take it uptown by stirring in a couple of ounces of goat cheese.)

If meat is your thing, you can go that way, too. Sauté one small chopped yellow onion in a tablespoon of butter. Add half a pound of ground beef, lamb or — steady purists — pork. When the meat is fully cooked, drain off the fat. Lastly, add about a cup of diced potato that you've sautéed in butter until browned. Cool.

As I mentioned previously, my girls love country ham and cheese, which I guess makes this a true Kentucky knish.

However you decide fill them, apply another circle of dough to the top.

Press the edges down lightly to get the air out.

You can skip this next step if you like, though I find it useful for keeping the filling from spreading and/or leaking. Take a circle cutter just big enough to encircle the dough, turn it so the lip is facing down...

..and lightly press to seal the filling in.

Fold the edges in and press to crimp. I don't worry about form too much...

...because I flip them when I put them on the baking sheet. This gives me a smooth top without a seam.

Proof these for half an hour while you preheat your oven to 350. Apply egg wash and bake for 25-30 minutes until golden.

Don Cuevas at My Mexican Kitchen submits his green chile, potato & cheese knish recipe for you approval.

Why is that about 90% of New York City street vendors — like this friendly fellow here — reply as such when asked for a knish? The reason is twofold. First, the knish has nosedived in quality over the last several decades, especially the type sold from carts. That's brought demand for the knish way down. Second, health regulations changed. In 1996, pre-cooked potato was designated as a hazardous food item by the New York City health department. That meant that in order to be sold legally, any food containing cooked potato either had to be a) prepared on the spot just before serving, or b) held at a temperature of at least 140 until it was served. Since New York street knishes are fried, option "a" was out. I mean, try pushing an open vat of 375-degree fry oil down a sidewalk some afternoon. You'll quickly see why the world isn't full of mobile fish & chip stands. That left option "b", but not every vending cart is equipped with the right sort of holding cabinet. Space is quite limited on a street cart — believe me, I know, I've sold from them before. It's better not to take up space or add weight if you can help it, especially not for a slow-selling item like a mass-produced knish. Add all that up and you can see why the former king of the New York streets was long ago deposed by the pretzel and hot dog. Sure, there are still places to buy them, but the heyday of the knish is over.

"Knish" is a Yiddish word, Yiddish being a Germanic language created by Ashkenazi Jews who settled in and around the Rhine Valley about the year 900. It closely resembles two other words in current use today, the Russian knys which means "pastry" and the Polish knyz meaning "snack." Put those two together, and that's pretty much a knish. Were Old World knishes like anything like New World knishes? That's where the picture gets fuzzy. But then I'm not sure, save for a short period in the early part of the 20th century, that the concept of the knish has ever been in very sharp focus. "A (usually) baked snack" may be as precise a definition as I can muster. (Thanks to readers Chana and Jim).

Take heed all you just-married guys out there: this is the kind of dedication you engender when you're as good a husband as Joe is. The missus walked all the way down from 87th and Amsterdam to about 50th and Broadway, just to take a picture of a knish.

You know, honey, I'd have preferred that you'd opened the foil a bit more so the folks at home could see the squared corners of the slab, but don't worry, you're doing great! Keep hoofin'! At this rate I figure you can make it out to Knish Nosh in Queens by sundown!

As fortune would have it, Mrs. Pastry is in Manhattan today for a conference. This morning she went to my favorite Upper West Side eatery, Barney Greengrass, without me. I'll find a way to forgive her, but she did send me a picture of what I might term the "tart-style" knish they make there. Frankly, I think you're nuts if you go to Barney Greengrass and don't oder the sturgeon with scrambled eggs and caramelized onions. It costs seventeen bucks, but they don't call Barney the Sturgeon King for nothin'.

More knish pictures as fortune and circumstance allow.

Jim Chevallier, who is fast becoming the research arm of Joe Pastry Global Enterprises, submits this fascinating clip from a 1916 edition of the New York Times. I don't want to give too much away, save to say it's a ripping tale of knishes, a socialist congressman, gratuitous advertising and an oompah band. It's notable in that it doesn't reference Yonah Schimmel at all, but rather attributes the invention of the knish to one Mr. Green. Is this just an instance of reporter ignorance? Or an example of the winner (in this case, the last surviving knish maker in the East Village) writing his own history?

A smattering of emails overnight (mostly from Manhattanites) expressing their dismay over what they see as Joe playing fast and loose with the knish. I don't deny it, and in fact one of the email authors was quite correct when she noted that most of the time I stay pretty true to the original of whatever I'm demonstrating — so what gives? I can't muster up too much guilt over this, since as I've said, the knish is a mostly derelict form of bakery. And that, I think, gives me the right to attempt a little creative — dare I say even radical — revival. This line from reader Chana, however, stuck in my craw:

[This] raises the whole question of just how expansive a recipe (for anything) can be before it loses all connection to its origin and morphs into something else entirely

It's a very interesting issue, one for which the knish is an almost perfect case study. For indeed a knish can take just about any shape, be filled with just about anything, and cooked by just about any method. So wherein lies the knish's essential knish-ness? Does a knish remain a knish when you swap out a traditional filling for a more contemporary one? I think it's safe to say yes. What about when you change the dough in the wrapper? Again, I think, yes. What if you do both at once? Is that allowed? Maybe if you do it in the East Village, but maybe not if you try the same thing in Kentucky.

So we see there are an awful lot of factors that go into the concept of a food, even one as simple as a knish. There's shape, size, color, flavor, ingredients, cooking method, place, time, the intention of the preparer, perhaps even the identity of the preparer, and I'm sure there are still others. How many of those can you change before a given food is transformed into something else entirely? It's a question that probably isn't answerable, but it sure is a fun one to ponder.

It's like asking where bread comes from. Or more to the point: pie. The small pie — the "pocket pie" — just seems to be one of those good ideas that a lot of different people all came up with, more or less all at the same time. The Cornish had their pasties, the Spanish their empanadas, the Russians their pirozhki, the Portuguese their rissoles, the Scottish their bridies, the Italians their calzones, and the Eastern Europeans — especially the Eastern European Jews — their knishes. It was this group, it's thought, that first brought the knish to American shores, if by "shores" you mean the Lower east Side of Manhattan. It's there that the knish really caught fire, as it were, around the turn of the (last) century. The reasons why are easy enough to guess. They were cheap, hot and filling. And for bakers, they were an easy thing to make in great, great quantity.

One of the first people to get famous making knishes for the masses was a Romanian Rabbi by the name of Yonah Schimmel. He is credited with being the first entrepreneur to begin selling knishes on the street from a pushcart. In time he brought his operation to Coney Island, where, for reasons that are still not fully understood by scientists, he made a small fortune selling piping hot potato pies to sunbathers on 90-degree days. In 1910 he opened his now legendary knishery on Houston Street, and it stands there, still churning out Schimmel's classic knishes, to this day.

Dough and filling. Beyond that, interpretations vary wildly. There are round knishes, square knishes, tall knishes, flat knishes, oblong, ball-shaped, tube-shaped, knishes that look like miniature tarts or cupcakes, even bottomless, roll-style knishes that resemble cinnamon buns. The one rule seems to be that regardless of the way it's shaped, a knish has to be able to fit in your hand.

Fillings are almost always savory. The classic is mashed potato, usually with some cooked onions mixed in. Other time-tested fillings are cabbage, ground meat, cooked onions, kasha, cheese and sauerkraut (and if you're suddenly getting the feeling that knishes are of Eastern European origin, you win today's four dollar prize). Nowadays of course knishes can have just about anything in them. Spinach, tofu, sweet potatoes, smoked salmon, mushrooms, liver and onions, tuna, tofu, broccoli, pastrami, turkey, corned beef, asparagus...and those are just the more conventional varieties. Realistically, anything that can go into a pasty, empanada or pocket pie can go into a knish. Sausage, curry, black beans and rice, you name it.

As for the dough, classically it's rather lean and simple, on the order of a pasty dough. However knishes can also be made from laminated doughs like puff pastry or my personal favorite, brioche. Most are baked, but as I mentioned yesterday, they're frequently deep fried. Some of the trendier modern knish makers even grill theirs. Does that go to far? Eh, maybe. I'm not sure a grilled ahi tuna and wasabi pocket pie with a ginger dipping sauce qualifies as a knish. But then I'm not one to judge, since one of my go-to fillings is ham and cheese. Neither, I'm pretty sure, would have found favor in Yonah Schimmel's original Manhattan knishery. But then if the knish is anything, it's a utility pie, adaptable to just about any circumstance. So if you feel like filling yours with bacalao, or butternut squash, sage and parmesan cheese, I say, more power to you.

I didn't make it to New York City for the first time until I was 27. Over the next two years or so I got very comfortable with the place, but at first I scarcely knew where to begin. Eating. Sure, pizza. Yeah, bagels. OK, a Nathan's hot dog from the original stand on Coney Island. But the first thing I remember really wanting to taste was a knish. Then, I didn't even know what one looked like. I'd only heard about them in Woody Allen movies and Billy Crystal comedy routines. I'd grown up in a big city, so I had a baseline reference for the pizza, bagels and hot dogs. But Chicago, as a city, is essentially knish-less. So when the future Mrs. Pastry took me to my first knish bakery in lower Manhattan, I was excited.

It was mid-morning and the place had just opened. The smell of fresh baked...somethings hung heavy in the air. I picked out a fist-sized potato knish from a heap behind the counter and eagerly forked over my three bucks. The baker plopped it into a paper bag, stuffed in a napkin and a moment later I burst triumphantly out onto the street. I yanked my prize out of the bag, took a big bite and...

Hm. Potato.

And that was about it. I'd bought a baseball-sized wad of barely salted potato (plus a few caramelized onions) wrapped up in a slightly bland, rather pasty crust. It was nothing to write home about, and I confess I didn't even finish it. My next knish experience took place the next day, I got one — a flat, oblong thing with squared corners — at a hot dog cart on a corner near Times Square. It had even less flavor than the one I'd bought the day before, except it was deep fried. It resembled a McDonald's fried apple pie, but tasted much, much worse.

