Category: Pastry

Why a tube pan?

Another very good question, reader Will. Heat penetration is the answer. Without that center hole, an angel food cake would be an extremely broad and thick mass. Heat from the oven would have a hard time reaching the center before the outside over-baked. Meringue-topped pies are a good illustration of this problem. Big as they are, the very centers are often under-baked or weepy, because it’s hard to get that middle region hot enough without overheating and breaking the rest of the meringue.

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The Fat Speck Myth

Several readers have written in to ask if it’s true that a tiny bit of fat in a mixer bowl will ruin a batch of whipped egg whites. The answer: absolutely not. A small blot of, say, egg yolk will do virtually nothing to impede a batch of whites from whipping up to a nice, voluminous foam.

Egg white foams work because the bubbles that make them up are reinforced by a mesh of string-like protein molecules, molecules which have been coaxed into untangling by the whipping action. At that point they begin to collect around air bubbles because certain regions along their length are attracted to air (are hydrophobic) and others are attracted to water (hydrophilic). Thus the surface of the bubble is a desirable spot for them, as all their different regions are happy, and they can bond to each other side-by-side while they’re there.

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That road, she is a-callin’…

Ladies and germs, I have to blow town for several days on business. I will still be blogging, just not as much as normal…I don’t think. We’ll see. More soon one way or another!

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What effect does cream of tartar have on an egg white foam?

This is one of the most popular questions here on joepastry.com, reader Nance! And no, you definitely can’t make an angel food cake with out it (or some other kitchen acid). But let’s start at the beginning. The reason egg whites whip so nicely into foams is because of the proteins they contain. These proteins naturally occur in clumpy balls. But apply a little shearing force and the proteins uncoil, at which point they begin to bond to one another, forming networks. These networks collect on the surfaces of air bubbles, preventing them from popping. The result is foam.

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Where does angel food cake come from?

That’s a bit of an unknown. It’s an American thing, that much we do know. What other culture holds five-inch-thick cake layers in such high esteem? As for exactly when and where angel food cake first appeared in America, that’s tougher to determine. People like to say Pennsylvania Dutch country, but that’s really just a guess, albeit a safe one since so much in the American home baking canon has come from that region.

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Next Up: Angel Food Cake

I know the site is getting big and popular when readers start heckling me over staple recipes I have yet to do. Just this week reader Linda complained that I’ve never done angel food cake, and reader Susan needled me over not having any chocolate sauce on the blog. So OK already, let’s do them […]

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What’s a “smoke point” and is it really important?

LOVE, that question, reader Jason. It seems like every food writer out there loves talking about “smoke points”, a.k.a. the temperature at which an oil starts to give off wisps of blue-black smoke. It’s the tell-tale sign that the fat molecules in the oil are breaking apart at an accelerated rate, which compromises both the oil’s flavor and its performance, to say nothing of its safety (since smoke is often a precursor to the oil’s surface catching fire).

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