Profuse apologies for my lack of posting yesterday. However driving back from Wisconsin on Thursday (yes, I drove) I ran smack into that massive storm system that swept through the Midwest this week. I made contact right around Bloomington, Illinois, and was finally blown off the road (not literally, thank goodness) in Urbana. Happily for […]
READ ONFound out I have to blow town on business for a couple of days. It’ll be a long overnight trip. Hopefully I’ll be putting up a post or two on Friday. Until then keep a-whackin’ that butter. – Joe
READ ONSo what other kinds of baked goodies are out there that employ mechanical leavening and mechanical leavening alone? Though you might not think it, pie crusts. True they don’t rise nearly as dramatically as laminated doughs, yet the whole concept of pie crust “flakiness” is a product of the same principle: large (or at any […]
READ ONSince it had been quite a while since I’d done a “project of the week” like I used to do, I decided to take the category down (it wasn’t getting much use anyway). In its place I’ve put up a new “Joe’s How-To’s” category, under which I plan to store photo-tutorials like yesterday’s on laminated […]
READ ONThe world’s first ice cream cone-making machine was patented. Invented by Carl Rutherford Taylor of Cleveland, the “machine for spinning or turning a waffle” was assigned patent No. 1.481,813 on January 29, 1924.
READ ONEvery laminated dough, be it puff pastry, croissant or Danish, begins its life as a thick slab of butter encased in a dough “envelope”. This 3-layer dough-butter-dough package is then flattened and folded however many times it takes to get the number of layers the maker is after. A folded flaky pastry for say, a […]
READ ONEvery laminated dough, be it puff pastry, croissant, flaky pastry or Danish, begins its life as a thick slab of butter encased in a dough “envelope”. This 3-layer dough-butter-dough package is then flattened and folded however many times it takes to get the number of layers the maker is after. A folded flaky pastry for […]
READ ONI mentioned in last week’s post on the mechanics of, er…mechanical leavening that steam is the force responsible for the heavy lifting in laminated doughs. Steam of course comes from water, which means the more water in your laminated dough the better. Or so one might be tempted to think. Lots of moisture in a […]
READ ONIt’s been a high-output week here at the Pastry household. One of the things I didn’t mention is that it was little Joan Pastry’s birthday a few days ago. A good time was had by all, though I have to say I was a bit disappointed with the cake. Don’t get me wrong, it tasted […]
READ ONThe French claim to having invented puff pastry may not be credible, but at least it has the virtue of being entertaining. So the story goes, it was created by a baker’s apprentice by the name of Claudius Gele in 1645. That was the year, apparently, that Claudius’ father took sick, and was prescribed a […]
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