Do Your Bit(map)

Most of us are at least a little freaked out by all the Ebola news these days. The majority of it is extremely overblown. A whole lot of it is downright panic-mongering. But one thing is for sure: the taste of fear we’re getting here in the developed world is nothing compared to what the poor folks in West Africa have been experiencing for some time now. If you’re like me you’d like to do something about Ebola instead of just worry about it which, let’s face it, doesn’t do anyone any good.

And in fact you can do something: you can draw maps. You heard right. The World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders and a variety of NGO’s are on the ground in West Africa and ready to fight the disease door to door. Unfortunately they don’t know where a lot of those doors are — especially out in remote villages or in densely populated urban areas — because they don’t have have accurate maps.

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Brioche Dough: How Much Gluten?

It’s still the age of Ragnarök here in Louisville, I’m looking out at dark grey skies and more rain, rain, rain. I don’t let that slow me down if I can help it but blowing, misty rain is hell on whipped cream. Fortunately reader David has a question for me. It goes like this:

Your brioche dough recipe calls for all purpose flour when one might expect to use bread flour for a higher rise. Is brioche not typically expected to be as airy and light or is there another reason for it?

Interesting question, David. It all depends on what you want to use the brioche for. Will you be making a simple loaf? Dinner roll-type têtes de brioche? Or perhaps you’re using it as a base for a bee sting cake or cinnamon rolls. In any of those cases you might want to vary the formula a bit to achieve a difference effect.

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Where does génoise come from?

And for that matter sponge cake in general? Nice question reader Holly! The answer is: um…

Génoise is clearly named for the city of Genoa in northern Italy. However the word is French which means it’s a French-ified version of a type of sweet bread or cake that was once made in Genoa. Does that mean that sponge cake was invented in Italy? Probably not as it seems most sponge-type biscuits and cakes that were made in Italy can be traced to an earlier confection that the Italians called pan di Spagna. “Spanish bread”. Everybody loves something that comes from somewhere else, knowadimean?

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Kentucky Monsoon Season

Don’t know about where you are, but the last week has been some of the gloomiest, rainiest weather of the year, rotten for the sort of out-on-the-porch natural light photography that is the life blood of joepastry.com. I’m still in my rain slicker answering questions though, so hit me! And more as soon as the […]

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Tell me about kirsch, Joe.

I’d be happy to tell you what I know, reader Max. It’s a cherry brandy. The name simply means “cherry” in German, and part of the reason it’s so apropos in a Black Forest cake is because it hails from that region. Morello cherries — the European Continent’s go-to sour cherry — originated in the Black Forest. As for who first started making alcoholic beverages out of Black Forest cherries, well that’s anybody’s guess. You can make wine out of just about any fruit and the practice of winemaking goes back literally thousands of years in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

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Why did it take so long?

Reader Cindy has been musing, she tells me, and is wondering why Black Forest cake only emerged as a phenomenon in the mid-20th century. If people in the Black Forest area had been eating sour cherries, cream and kirsch together for a hundred years or more by then, shouldn’t somebody somewhere have come up with a pastry?

My guess, Cindy, is that the rise of Black Forest cake was directly related to the advancement of refrigeration technology. Sweet cream, of the kind you need to make whipped cream, would have been a fairly rare commodity prior to about 1930.

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Cake and the Continental Divide

Reader Dottie wants to know why I’m bothering to make Black Forest cake with génoise when American layer cake makes a perfectly good — and easier — substitute. Dottie, good question, for indeed there are a lot of New World bakers out there who don’t much care for sponge cake. Many of us find it difficult to prepare and maybe just a little anachronistic.

I get that. We New World bakers like our cakes thick and moist. Cake layers on the Continent are a bit tough by our standards and are seldom more than an inch or so high. An inch of course is nothing for an American cake layer. Heck, two inches is common. Three inches? Why not? I’ve got nothing to do today.

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How much fat do you need in cream to whip it?

So asks reader Jey and it’s an excellent question. The answer is you need a minimum of 30% butterfat to make a stable whipped cream. In the States whipping cream (also called heavy cream) must be 36% butterfat. Some have more though I’m not sure if ingredient labels reveal that or not. I’ll have to check. Aussies and Brits have what’s known as double cream, which is at least 48% butterfat. It makes exceptionally thick

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What do you know about the Black Forest, Joe?

Not very much, reader Brian. I drove through it once on the way to visit the city of Freiburg. I remember the Black Forest being quite black indeed because of all the pine and fir trees, but that’s about it for the forest itself. One thing I remember about Freiburg, however, was all the cuckoo clocks. The Black Forest area is known for cuckoo clocks, which have been produced there, in one form or another, for some 300 years. There was a shop in Freiburg that seemed to have nothing in it but cuckoo clocks. The sheer absurdity of it made you want to buy one.

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