For the duration of my visit to New York, and for many visits thereafter, I didn't notice a knish for sale anywhere. But to be honest, even if I'd seen one I wouldn't have cared, having been let down two times in a row. It wasn't until roughly a year later, when I came upon a knish from the famous Knish Nosh bakery that I finally understood what a knish was supposed to be about. Yet even then it was clear to me that the knish was a fallen art form. A once-great archetype that had been abandoned by bakers and eaters alike.

It's still that way today. I dare say there are legions of people — may of them New Yorkers — who neither know nor care what a knish even tastes like. It's for this reason that when I make knishes, I don't adhere to form. I improvise, both with fillings and with wrappings. The way I see it, since the knish has been mostly left for dead, it's an aesthetic that's wide open for (re)interpretation. Purists may protest my rather "uptown" version of the ultimate downtown pastry. But eh, so sue me.

The last thing I made — before I was so rudely interrupted by Mose and his cider-squeezing machine — was a rather frilly bit of French pastry shop pastry: Opera Cake. How fitting then that I should return to my request list to find something that really puts the "Joe" back in Joe Pastry: knishes. For those of you who may never have encountered the word before, it's pronounced kuh-NISH, and it is (really, was) one of New York City's archetypal street foods. Knishes are fast-disappearing in their native environment. So now's as good a time as any to rally to the greater cause of the knish.

All you folks who've written in this fall requesting ideas for easy, home-baked school lunch items, you'll want to pay close attention. An argument can be made that knishes are less a legendary street food than a proto-pocket sandwich. So, I'll not only talk about how to make knishes (they're easy as pie...actually even easier than pie), I'll put forward some strategies for storing and baking them off in a fashion that integrates easily with a hectic family schedule.

So...two birds with one stone. And probably in record time. I've got a very busy week going here at Joe Pastry world headquarters. Posting may be a little light this week generally.

Speaking of strange cider rituals, this document, I'm told, details an old Welsh practice whereby a cake was placed on the head of a live cow, then a bucket of cider was poured over. If, when the cow shook its head, the cake fell forward, it meant good luck. If it fell back, bad luck. And here I've been flipping a coin all these years. What have I been thinking?

Thanks again to Jim Chevallier over at Chez Jim.

My post below unleashed a small flood of defiant emails stuffed with cider cake and cider bread recipes. I have only myself to blame. What I was thinking when I wrote what I wrote was simply that cider-based baking isn't something you encounter much in books, for the reasons I discussed. That's not to say cider is never used as an ingredient in baking. Being as acidic as cider is — at least on par with buttermilk — it reacts splendidly with baking soda. Thus there's no shortage of cider quick bread recipes out there. More exotic preparations containing cider also exist, I know. So please, no more. My cider recipe box is now full to bursting. Next time I have a surplus of the stuff, I'll know exactly what to do with it.

That excellent question comes from reader Troy. The answer is: I don't know. Sure, there are a few cider-based recipes in the baking world — cider doughnuts spring to mind — but by and large cider isn't something bakers use very much. Mix it into a dough or batter instead of say, water or milk, and you'll barely notice the flavor at all. The thing that makes a cider doughnut taste like cider is usually a) a little bit of cooked apple or apple sauce mixed into the batter, but mostly, b) a strong cider reduction made into a glaze or an icing. Otherwise it's generally the warmth and crispiness of a freshly-fried farm stand cider doughnut that makes one so memorable.

To make a cider doughnut glaze, reduce one cup of apple cider down to about 1/4 cup, then stir in about two cups of powdered (confectioner's) sugar.

Alternately, cider can also be made into a syrup to garnish a wide variety of fall desserts, from ice cream to tarts, crisps and pies. To do that, combine two cups of apple cider with 6 ounces of light brown sugar, 1 1/2 ounces of butter, two teaspoons of cider vinegar and a pinch of salt in a saucepan. Bring the mixture to a simmer and reduce it down to one cup. Cool and apply as you see fit. And should you feel like using hard cider instead of sweet to make your syrup, well, who am I to stop you?

Maybe it's the contemplative nature of autumn, perhaps its all this talk of cider and scrumpy, but I spent a good deal of the past weekend thinking about small town food traditions, especially the really odd ones I encountered while living in the Southwest of England. There it seems that every little hamlet you happen into has its own signature food or drink. Many of them are ingenious and delicious. Some are creative, but, er...well...

I remember one that furrowed my brow. I watched it being made, in my dorm, by a fellow named Trevor. Trevor was a quiet accounting student whose great ambition in life was to marry Grace Jones. He spent the entire fall term slowly pouring a bottle of 20-year-old port into a wheel of his home town's signature cheese. Every morning he'd remove a little circle of wax he'd cut out of the top, pour about a tablespoon in, and cover it back up again. By the next day the cheese had absorbed the port and was ready for more. I never got to taste it, since it was the one Christmas dinner responsibility his family entrusted him with while he was at school. However I confess that it always seemed to me like a waste of a perfectly good bottle of port and a fine wheel of cheese. I can see him in my mind's eye to this day, running off toward train the day before Christmas vacation, maroon scarf blowing in the Devon breeze, his port-soaked cheese swaddled in a towel like a baby.

Trevor's hometown tradition was completely conventional, however, compared to that of another classmate, Ian. In his village, he said, it was a centuries-old tradition to prepare a small cider barrel for every male child born in town. When the child turned one year old the barrel would be filled. However before it was sealed an entire ham would be put into it, suspended by a leather cord. The barrel would then be stored for 20 years, after which time the liquid would have reduced to less than half its original volume and the ham and cord would have disappeared completely. On the boy's 21st birthday a party would be held in which all the men in town would gather, open the cask and degrease their car engines with the liquor inside. No, that's a lie. Actually, he said, they'd drink it. I left Exeter before Ian's 21st birthday and never heard from him again. I presume because he was dead.

What I meant to say is that there is also a longstanding farm cider-making tradition in France, as reader Clair reminds me:

I live in a small French village in the heart of France and every year in October, there is a celebration of local autumn produce. Having read your post about apple juice and cider, I thought you might be interested in the pictures I took there last weekend.

The apples are pressed between two layers of clean straw which act as
padding on top and filter at the bottom. The resulting juice is either
sold as apple juice on the spot over the weekend or collected in
wooden barrels like those shown in the picture and left to ferment for
a while.

The apples are given by the locals (anyone with an apple tree is
asked to donate and all are happy to do so) and they get a free
taste in lieu of payment!

Now that's what I call a great way to spend a weekend! It looks very like what I saw twenty-plus years ago in the Southwest of England (though don't anyone tell those folks I said so).

And have I mentioned in a while what a delight it is keeping a blog like joepastry.com? To have readers around the globe who constantly offer up their own insights, information and (on occasion) photography?

What more could any food geek want? I tell you, friends, I am a lucky, lucky man.

You pretty much just let the squeezings sit. That at least is what early Americans did. Given time (ten days or so), yeasts on the skin of the apple go to work consuming the sugars and giving off alcohol. But that's just one possible way to go.

In some cider-making traditions the fermentation is carried out before the cider is even squeezed. Back in Devon, cider makers form the apple pulp into large, dense cloth-covered blocks that they refer to as "cheese". The blocks are left to sit for several days until the pulp ferments, at which point they stack the blocks under a large press and squeeze the whole works into a barrel. This is pretty much what "scrumpy" is. Filtered and refined it can be turned into clear hard cider, of the type you find in bars and liquor stores. Just how much alcohol does cider have in it? Anywhere between 3 and 9%, about the same as beer which averages about 5.5%.

The next step up the ladder in terms of alcohol content is apple whiskey or "applejack", which was a fairly big thing in colonial America. Applejack was mostly a poor-man's liquor, made by simply allowing hard cider to freeze in the winter, then taking off the ice. But while this sort of distillation was a fairly effective way of increasing alcohol content, it didn't necessarily produce either great flavor or consistent results. Which is why more sophisticated applejack makers employed steam distillation of the type used for corn whiskey. Nowadays, unfortunately, true applejack is very hard — if not impossible — to find. Distillers simply don't consider it worth the time and effort to make it. The cloyingly sweet stuff you find in stores is usually just apple brandy diluted with apple juice.

It is of course always possible to make one's own out of a large quantity of homemade hard cider. But then I would never do that. That would be illegal.

Other than because that's the way it makes you feel? "Scrumping" is actually a verb. It's what you do when you're passing by an orchard and it suddenly occurs to you that you're hungry, but have no money to pay for fruit. Since there's no one around, so you swipe it and run.

There are a few places left on Earth where it's possible to sample real farm cider. One of those is the Southwest of England, where I pleasantly passed a year of my undergraduate career. And when I say "passed" I mean only just barely, since so much of my time there was spent sampling Devon ales and ciders.

In that region of the country, the fresh-fermented elixir that starts appearing in the fall is called "farmhouse cider", or more colorfully, "scrumpy". Back in the 80's, my housemates and I would pick it up in unmarked plastic jugs at unattended roadside stands out in the countryside. You'd just leave your money in a bucket. Talk about a rough country brew, those ciders were green, cloudy, thick, and had a kick like a ram resisting a tetracycline shot. I know what you're thinking: what sort of idiot would drink whatever strange liquid some anynymous farmer left by the side of the road? Well, you're reading his blog. Anyway that's college for you. But oh Lord, if only I could have given back that third pint I drank at the birthday party my housemates threw for me that year. I suppose I did after a fashion, later on in the alleyway. But by then of course it was far too late. It was days before I got out of bed, and I gave scrumpy a wide berth thereafter.

Foodborne illness can come from just about anywhere. It can even be caused by a drink as seemingly wholesome as fresh-squeezed apple cider. Typically, the microbes involved are the usual suspects: Salmonella and Cryptosporidium, but on rare occasion the dreaded E. coli 0157:H7 rears its ugly head, and that can cause rapid serious illness and even death if consumed by young children or people with weak immune systems. In 1996 there were three E. coli outbreaks related to cider in the US, involving some 91 people. Fortunately, there were no deaths.

