Category: Pastry

Miracle Sunday

We had a little taste of Lima in Louisville yesterday. The Peruvian members of our parish hoisted the image of Señor de los Milagros (Lord of Miracles) and carried it down the street, in keeping with annual tradition (in Peru).

The procession commemorates the famous Lima earthquake of 1746 which destroyed virtually the entire city — except — the wall upon which this image was painted. So every year in October, the month of the quake, fellows in purple robes carry this image through the city of Lima in remembrance of the miracle. Here in Louisville they carried it about six blocks because that thing is heavy, heavy, heavy and we have only so many Peruvians to do the lifting.

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Weren’t we just talking about browning enzymes?

And suddenly here comes a high-tech genetically modified apple that doesn’t brown. Why not? Because it has very little in the way of either polyphenoloxidase or peroxydase (more on what those do here). Which means when you cut it you don’t get browning pigments. Very interesting.

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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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