The infections came as a big surprise to the commercial food and drink industries, since it had been widely assumed up until then that dangerous microbes couldn't survive in solutions as acidic as apple juice. Yet studies have since shown that some pathenogenic bacteria can survive, at least for brief periods, in an environment with a pH as low as 2.0 (which is quite acidic, about on par with lemon juice).

But then how do these microbes get into apple juice in the first place? Salmonella and E.Coli don't occur naturally in fruit after all, they're typically only found in animals. The answer is that many cider makers, especially smaller operations, use fallen fruit for reasons that should be obvious from the below posts. And any apple that's on the ground can potentially come into contact with animal droppings, especially if the apple tree in question happens to be in a cow pasture. Not a pleasant thought, but there it is. Pasteurization will destroy all of these dangerous bugs, though as I've mentioned previously, it does change the flavor.

The additional step of fermentation, as I mentioned in the posts on hard cider, kills of pretty much everything, though nobody knew why hard drinks prevented disease back in the days before pasteurization. No wonder bakers and vintners of old, lacking any clue as to how microbes worked, simply referred to fermentation as "God is good".

To pasteurize locally purchased cider at home, simply put it in a pot and heat it to 185 degrees Fahrenheit. Try not to boil it, since the pectins will tend to clump up and sink to the bottom.

...a reader asks. And it's a good question. Squeeze a load of apple pulp and what comes out is fairly clear, fairly golden. It also has an unbelievably aromatic, crisp apple flavor. Yet give it a few minutes and suddenly it looks like the cider we all know: cloudy and brown, and with a noticeably duller (though still fabulous) flavor. What happened?

In a word: enzymes. Even though it looks like there's only juice running out of a cider press, there's quite a bit of apple flesh in there too, albeit in very small pieces. That flesh contains enzymes (non-living protein molecules that perform specific chemical tasks), many of which are designed to spring into action as soon as they're exposed to oxygen. Some of them begin disassembling molecules called phenols, transforming them into pigments which turn the bits of apple flesh brown (for more on why they do this, see this post right here). Thus the more bits of apple flesh that get left in the cider, the browner it becomes, which is why commercial juice makers go to great lengths to filter their squeezings as soon as they're, um...squeezed.

But then of course there are other ways of combating enzymes. Being proteins, they're senstive to temperature, and so can be "denatured" (i.e. "wrecked") with heat. This is a big part of the reason why larger cider and apple juice makers almost always pasteurize their product. The other reason is of course to kill off any dangerous microbes, but more on that later. The down side of heating apple cider is that it then gives you a "cooked" apple flavor, but the compromise can be worth the peace of mind, especially if you have small children. Me, I'll take my cider however I can get it.

So...are we clear?

It's the fickle nature of the apple, as much as anything else, that makes it the perfect fruit for juicing. For you see, apple trees are heterozygous organisms, which means they reproduce sexually and their offspring are rarely (if ever) perfect reproductions of one or other of the parents. That means that whenever you plant an apple seed there's no telling what sort of apple tree is going to come up. Sure it'll produce apples, but as to the quality of those apples...who knows? To produce consistent fruit for eating, an orchard requires years of careful attention and grafting.

And that was precisely the sort of thing that American pioneers were in no mood for, being largely preoccupied with building homes, cultivating land, tending animals, raising children and generally staying alive. Grafting apple trees? Who has time for that? But if the mongrel trees they put down in a corner of the back 40 happened to throw off a few bushels of cider apples each year, great! They coould be pulped and pressed, and consumed as cider months after the last eating apple had turned to mush in the root cellar.

Thus when it came to be cider making time, every sort of apple (provided it was edible) went into the same pot: big apples, small small apples, tart ones, sweet ones, red ones, green ones, hard ones, mealy ones, hopefully to emerge some weeks later as an at least drinkable cider. Over time those random blends evolved into "recipes" of sorts. Serious cider makers came up with formulas that called for X number of bushels of apples from this tree, X number from that one.

That tradition endures to this day. Hobbyist hard cider makers (and there are more of them out there than you might think) jealously guard their secret blends of sweets and sharps, bittersweets and bittersharps. The weekend's cider pressing wasn't nearly so discriminating. People mostly brought sweet eating apples. Squeezed, they were a pleasure to drink as juice. How they'll taste when they're fermented, I haven't the faintest idea.

Things are clearly tough all over.

This, friends, is one serious piece of apple squeezing hardware. An original "Kentucky Buckeye" cider mill, made by the Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company here in Louisville. It dates to probably the 1890's.

At that time, just about every family who lived in rural territory east of the Mississippi owned (or at least had access to) something like this. Mills of similar design go back to about the 1860's.

The mill has two work stations on it, a grinder at the back for shredding the apples and a big screw at the front for squeezing the pulp.

The operation is pretty basic. You put a few handfuls of apples into the hopper...

...and as the crank is turned they're ground up. The bits emerge below, dropping into a bottomless bucket situated on a plank.

When the bucket is full it's slid forward along the plank to the pressing station where a wooden top is put on and the screw wheeled down:

Then all there is to do is apply a little elbow grease. The the screw is brought down, the pulp is compacted, and the liquid gold then starts to flow.

Originally the machine came with two buckets which would allow two people to work the back station, loading and cranking while two more folks at the front station squeezed and poured off juice. My guess is that at full tilt a press like this could produce a dozen or more gallons per hour.

These days, only two people work Mose's mill at any given time, one at each station (and they're usually at least partly inebriated). However I should mention that a third station has evolved over the years, just to the side of the main operation. It's this chair:

...in which a third person sits and tells the other two how to do their jobs better.

In the rest of the English-speaking world, the term "cider" means an alcoholic beverage made from fermented apple juice. It's only here in America that "cider" has come to mean fresh-squeezed apple juice (a thing known as "sweet cider" elsewhere). The reason for that is something we'll get into a bit later, for now the critical thing to know is that cider wasn't always the seasonal refresher that it is today. Once it was a vitally important year-round drink, in the British Isles as well as America.

Though nobody can say where cider drinking first originated, the first recorded instance can be found in Roman logs that date to about 50 BC, the time when the first legions arrived in England. There the locals had been tying one on around the old apple tree for quite a while. Apples didn't originate in England, however. They came from Central Asia, somewhere in modern-day Kazakhstan. They travelled the Silk Road with ancient traders probably as far back as 8,000 or 10,000 BC. Some of those folks, I think it's safe to assume, figured out that apples could be squeezed and the juice fermented.

But the English are the ones who really refined the art. By the colonial period cider was such a popular beverage that colonists were bringing apple seeds by the caseload to the far corners of the Earth, including America, where the cool climate was just about perfect for them. But of course those apples were for eating, you might be tempted to think. By no means. People did eat the fruit, but apple orchards in America were planted primarily for cider. Why? Well for one because there was nothing else to drink, especially on the frontier. Natural water sources like streams, ponds and lakes weren't always trustworthy, tainted as they were with biological contaminants. Alcoholic cider, by contrast, was safe. Which is why it was a common daily drink for children as well as adults.

Cider making was practiced in America as far back as the early 1600's, especially east of the Mississippi. West of the great river, cider was less popular. The reason being that apples didn't grow very well in the more arid parts of the country. And anyway more than a few of the immigrants who settled those parts were German. They mostly grew grain, so, their children mostly drank beer.

Cider remained a critically important — and popular — drink in the eastern US well into the 19th century, up until the arrival if the temperance movement in the 1880's. Then, women (and indeed they were mostly women) armed with bibles and hand axes roved the landscape chopping down orchards and sermonizing against the demon apple. It wasn't until a several decades later that commercial apple growers were able to fight back with a new marketing campaign: "An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away." The apple has been a symbol of health ever since.

It's that time of year again here in Kentucky: cider squeezing. And happily for the Pastry family, this past Saturday we were again invited to the hilltop home of my good friend Mose for his annual cider making party. He has a cider press that's been in his family for maybe 100 years, and every year it gets a workout. This year was a bit different, since in addition to the cider press, Mose made the mistake of putting out a keg of good beer. The predictable happened. Everyone stood around and drank the beer instead of juicing the apples. So the sun went down on Saturday to the sound of the fiddle and the banjo, with very little cider having been pressed. But the sun has a way of coming back up again, and Sunday afternoon I found myself standing back up on Mose's hill — sober — next to a pile of apples as big as a car. But hey, once you're in you're in.

Here I should insert that everyone who lives in Kentucky should have a friend named Mose. Better still that he should own such an historic (and useful) piece of Americana, for there truly is nothing like the taste of fresh-squeezed apple juice right off the press. But then fresh apple squeezings really aren't the point of a cider press...just a fringe benefit. What Mose had in mind, just like his ancestors before him, was something a bit more adult. A bit more Kentucky. But more on that as we move along...

Reader Jo writes:

Perhaps you already knew this, but I just discovered for myself that the same technique you showed for fixing siezed chocolate (mixing in a little water) works really well for rescuing split mayonnaise as well. I had only ever encountered the standard advice about using another egg yolk to save split mayonnaise, but when this unfortunate thing happened to me yesterday, it occurred to me that it might be worth trying what you recommended for chocolate. And it worked beautifully! I just wanted to thank you for the inspiration to try this.

Great improvisation Jo, and I'm glad it worked! But it's true, if an egg emulsion isn't to far gone, a little warm water will fix it. Once it's completely separated, however, the old egg yolk method is pretty much all you can do.

I always put my foot in it when I express opinions. An email or two asking that essential question floated in overnight. The answer is I don’t buy food magazines all that much. When I remember, I’ll renew my on again-off again subscription to Cook’s Illustrated, the content of which, as you can probably guess, is right up my alley. (I’m still undecided about editor Christopher Kimball, whose unapologetically elitist response to the fall of Gourmet still has me baffled).

Once upon a time I had a flirtation with Saveur, though it didn’t last long. That magazine always had a nice look and great photography. Its editors also deserved a lot of credit for broadening the world of food beyond the borders of France. Yet they never seemed to be able to resist the temptation to make their readers feel like jerks for not being as sophisticated and authentic as they were. I’m here in the desert of Morocco eating locally-made couscous out of a hand-thrown tagine…

Bon Appetit, Gourmet’s major competitor, continues to make bank for reasons that are fairly obvious: it churns out page upon page of well tested, easy-to-understand, quick-to-prepare recipes without much fluff or pretension. It’s nowhere near as “literary” as Gourmet or Saveur, but it’s a cooking magazine first, a travel and lifestyle magazine second. I like to pick it up from time to time because a scan of the recipes will tell you — in about two minutes’ time — what the popular trends are in food.

But I suppose the honest answer is that if I were truly sold on a cooking magazine I wouldn’t be blogging every day. If you can’t find anything you like to read — write it! Or so the old adage goes. I guess joepastry.com is — save for all the spelling and typographical errors — the cooking pub I really want to read. I’m very glad and grateful that there are others who feel that way too. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Another 50K yesterday. It's getting crowded in here.

I've received several notes from readers over the last ten days asking me if I had any comment on the demise of Gourmet magazine. One in particular asked if, as a member of the "new food media", I felt in any way guilty about it. I confess that was a bit of a laugher, though very complimentary in its own way. It would be quite an exercise in self-flattery to think that I'd gotten big enough to have an impact on Gourmet's readership, or that I'd become enough of a pest to make Ruth Reichl's enemies list. I confess latter is a pretty entertaining thing to think about, if only to speculate on what sort of hit she'd put out on me. Have me drowned in a vat of roasted red pepper aïoli, perhaps.

Really, I don't feel one way or another about the demise of Gourmet because I never read it. Truth be told, it always seemed like the food magazine of another generation. Which is not to say I consciously considered it stodgy, more like that it belonged to somebody else. The flamboyant cursive of its masthead always made me think of early 60's women's fashion, of ladies' lunch groups dressed in pink woolen suits and pillbox hats. The food magazine Jackie O would read. Cultured, refined and urban, utterly captivated by all things French.

I know the magazine evolved beyond that over the years, but I could never shake the conviction that Gourmet was a provincial publication. Top quality, make no mistake, but one that was mostly by, and mostly for, people who lived in New England and New York. Dispute that idea if you will, but I think there's merit to it. The question then becomes: can a provincial magazine survive in times like these? When people no longer look to solely to New York for their cultural cues? When the province of New England has been hit especially hard by a severe recession? The answer, it's clear, is not. Some have said it's because Gourmet's editors forgot they there was a wider world out here. I myself wonder if they ever really knew it to begin with.

A few of the true Opera cake cognoscenti out there have emailed me over the last several days pointing out that I left instructions for creating a truly "authentic" Opera cake out of my tutorial. That's true enough if you don't consider an Opera cake to be an Opera cake without with the name "Clichy" or "Dalloyau" written on it in chocolate. Me, I'm just as happy to let those guys do their own branding work. But in the event you want to dot every "i" and cross every "t" when assembling your cake, you can create a small round chocolate seal in one corner of the cake by pressing down a small blob of molten (tempered) chocolate with a bottle top and piping "Clichy" on it — in cursive — in chocolate icing. Alternately, you can also just write "Opera" in chocolate on each individual slice. That, I believe, is also acceptable in Opera cake purist circles. Judges?

Fifty thousand page views yesterday. All as a result of StumbleUpon again. Someone there put up my chocolate chip cookie tutorial and, well, let's just say I'm glad I have an ISP that can deal with that sort of volume (much as I wanted to kill them a month ago). So settle in all you new arrivals. Hang up your coat and have a look around. Oh, and try the doughnuts.

So at long last we get around to the Opera cake tutorial I've been meaning to put up for a week. What can I say, I'm easily distracted by food science. And chocolate, well, it's terribly interesting stuff. You'll thank me for all those posts later, I promise you.

So then, Opera cake. If at all possible, I suggest that you make up all your various components on one day, then build the cake the next. Because let's face it, it's easy to get worn out over the course of a lengthy baking or cooking project. Enthusiasm wanes with time and impatience sets in, and that opens the door to potentially catastrophic mistakes. Separating the stirring and baking phase from the building phase not only gives you a breather, it makes the assembly a whole lot more pleasurable. All the components including the joconde will keep just fine at room temperature overnight.

Begin by trimming the edges off your two joconde sheets. Once that's done, measure them and cut them in half. The exact dimensions are less important than making sure they're all the same size. You want four layers, which is traditional for an Opera cake. You want the "up" side of the joconde layers (when they were finished baking) to remain their "up" side, as they're more porous and will more easily absorb the syrup.

Job one is to apply a thin scraping of melted chocolate to the underside of the bottom layer. Remove it to a separate sheet of parchment, flip it over and spread the good stuff on. Let it firm for a few minutes, then place it in the refrigerator for a few more. What will this do? Besides adding still more deliciousness, it will ensure that the cake doesn't stick to the cake board when it's time to slice and serve. (This is an excellent, consequence-free opportunity to practice your tempering, should you be so inclined).

Flip it over onto your cake plate or cake board (here again I'm going traditional and using a decorated board).

Gently peel the parchment back, center it on the board and you're ready to go.

First thing, apply coffee syrup to your layer, and don't be shy about it. I know what I've said about cake syrup in the past: it's overused. However in this context you really want to go hog wild. Thoroughly soaking the layer will give the cake the melt-in-the-mouth texture that Opera cakes in Paris are known for. Pastry chef Camille, who works in a Paris pâtisserie and makes these cakes regularly, tells me the layers should be soaked until they're brown all the way through. So no genteel paintings of syrup. Go Jackson Pollock on the sucker.

And now for your first layer of buttercream. Take your time, and pay special attention to the edges. As with all icing and/or topping jobs, the tendency will be to pile all the good stuff up in the middle. Spread the buttercream slowly and deliberately, eyeballing it from all sides to get it as even as you can. You want it about a quarter inch thick.

Apply your next layer of cake.

Soak it.

Now it's time for your middle layer of ganache. Oh yeah. Spread it thinner than the buttercream. Just a covering will do.

Apply the next layer of joconde.

Do I need to tell you what to do?

Another quarter-inch layer of coffee buttercream. Again, check for evenness all the way around as you apply it.

Then the top layer of cake. Edges getting a little sloppy? Don't worry, you'll trim those off later. Check again for evenness. If you have any obviously high spots, it's OK to press them down a little with your palm at this point.

Soak, soak, soak.

And now for the top. Here you want just a thin scraping of buttercream, mostly to fill in any pits so the tempered chocolate top will lay on smoothy. Now's a good time for a beer break, if you were wondering.

Prepare your tempered chocolate according to the tutorial. Or, if you just want to melt some bittersweet chocolate and put it on, that's fine too (if you've gotten this far, you've already done one heck of a job). Spread it on promptly and thinly

Let the chocolate firm at room temperature for about ten minutes. Then, using a knife you've heated under hot tap water (then dried) slice off the edges to reveal the layers. (Keep and hide those trimmings, kids. The pastry chef deserves a secret, greedy coffee break sometime in the next day or two).

Looks pretty good. Maybe not an Opera cake for the ages, but pretty darn decent.

Once that's done it's time to score the top so it doesn't shatter later when you want to cut it. Again, heat a long knife under hot tap water, dry it, and do your business.

Pieces can be any size you like. Here I'm dividing the cake into eight. As rich as this cake is, these pieces are huge. Ten would have been better, but oh well.

Now's the time to put your Opera cake in the refrigerator while you nip on down to the corner store for a little edible 23-karat gold.

What.

Edible gold. You get it at the Quick Mart. Second shelf on the right next to the oatmeal. What sort of neighborhood do you live in? I'll admit it's tricky stuff to handle. You don't want to touch it with your fingers, since it'll stick and disintegrate when you try to peel it off. I use two x-acto knives as implements to cut and steady it, then just transfer pieces — of whatever shape — over to the cake. Not very elegant, but gold makes a statement whatever shape it's in.

Your Opera cake can now be refrigerated for a day or two if need be. Opera cake is best slightly chilled. Ideally not refrigerator-cold, maybe an hour or so out of the fridge. When you're ready to serve, separate the pieces (again with a warm knife) and transfer to plates. Ah yes, the chocolate-on-the-bottom trick worked splendidly, did it not?

Thanks to Camille Malmquist for all the great advice, and to a very generous benefactor for the precious metal — and a terrific suggestion!

Not being a rocket scientist, but rather one who pretends to be one, I'm always impressed when the real thing walks into the room. Here reader Aaron, an apprentice chocolatier who really has a handle on how to make a suerior ganache, weighs in. All those who aspire to use ganache to make candies like truffles, you'll want to pay close attention.

If I may submit a few tips on making a ganache. In my opinion, it is actually easier to think of a ganache as an emulsion, rather than as a crystal. While crystallization does play a part in creating the perfect ganache, a proper emulsion plays a far larger part.

The bloom you see on the top of a ganache is like the drops of oil you see floating on an improperly made vinaigrette. Add some mustard, whip it up, and voila, no drops. Ganache contains mainly water and fat so at best, the mix is unstable. Add cocoa solids, lecithin and milk solids and the strangers at the party start talking.

The best weapon employed in creating the perfect ganache? A stick blender. Use the mixer to emulsify at 91.5 degrees Fahrenheit (33C), not below to avoid fat coalescence, and make sure that when mixing, no air is incorporated (blade cavitation is bad news, so keep it immersed). Mix until the ganache is super shiny with no fat smears and it just starts to appreciably thicken.

I have never used clarified butter and I don't know why recipes call for it. Butter in it's natural state is the perfect emulsifier (Mcgee wrote about this in some long article about Hollandaise). With clarified butter, one benefits by lowering moisture activity, extending shelf life and and gaining the ability to add the butter with the hot cream. One loses powerful emulsifying agents, fresh taste and a bit of je ne sais quois (I think it's called melty-ness). The trick is to let the ganache cool to 93 degrees (34C) before adding ROOM TEMP butter and them emulsify. It's not good if the butter goes in, melts and separates, and then ruins the emulsion.

The ganache should never rise about 93 degrees (34C) so as to not lose the temper in the chocolate. Between 89 degrees and (32C) and 73 (23C), it should not be touched. And then below 73 (23C) it can be molded. Always enrobe above 91.5 (33C). To summarize:

1. Boil cream and sweeteners
2. Infuse flavorings
3. Pour over tempered, room temp chocolate
4. Let sit for 5-10
5. Stir, starting in the center to get an emulsion and then moving outward
6. Add butter when cooled to 93 degrees (34C)
7. Zap with immersion blender until shiny
8. Pipe at this point if desired
9. Don't touch while cooling (no fridge)
cut at this point

Fabulous stuff. Thanks Aaron! I'll file this under the permanent ganache tutorial for future reference.

You know how it goes. One minute you're happily stirring a batch of melted chocolate, dum dee dum dum...

...and all of a sudden it starts to darken and thicken mysteriously. What the...? It seems to shrink in volume and looks oddly greasy.

Then in a few seconds it's seized up into a thick, putty-like chocolate goo.

What caused this? The answer of course: a small quantity of water somehow got into the bowl. Typically this sort of thing happens when chocolate is being melted over a double boiler, and water vapor or drops of condensation find their way into the pan. It's just one of the reasons I prefer a microwave. Can anything be done about this?

Yes indeed. More heat? Nope, the chocolate's already melted, even though at the moment it doesn't look that way. More heat will only burn it. The answer is more water. Are you kidding, Joe? It's water that got me into this mess!

That's true. A small amount of water caused the problem. A larger quantity of water will solve it by creating more syrup and allowing the molten chocolate mixture to flow again. So we just add perhaps a spoonful or so of hot water...

...stir, and a few moments later we're pretty much back to where we were. Pretty much. The chocolate has some water in it now, so it's not so good for something like tempering. However it's perfectly good for ganache, a flourless chocolate cake, or any of a thousand other uses.

Whew! That was a close one...

Another good question in a long list of chocolate queries (I swear I really did make an Opera cake, shortly I'll put up the pictures to prove it). Melted chocolate "seizes" when it comes into contact with small amounts of water. The question is: why? The answer is that melted chocolate is a flowing mixture of fat, cocoa solids and sugar that's easily upset. It contains almost no water at all, but when a small amount is added, several things happen. First, the sugar in the matrix grabs hold of the water (sugar does that) and a syrup is created. That syrup is quite sticky and it acts like glue on the cocoa solids, causing them to clump together. The result is that the molten chocolate stops flowing and turns into a grainy paste. Can anything be done about it? Funny you asked that. It just so happens I have my camera handy...

That from reader Victor on the tempered chocolate glaze recipe below, which calls for a small amount of clarified butter. The reason has to do with the "fat bloom" I mentioned yesterday. Just as a refresher, fat bloom is what frequently happens when melted chocolate isn't tempered properly, then re-solidifies. The random, unstable crystal formation causes additional liquid cocoa butter to leech out of the chocolate and crystallize on the surface of the mass. It's a phenomenon just about everyone has seen: those gray streaks.

Clarified butter provides extra insurance against fat bloom by introducing different kinds of fat molecules to the mixture (dairy fat as opposed to cocoa fat). The dairy fat molecules have a different shape than the cocoa fat molecules, and so interfere with the cocoa butter's ability to form crystals. It's like adding a bunch of Lincoln Logs to a mass of LEGOs. The two just don't fit together. Of course, properly tempered chocolate doesn't bloom. But then we're not all — ehem — precision chocolatiers.

Yesterday a reader and I indulged our very geekiest sides as we briefly discussed the way in which crystallizing molecules give off heat as they change phase from liquid to solid. But did you know the process works in reverse as well? Crystals that change phase from solid to liquid (which is to say, melt) actually absorb heat. This is known as an endothermic reaction and it's what's behind chocolate's oft-touted ability to cool your mouth while you eat it. It's not just a marketing ploy. It literally does it.

Ganache isn't strictly speaking temper-able, but the rate at which ganache cools and the types of crystals it forms are important. The more of the stable, "Form V"-type cocoa butter crystals you have in your ganache, the better its consistency will be. For that reason, a ganache should always be allowed to cool slowly at room temperature, and never cooled quickly in the refrigerator. Classic ganache, which is made of a 50-50 mixture of chocolate and heavy cream, is quite soupy when it's made, then is traditionally left out on the counter overnight before it's used. Several hours will suffice, though purists may howl. What does a long, slow cooling do for a ganache? It gives it a smoother, less grainy texture and prevents it from becoming greasy with separated cocoa butter.

Reader Aaron writes:

Quick thought about the tempering of chocolate. As you note, refrigeration messes with proper crystallization. However, as crystallization is exothermic, for molded chocolates (especially with poly-carb molds), it helps to pop the chocolates into the fridge about halfway through the cooling process in order to draw out some of the heat. As the formerly abused stagiere of a Chocolatier, I can vouch for the tip having learned the lesson the hard way.

Great tip, Aaron! Thanks! Your comment about the way in which substances give off heat as they crystallize reminded me, funny enough, of the Hoover Dam. It's said that the 4+ million cubic yards of concrete that the dam contains are still hardening, and that to this day the dam is still giving off heat. Call me crazy, it's just how my mind works.

Reader Paul C. writes in with this:

I was very interested to read your pieces on tempering and fat crystals. Does the fact that unstable [crystals] form at a lower temperature than stable crystals have anything to do with the softness of untempered chocolate?

An excellent question, and the answer is yes, it does. The forming temperature of a crystal is the same as its melting temperature. However they'll start to soften at still lower temperatures. Unstable crystals thus contribute to the softness of untempered chocolate in several ways. Their structure is fundamentally weaker, but they're also softer at room temperatures. On a similar note, reader Natasha observes:

The last time I made a chocolate ganache and covered a cake with it (it had slightly more chocolate than cream), after a day uncovered in the fridge it was basically hard, and had that "brittle snap" when you'd cut into it. So isn't this the same thing? I guess I'm confused as to why temper it at all. And in which cases you'd need to temper it.

Indeed, refrigerating untempered chocolate does make it brittle, for at around 37 degrees even unstable fat crystals will be quite rigid. The whole point of tempered chocolate is to create and retain that brittle texture at room temperature. Without it, chocolate-coated candies like truffles wouldn't hold their shape (or have a shine) in the candy case. Certainly, tempered chocolate is an optional extra for a pastry like an Opera cake. It's not strictly necessary, and indeed many Opera cake recipes leave it out entirely. However it is a nice-to-have in that it provides a textural counterpoint to the cake, which is almost totally soft and velvety otherwise. The crisp edges and subtle luster of a tempered top also make a nice presentation.

Tempering also helps prevent the gray streaks that can appear on a large expanse of re-hardened chocolate, which is a result of what's called "fat bloom" (basically cocoa butter leeching out of the chocolate and crystallizing). So, in answer to the last question, tempering is usually desirable in any pastry or candy application that features an exposed, pure chocolate surface.

That question from reader Dennis. The answer is yes, it is. Steel tempering involves manipulating temperature to produce crystal structures that are stronger and more stable that they'd otherwise be. It's a more complex process, but the principle is the same.

Reader Greg writes in with this tip on maintaining the temperature of a batch of tempered chocolate:

I have tempered chocolate using the seeding method and found it really a difficult process. On a “Good Eats” episode, Alton Brown used a heating pad to melt and maintain the chocolate at the correct temperature. I tried this with some truffles and it worked quite well and was much less finicky.

The best way to learn how to temper chocolate is just to do it a few times. It doesn't take very long, maybe twenty minutes including set-up, then maybe half an hour to an hour for the chocolate to harden, depending on how thinly you spread it. I suggest simply practicing on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Two or three times through the process and you'll be a pro. All the temperatures I've listed assume you'll be using bittersweet chocolate, which is the most common chocolate for pastry coatings.

Start by breaking up some chocolate bars into small pieces and putting them in a bowl. I recommend bars for tempering as opposed to chips. Firstly, because I don't completely trust that chips are made from the same quality chocolate that bars are. Second, because there aren't terribly many varieties of bittersweet chips on the market and I like to pick my product. I have a four-ounce bar in here:

Next, set up two bowls of water that will hold the chocolate bowl easily. One hot, one cold. The hot should only be hot to the touch, not boiling. Good hot tap water is fine. The cold water should be cold, but not ice water. You don't want the chocolate cooling down too fast or the desirable (known as Beta V form or "Form V") crystals won't have time to spread. Cold tap water with a few ice cubes thrown in, I find, is ideal.

The microwave, in my opinion, was invented for melting chocolate. It's a far better tool for the job than a double boiler. Zap the bowl on high for twenty seconds. Stir, and apply as many more ten-second bursts (and stirs) as necessary until the chocolate reaches 120 degrees Farhenheit. Try not to go over.

Oops, I did. Oh well, bittersweet chocolate can handle a little of that. No problem.

Immerse the chocolate bowl in the cold water and stir, being careful not to splash (you don't want to get any water in the chocolate or it could "seize"). The chocolate will thicken as crystals begin to form.

Keep stirring until the chocolate gets down under 84 degrees. It'll take about five minutes. Is it a bit under temperature? Eh, that's not the end of the world, either.

Now move the bowl to the hot water and guess what? Stir.

You're shooting for a range between 89 and 91 degrees, and you need to be precise. I took mine out of the water bath when it was 89 and it carried over (which is to say it continued to increase in temperature) almost two degrees. You'll want to be mindful of that.

Now just spread your chocolate out on the surface of your choice and wait for it to cool down. Here I'm using a sheet pan as I suggested and you can see I didn't do much more than pour it out. The chocolate appears a little dull here, but I was gratified to find that it had a very nice brittle snap when I broke (and ate) it an hour later. Sadly, I can't think of a way to demonstrate that over the internet.

Something to avoid is putting tempered chocolate into the refrigerator before it's hardened completely. As I said, gentle cooling is what gives the chocolate time to form a uniform crystal structure. You want to avoid spreading tempered chocolate on a refrigerated cake for the same reason.

It's easy to lose your cool trying to create a perfectly tempered batch of chocolate. I know I usually do. The thing is, professional chocolatiers have high-tech mechanical temperers that keep melted chocolate at just the right temperature for hours at a time. The rest of us have to make do with the tools we have available: bowls of hot and cold water, a thermometer and our wits. The good news is that while tempering itself is a precision sport, chocolate itself is infinitely forgiving of mistakes. Which is to say that if you fail to get the texture you want, you can simply melt the chocolate back down and try it again. And again, and again.

There are three possible methods for tempering chocolate. Only one of them is really practical for the home baker.

The first method simply involves slowly melting previously tempered chocolate at a perfect 89 degrees Fahrenheit (the melting and forming point of the ideal "Beta V form" cocoa fat crystal), maintaining it at that temperature, then applying the chocolate as desired. Sounds easy, right? Nope. Until the day arrives that we all have our own sous vide water circulating equipment in our kitchens, we'll never be able to maintain that sort of perfectly steady temperature. This method is, practically speaking, impossible in a home kitchen.

The next method is slightly less, er...impossible. It involves gently heating a quantity of chocolate up to 120 degrees, the point at which all the various kinds of fat crystals that exist in the chocolate melt totally, then allowing the chocolate to cool to 89 degrees. At that point the chocolate is "seeded" with uniform fat crystals in the form of finely chopped tempered chocolate. This "seeding" sets the pattern for crystal formation in the main mass. The chocolate is then maintained at 89 until the seed chocolate melts and the newly tempered can be used. But of course here again we have the temperature maintenance problem. It's next to impossible without precision equipment.

The final method takes advantage of the up-and-down temperature cycles that are typical of the home kitchen. Like the previous method, it begins by heating a mass of chocolate to 120 degrees to "wipe the slate clean" as it were. At that point the chocolate is gently cooled...past the Form V crystal-forming point, down to about 83 or 84 degrees. What kind of crystals are in the chocolate bowl at that point? The answer is: quite a few different ones. In fact if the chocolate mass were simply allowed to cool all the way down from there, it would be the typical riot of disorderly crystals.

So, we heat the chocolate back up again, slightly, up to 89 degrees. What does that accomplish? The answer is it melts the undesirable random crystals, but leaves the desirable Form V crystals intact. With no other competition in the tempering bowl, these desirable crystals then "seed" the rest of the mass, setting the pattern for crystal formation as the chocolate gently cools — and it must be cooled very gently indeed order for the new pattern to "take."

Very clever, yes? Yes. And in the broad scheme of things, really not all that difficult to do.

Whenever you buy chocolate, it's tempered. Bars, chips, disks, chunks...whenever chocolate leaves the factory, it's tempered. The only time you'll ever bring home untempered chocolate is if it's been baked (say, in a chocolate chip cookie) or if you happen to leave it in a hot car and it melts. In either case, the carefully manipulated, uniform crystal structure is destroyed and a new, random one forms in its place — with the predictable consequences for the chocolate's texture and appearance.

Here's a factory-fresh chocolate bar that I'm about to melt down to make a chocolate coating. Notice the crisp definition around the logo emboss and the shiny luster of it. That almost gleaming surface is what happens when tempered chocolate is cooled in a metal or plastic mold. The already quite orderly cocoa butter crystals are given even more structure by their contact with a smooth surface, with the result that they reflect more light.

Compare that to the back side of the bar, which was exposed to the air as it cooled. It still has some luster, it's not totally dull, however it has considerably less shine.

This is essentially the finish you can expect when you apply tempered chocolate to the top of a cake. And if you've ever wondered how it is that chocolates can be un-molded so easily without being reheated, it's because tempered chocolate takes up 2-3% less space than untempered chocolate. All those tight crystal formations, donchaknow. The tempered bars thus loosen themselves from their molds as they cool.

No, wait...it's both! Here's a fascinatingly redundant gizmo by Taylor that I can't quite figure out. One thing is for certain, however, I'd eventually put it into the dish washer. (Hat tip: April. Thanks!)

As longtime readers of joepastry.com know, crystals abound in the kitchen, and not just in the salt shaker or the sugar bowl. Lots of the things we eat are crystalline in structure: carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Fat crystals are what differentiate solid fats like butter from liquid fats like olive oil. The more of them there are in a given fat, the firmer it is.

Chocolate contains fat in the form of cocoa butter, which is a fascinating fat to say the least. It is utterly unique in that its molecules are composed of just three different types of fatty acids. Its structure is therefore highly uniform, and its behavior, well, let's just say it's more than a little unusual. But let me back up just a little bit.

Fats, as you may recall from past posts, are "E"-shaped molecules. They're made up of three fatty acids attached to a single glycerol "backbone." In that sense they're all the same. Where they diverge is in the types of fatty acid molecules that are attached to that backbone, and in what configuration. Butter, for example, has about a dozen different kinds of fatty acids in it, mixed and matched in various sets of three. All that variety makes crystal formation slightly difficult, since crystals thrive on uniformity. If molecules are similar enough, they'll stack up like LEGOs under the right conditions. The fact that many of them find a way to do so accounts for butter's relative solidity at room temperature. But imagine the variation in olive oil, the molecules of which are pretty much always flowing.

Cocoa butter's molecules, as I said, are made of only three kinds of fatty acids. All that uniformity makes them highly crystal-prone, but here's the rub: there are six different types of crystals that hardening cocoa butter can form. Just two of those are stable and uniform, the rest are comparatively unstable and random. Tricking those fat molecules into forming only (or at least mostly) the stable, uniform kind is what tempering is all about. They key to the process: temperature.

Stable cocoa butter crystals form (and melt) at a higher temperature that unstable cocoa butter crystals, around 91 degrees Fahrenheit as opposed to around 86 degrees for the less stable variety. This higher melt point is what gives tempered chocolate its glossy sheen, firmer texture and more brittle "snap" vis-à-vis its untempered equivalent which is softer, duller and more pliable at room temperature. Obviously, since the difference between tempered and untempered chocolate is a precious couple of degrees, tempering requires patience and a very precise control of temperature. You have a digital candy thermometer, right?

Given that there are two different sorts of very interesting chocolate components at work in the opera cake project that's underway (tempered chocolate and ganache), I thought it might be worthwhile to take a slight detour into chocolate chemistry the next couple of days. Understandably, I've received quite a few questions about the process since I posted the recipe last week (tempering chocolate is that sort of anxiety-causing kind of thing). But to understand the process well, one really needs to understand the science, at that'll take a little explaining. But heck, I've got nothing but time...

It was a beautiful early autumn weekend here in Kentucky, and the Pastry clan took advantage by spending most of it roving around the Louisville area. One of our stops was at an historic plantation home where a variety of performances and reenactments were taking place. Truth be told, we really went there for the free pony rides, which were unfortunately over by the time we arrived. I enjoy a nice pony ride as well as the next guy, but it was our 2-year-old who was the most let down. We'd sort of gotten her hopes up.

A consolation, at least for me, was a cooking demonstration that was underway in the kitchen, a small brick outbuilding about 50 yards from the house. The big brick hearth was truly impressive, even though they cooks — in period dress — were only using a fraction of it. As you can see a full meal was in process when we went in:

The dutch oven at the very bottom was opened just before this photo was taken (you can see the lid with embers on top in the far corner), and the apple pie within smelled great. What really caught my attention, however, was the bottle jack, which is the brass contraption that the chicken is mounted on. I'd heard of them before, but had never actually seen one in action. Basically it's a clockwork rotisserie, wound by a key, which rotates the chicken slowly in front of the fire. This one, I was told, was over 100 years old and still worked just fine. Amazing.

It made me want to build a cooking hearth. Mrs. Pastry put the hammer down on that idea immediately.

If you ever doubted that Michael Pollan wanted to rule your life, you need to go check out the most recent New York Times food section. In it, there's a short essay by the man himself, previewing his upcoming January release. The book is a compilation of Pollan-approved eating and dietary rules, offered up by readers of the blog Well in response to a call he put out back in March. In total, Pollan received over 2,500 of submissions, he says. I'm not sure if they'll all be in the book or not, but Pollanites, consider yourself notified: prepare to receive instructions!

Any time you set out to make cake — especially a foam-based sponge cake like joconde — it's very important that you have all your ingredients pre-measured and at-the-ready. You also want to have all your ingredients at room temperature.

Begin by brushing melted butter on your parchment-lined sheet pans. If necessary, trim your parchment a bit so lies completely flat on the pan.

Now for the egg foam. Whip your six egg whites to soft peaks, then add the sugar.

Keep whipping until they're at stiff peaks like so:

Remove the finished meringue from the mixer bowl to another bowl.

Rinse and dry the mixer bowl, and sift your powdered sugar into it.

Add your eggs and ground almonds...

...and with the paddle attachment, beat the mixture on medium-high until it's light and foamy, about three minutes.

Now add your flour and stir on low for just a few moments until it's gone.

Now it's time to incorporate the meringue. Fold it in, adding the foam in three additions. Use the largest rubber scraper you've got.

Fold until there are just a couple of small lumps left, then fold in the melted, clarified butter. The mixture will look about like so:

Pour the batter into your prepared pans, dividing it evenly. If you're the type that likes to use a scale for this sort of thing — and I am — you'll pour about 18 ounces of batter into each pan. Spread the batter as evenly as you can, paying special attention to the corners.

Bake 6-9 minutes, until the joconde layers look about like this:

Let cool for maybe a minute, then using a sharp knife, gently loosen the cake from the sides of the pan. If you can, lift the corners of the parchment up a bit to make sure the joconde sheet is loose all the way around.

Apply a fresh sheet of parchment to the top of the layer.

Flip the pan over...

Remove the pan and very gently and carefully peel the parchment off the top of the cake.

Flip the parchment sheet over and put it back on the cake, then move the layers to a wire rack and cool about 15 minutes. Done!

Lots of email this week! Reader Bill writes in to ask:

You write a pretty glowing review of gateau. Can I infer that you prefer it to what you call "New World" cake?

In fact, no. If I were forced to choose one kind of cake to eat for the rest of my life, it'd be good old, thick and buttery "New World" layer cake. It's what I've grown up with. However since I'm in the happy position of not being forced to choose, I eat both whenever and wherever I can.

As far as the popular food press is concerned, no. In fact there are more than a few recipe writers out there who will call an American-style layer cake a gâteau just so they can sound fancy. But in fact there are real differences between the two, even if the words themselves mean largely the same thing.

The main difference between cake and gâteau, at least to my mind, is in the layers. New Worlders, who've embraced chemical leaveners almost since the day they were invented, commonly make cakes with layers well over two inches in height. The classical, Old World cake making tradition eschews such theatrics in favor of egg foams. What results are cakes that are based on many thin layers, for the simple reason that even the mightiest egg foam can only heft a cake a short distance into the air. Indeed even champion génoise layers are but a handful of centimeters tall.

To compensate, most gâteau have thick layers of filling. These are frequently made of buttercream or fruit, and aren't terribly sugary so as not to pummel the eater with sweetness. Thus in a gâteau, layers are almost a structural element, team players in the ensemble that is the finished pastry. New World cakes typically make the layers themselves the focus. Their ultra-sweet icings were originally meant to be a condiment, though in many circles they've become the cart that drives the horse.

One other distinguishing factor of a gâteau is that like its other Continental counterparts, its layers often contain some sort of nut meal, adding a level of complexity seldom found in New World cakes.

I marvel at the specialized knowledge of some people. After reading my post on the history of Opera cake last night, Jim Chevallier of www.chezjim.com went to work checking sources. His response this morning was: "Like I don't have enough to do with baguettes and such... But you know, those unresolved culinary mysteries are hard to resist. Certainly it wasn't Dalloyau who invented the gateau opera and almost certainly not Clichy." As evidence he offers this clip from the French newspaper Le Gaulois, dated 1899. It shows Opera cake being advertised by a Parisian pâtisserie:

I'd have liked to have also tried one of those plum cakes. But why, I wonder, were they advertised in English? Were there enough English-speaking tourists in Paris at the time to justify that? Or did English plum cakes themselves have some sort of caché among Parisians? Hm...another mystery reveals itself. But anyway.

Assuming that's the same cake — not another one simply called "gâteau Opera" — it does indeed blow both the Clichy and Dalloyau claims. Jim also points out that Opera cake is not mentioned in Urbain Dubois' Grand livre des pâtissiers et des confiseurs from 1896, which tends to at least undermine the Paris Opera story as well. So it appears that Opera cake was invented sometime in the very last years of the 19th Century. By whom, it remains unclear.

But you heard the news here first, kids! And thanks Jim!

UPDATE. Jim Adds:

I'm not necessarily convinced the Opera cake (if, as you say, it was the same) wasn't invented before Dubois' book - sometimes these things took a few years to make it into the printed literature. Also, the French probably said "plum cake" for the same reason we say "creme brulee" (which the English once knew as "burnt cream") - it sounds sexier in a foreign language (just like, in the same ad, "Five o'clock Tea"). Les muffins had long been known, for instance, in France at that point (though one work calls them "mophines", phonetically).

Nice to have you around, Jimbo.

Someone with an excellent memory wrote in overnight, reminding me that I once said that I don't like using cake syrup. This person clearly has the memory of an elephant, but yes, that's true. In general I don't like using cake syrup for American-style layer cakes. It's my view that cake syrup is abused by too many professional cake makers, who apply it so liberally to wedding cakes that they become wet, heavy, sloshy-sweet sponges. And I hate that. Thin European sponge cakes are, ehem, another matter entirely.

This same emailer also asked whether the proportions of cake syrup really have to be so exact. Can't a lighter syrup be used? Well, yes, a lighter syrup can be used however if you're worried about sweetness, it's better to just use less of the standard syrup. Cake syrup has the proportions it does because a lighter syrup will eventually ferment if it sits too long, and the sugar will tend to want to crystallize and settle out of a heavier solution. Home bakers really don't need to worry about either of these eventualities, since our cakes are usually made and consumed very promptly. But there's often a reason to stick with the old tried-and-trues.

There are so many competing stories about the origin of Opera cake, I doubt anyone will ever know the truth about it. I have a pet theory about such things, things like the Kennedy assassination, the Princess Diana conspiracy or the reason Brad Pitt left Angelina Jolie. They become so heavily investigated and so widely talked about that eventually a point of information density is reached, beyond which it's impossible to know anything at all. Someday I'm going to publish this theory in an international epistemological journal. For now though, I'm going to use it to talk about Opera cake.

Maybe it's a bit of an overstatement to say the controversy surrounding Opera cake resembles that of the Kennedy assassination. But in international pastry circles, people get worked up over these sorts of things.

A leading theory is that Opera cake started out as Clichy cake, invented by Louis Clichy, one of Paris' legendary pastry chefs, around the turn of the last century. It's said he premiered his famous gâteau at the Paris Exposition Culinaire in 1903, after which it became the signature cake at Clichy's shop on the Boulevard Beaumarchais.

Not true, say the owners of pâtisserie Dalloyau, who claim to have invented Opera cake in 1955. According to their story, a pastry chef by the name of Cyriaque Gavillon invented the cake, which was subsequently dubbed "Opera cake" by his wife Andrée in honor of a prima ballerina at the Paris Opéra. Supports of Clichy claim Dalloyau stole it.

My favorite story of Opera cake's origin is that it was invented by the Paris Opéra itself around 1890. Such a coffee-heavy preparation, it's said, helped people stay awake through the final acts of lengthy Wagnerian epics.

Will we ever know who really created Opera cake? According to the Pastry Theory of Cognitive Entropy, no. However we can be certain that Opera cake will continue to be around, regardless of who first thought it up, for many years to come.

A reader emailed in last evening to suggest that I change my recipes to reflect the fact that instant coffee and espresso powder aren't really equivalents. Espresso is more concentrated than coffee, so more instant coffee is needed to make up for the difference in strength.

There's a certain logic in this. An espresso drink is stronger in flavor than a typical cup of coffee, but that's because it contains more coffee solids packed into a smaller volume of water. A shot of espresso is usually two ounces versus a cup of coffee which is eight, but the amount of coffee solids they contain is roughly the same. Thus spoonful-for-spoonful instant coffee and espresso powder deliver about the same amount of flavor. Espresso is really a method, not a thing.

This is not to say that there aren't differences in those flavors. Espresso and coffee are generally made from different types of beans (arabica and robusto, respectively) which have different flavor profiles. Espresso powder is truer to the French tradition than coffee, but I'll be using coffee since there isn't a spoonful of instant espresso powder to be had in this town right now. Not that there's any great demand for it in Kentucky as a rule, but some can usually be dug up at a specialty shop. Thank God there's Folgers around when you need it.

The road from the Mona Lisa to joconde sponge cake is a slightly circuitous one, but it goes like this: the portrait of the Mona Lisa was commissioned by a fellow by the name of Francesco di Bartholommeo di Zanobi del Giocondo, a wealthy silk merchant who lived in Florence around the turn of the Sixteenth Century. He commissioned the painting — a portrait of his wife, a commoner by the name of Lisa Gherardini — to commemorate the birth of their second son, Andrea.

The artist, one Leonardo da Vinci, accepted the commission and spent some four years working on and/of fiddling with it. In the end da Vinci became so attached to the painting that he never delivered it, and ultimately took it with him to France when he moved there around 1515. There he sold it to the King of France and it's been property of the French government ever since.

But now where was I? Oh yes, the name thing. It just so happens that the surname of the man who originally commissioned the painting, Giocondo, is very similar to another Italian word, gioconda which means "cheerful" or "merry" (like the English word jocund). Thus the name of the Mona Lisa is something of a pun there: la Giocanda. The French, likewise fans of word play, refer to the painting in the same way, only using their equivalent word, joconde. La Joconde is thus a double entendre, if you follow me.

Of course in both countries the painting is also known by its more proper name Monna Lisa (monna being a contraction if the words ma donna which mean "my lady" in Italian). How the word got to be applied to an almond sponge cake is less clear. As yet I've found no documentation as to how or why it may have happened. To my way of seeing things, it's just as likely that joconde could mean "merry" cake as it could "Mona Lisa" cake. Though it probably is meant to mean both. Oh those punny, punny Continentals.

This highly useful almond sponge cake is said to be named for the Mona Lisa (more on that later). The main difference between it and other sponge cakes is that it has whole eggs beaten into it, and not just whites.

6 room-temperature egg whites
1 ounce granulated sugar
8 ounces sliced blanched almonds, ground to powder in a food processor
8 ounces powdered sugar, sifted
6 large eggs
2.5 ounces all-purpose (AP) flour
1 1/2 ounces clarified butter, melted

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Line two half-sized sheet pans (jelly roll pans) with parchment and brush with melted butter.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk, whip the egg whites to soft peaks, add the sugar, and continue to whip to stiff peaks. Scrape the meringue into a bowl.

Wash the bowl of the mixer and dry it, and switch to the paddle attachment. Beat the almonds, powdered sugar and eggs on medium until they're light and increased in volume, about 3 minutes. Turn the mixer down to low and add the flour, stirring just until it disappears.

Remove the bowl from the mixer and gently fold in the meringue. Lastly, fold in the clarified butter.

Divide the batter evenly between the two pans, spreading it as evenly as possible over the two pans. Bake for 5-7 minutes, until the layers are lightly browned. Remove from the oven and place the pans on the stove top. Cover each with a sheet of parchment, then flip the pans over on the countertop, thus turning the layers out. Carefully peel off the top layer of parchment, turn it over, and put it back on top of the layers until they're cool.

The layers can be refrigerated for one day or frozen up to a month.

This will require 6 ounces of a good Euro-style bittersweet chocolate (like Callebaut or Ghiradelli) and one ounce of clarified butter.

Tempering chocolate isn't terribly difficult, but it does require precise control of temperature. You'll need a digital thermometer, they're less than $20 at most kitchen supply stores. If you don't want to go to the trouble of a tempered finish, you can just spread melted chocolate over the top of your cake. It'll firm up just fine, though it won't have the sheen or the snap of tempered chocolate.

Put the chocolate into a glass or crockery bowl. Melt in the microwave in the same way you'd melt chocolate for a ganache, zapping it on high for bursts of 10 seconds or so. Meanwhile, prepare two bowls of water that the chocolate bowl will fit into comfortably. Fill one with ice water, and one with hot water.

When the chocolate mixture is finished melting it will likely be over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Leaving the thermometer in the chocolate, dip the bowl of chocolate into the bowl of ice water and stir until the temperature comes down to between 80 and 84 degrees (it will start to firm). Immediately put the chocolate into the hot water bowl and bring it back up to right about 89 degrees.

Remove the chocolate bowl from the hot water and immediately stir in the clarified butter. Promptly spread a thin layer of chocolate over your cake with an icing spatula and allow it to set.

All of the buttercream recipes I have up on the site can accommodate flavorings of various kinds. Since Opera cake is a French invention, it only seems appropriate to start with a French-style buttercream. To make a coffee-flavored buttercream, prepare a mixture of two tablespoons of instant coffee or instant espresso powder dissolved in two teaspoons of boiling water. Allow it to cool, then make a recipe of French buttercream according to the instructions in the How to Make Buttercream posts. Beat the coffee mixture into the finished buttercream along with one teaspoon of vanilla extract. This recipe will make more than enough buttercream for the opera cake I'll be making.

A standard ganache is a 50-50 combination of bittersweet chocolate and heavy cream (or crème fraîche) by weight. This one is slightly firmer, calling for 10 ounces of bittersweet chocolate and 8 ounces of cream. You may feel free to swap out an ounce of rum or Grand Marnier for an equal amount of cream...if you're feeling saucy. Prepare as shown under the How to Make Ganache tutorial under the Pastry Components menu to the right.

This is just standard cake syrup but with a little zing. Remember that cake syrup is made by combining water and sugar 2-1 by volume and then heating it until the sugar dissolves. To make coffee cake syrup combine 1 cup of water with half a cup of sugar and add about three tablespoons of instant coffee or instant espresso powder. Bring the mixture to a simmer and...done! Cool and store in the refrigerator until needed. It'll keep well for a week or more.

It's been pointed out that for a guy who calls himself Joe Pastry, I really don't do that much pastry. Like real French pastry shop pastry. That's fair criticism, since it happens to be true. So this week I thought I'd bust out my frilliest recipe book and make a little Opera cake. What's that you say? For now suffice to say it's a fancy-looking cake that's really not very difficult to pull off. I'll be putting up a small flurry of recipes for the components the next day or so, but be not alarmed. It's almost all stuff we've gone over before.

Pastry chef Camille weighs in on pastry cones from Paris:

I make a cornet (pastry cone) pretty much the same way (sans tape, bien sur) but i never fuss around with getting a perfect triangle to begin with. I take a regular, rectangular piece of parchment, full-sheet sized, and fold and cut until I have 8 Nevada shapes. I fold in the squared corner first, then wrap the Vegas end around, tighten, and fold. They say you're supposed to fold the top down away from the seam, but I haven't noticed much of a difference, to be honest.

Thanks Camille! I'll check my map of the continental US and give it a try!

Got some very useful email in over the weekend about those Mexican sweets. First this from reader Chuck:

Those things in the glass case are geletinas or gelitines. Mixed flavors with nuts, ect.

Then Mike (an American living in Mexico) chimed in with this:

I'll take an educated guess and say that the photo of churros was taken in the 24-hr churrería El Moro, in Centro, México [City]. They are, IMO, not very good. The chocolate caliente, though, is something else entirely.

The shiny things in the portable case are unusually elaborate gelatinas. Mexicans love gelatin desserts and snacks. They are required at every kids' birthday party, for one. Specialty magazines are sold at news stands on how to make gelatinas to impress your family and guests.

The stalactitic towers are cake dummies on the mezzanine level of the famed Pastelería Ideal, probably Mexico City's largest and most popular bakery. The lower level holds table after table of fresh baked panes dulces, regular breads and cookies, of every variety. Davidlida.com had a blog entry on that bakery.

I won't try to guess where the cup of hot chocolate was photographed, although it strongly resembles a cup of the Chocolate Español at El Moro. I once got a cup of that and it was so thick and intense that my knees were trembling before i got halfway through. But it was delicious.

Right on all counts, Mike! But that's very interesting stuff. I guess I never quite realized how popular gelatin desserts are in Mexico. However now a celebrity gelatin artist like Lourdes Reyes Rosas (whose work I have marveled at) really makes sense. Lord, I'm thick. Thanks Mike!

Lastly Warren, who lives in the South Pacific, had this to say about those big tiered cakes:

The icing on the wedding cakes in the shop window in Mexico is common as a decoration, I've done it for Samoan and Rarotongan wedding cakes, they like the icicle effect of it, it's a slightly runny icing let flow over the cake board and quickly guided to make the shape. No, I'm not doing it here, the 30*C temp in my house means nothing sets.

I'd still like to know what that icing is made of. I'm intuiting that it's a simple sugar icing of some sort, yes? Many thanks to everyone who took the time to write in!

The little woman (the very little woman...she's 4' 11" and maybe 95 pounds in hiking boots), just returned from a trip down south of the border. She was ostensibly there to conduct scholarly research, but her real purpose — being a Pastry — was to eat. She succeeded. Below are pictures of just a few of the sweets she encountered. Next time I'm going and leaving her home with the kids!

First up, a classic: churros, basically Spanish and/or Latin American doughnuts made out of a potato dough. I've eaten them at this place and they're excellent.

I'm less certain what these shiny little treats are or what they taste like, but there's no question that had I been there, I would have found out.

This is something truly bizarre. Towering cakes with stalactites of what appears to be meringue dripping off of them. Weird.

Lastly a cup of hot chocolate from the wife's favorite Mexico City café. It was too big for her to finish (which means, friends, that it was very, very big).

What can I say about being made to miss all this, except that there will be retribution.

Someday someone will write a book on the history of food coloring litigation. Well, no, I guess they won't...but a very, very interesting read it might have been. For the battle over food coloring is a microcosm of a much broader fight that's still going on: between small local food producers and big food manufacturers. Today we witness it in the form of "natural and organic" vs. "packaged foods", but these are merely new names for old combatants in a conflict that's at least 150 years old.

Ever since large industrial food makers have had the capability of coloring food, their competitors (almost uniformly small food producers) have fought them over it. In the 1800's most of these battles were waged outside the courts, for back then there was no regulation. The central issue: safety. And for very good reason (see the below post The Dark Days of Color). However once government started taking an interest in food safety, the critical health issues around food colors were quickly resolved. Formulas changed, but the colors didn't go away. So the battle moved to new ground: quality.

Any time a food maker puts an artificial color into a food, there's the natural question: why? Isn't it fresh? Is it badly prepared? Is it something other than what you're telling me it is? In other words, it's reasonable to wonder if it's some sort of trick. Nowadays we tend not to wonder that, since we're so accustomed to colorings in the foods we buy (we even use them at home). Yet once upon a time people did look askance at food coloring, a sentiment that many a small food maker capitalized on to hobble his bigger, more powerful competitor.

For small foods makers rightly saw that industrial food producers were vulnerable on the freshness issue. To make their mass-produced products competitive with local (or home made) foods, big manufacturers had to doctor them with additives like colors. Take away those colors, so the thinking went, and those products would be revealed for what they were: old, industrially made, artificially preserved...fundamentally inferior to the real thing.

One of the most famous of these early contests pitted dairymen (which is to say, a national consortium of small, local producers) against the margarine industry. Margarine, as you probably know, is composed of animal fat. When it was first introduced to the market in the 1880's it was white, which is its natural color. The trouble was, people weren't attracted to it as a spread, at least compared to butter. To compensate for this, big margarine manufacturers colored their product yellow to make it look more like butter. The dairymen cried foul, claiming that big meat processing concerns were trying to dupe the public (those same local dairying concerns had been adding yellow color to their own fresh butter for years to make it look more appetizing, but why cloud the issue?).

This was just one of hundreds of legal contests that pitted small businessmen against big manufacturers of everything from vegetables to beef stew to packaged pies. In time legal precedents, in combination with FDA rulings that classified most food colorings as fair "additives" put the hammer down on most of this kind of litigation (though the margarine-butter battle still rages today in Canada). Which is why the modern debate has switched back to the issue of health. True, no one is being killed or hospitalized as a result of toxic colorings anymore, but a lot can be chalked up to food color "sensitivity", from hyperactivity to sleeplessness to hives to irritable bowel. In other words, there's still a lot of battle ground left. New studies can always be commissioned, new courtrooms always found.

Then again, perhaps not. For while even five years ago depriving big food makers of their precious colorings would have dealt them a crippling blow, nowadays it would simply constitute an inconvenience. New advances in organic technology (if those two words can rightly be used together) have given birth to a palette of plant-derived, 100% organic colors to rival any paint store.

But then to be honest, colorings are really obsolete weaponry in the realm of contemporary food fights. Today small food concerns have all sorts of new stuff in their arsenal: trans fats, HCFS, BPA, you name it. Heck, Michael Pollan is trying to make corn itself the Scheele's green of the new millennium (talk about trying to kick a leg out of the food-industrial stool!). And so the battle goes on...

Ever since I put up the post about assembling a plastic pastry bag, I've been besieged by requests for instructions on how to make a traditional paper pastry bag or "cone." I confess I don't use these much, though they've been the #1 tool of every professional or semi-professional cake and/or cookie decorator I've ever known. Why don't I use them very often? Because a.) I'm not a particularly good decorator and b.) I'm lazy