Hello friends and neighbors! Sorry for yet another delayed entry, but this one has been long in coming. When I first asked friends and family if I should cover making pastry cream on here, the answer was a sonorous “YES.” I then suggested that I should cover pate au choûx as well (the puff pastry that gets filled with pastry cream to make cream puffs, eclairs, etc.)

“No, no- we just want to eat it a big bowl of it in front of the tv.” – several relatives and friends

…Right. I can’t really conceive of doing that, but it’s your call. Now, while I await the no-doubt annoyed letters from the First Lady for reversing her work against obesity:

Pastry cream (or Creme Pastissier, if you want to be all French about it), is one of the staple recipes a pastry chef- or at least a French-trained one- knows. As I mentioned above, pastry cream is the tasty, rich custard filling found in eclairs, cream puffs, and Boston Cream Pie. This recipe is for a regular vanilla bean custard, but feel free to experiment and make any kind of flavor you like!
The pictures here show the double batch I make for my job, but I’ll be giving you the recipe for a single batch- the method is absolutely the same.

Step 1. Mix the milk with 4 oz. of the sugar. Try not to have too much settle on the bottom of the pot, otherwise it may burn.

Next, you slice and scrape your vanilla bean. I prefer using vanilla bean over extract whenever I can just because the flavor is infinitely better, and the smell is GLORIOUS.

Once you’ve scraped both halves of the bean pod, drop the grains into the milk and stir. If you want, you can throw the pod in there as well- nothing wrong with a little more flavor, and you’ll be straining them out later anyway.
Just a note- vanilla beans ARE admittedly expensive, so if that’s a concern, you can substitute a teaspoon of vanilla extract (albeit, this is like going out on the town in a golf cart instead of a Ferrari.)

Now you just wait for the milk to boil. Keep a VERY close eye on it- milk will go from a light simmer to an explosive rolling boil VERY quick. As soon as you see the foam start to rise, take it off the heat IMMEDIATELY.

Now, it is time to TEMPER your eggs- this means pouring some of the hot milk into the eggs first and mixing it briskly. What this does is gently raise the temperature of the eggs before you add them in to the bulk of the milk. If you pour your egg mix right into the hot milk, you’ll wind up with sweet vanilla-flavored scrambled eggs- not exactly pleasant. 

Next, back on the heat (medium-low to medium this time!), and you will be boiling the custard for a minute, whisking constantly.

No, that was not a figure of speech- you will be boiling it for ONE MINUTE. The mixture will thicken considerably first, and then boil with thick, slow, blorping bubbles. Whisk constantly to keep the custard from burning, and when you see the first bubble, count to sixty, and then take it off the heat for good.

After one minute of boiling, your pastry cream should look like this:

Mmmmm… Don’t worry, you’re almost done!
Next comes the straining. Set your strainer or sieve over a large bowl, and pour the pastry cream in (a bit at a time if necessary.) Use your wooden spoon and gently stir the cream so it goes through. 

Once it’s all strained, you need to cool it down and add the butter, and you can do this one of two ways. The way I have shown here uses a KitchenAid electric mixer- strain your pastry cream into the bowl, and mix it on the lowest speed possible with the paddle attachment. Add the butter, and mix until A. the butter is melted and gone, and B. The cream is cool enough to touch the bowl.

If you don’t have a mixer, you can go the more traditio
nal route. Strain you pastry cream in a bowl, and set it in a larger bowl with ice. Add the butter, and slowly mix with a wooden spoon until the butter is completely melted.

Once you’re done, get a piece of plastic wrap and lay it DIRECTLY ON THE SURFACE OF THE CREAM. The reason being that as custard cools, it forms a very unappealing skin. The plastic wrap will prevent this. Try to have as few air bubbles as possible.

Stick it in the fridge to cool, and you’re done!

There you have it- your own pastry cream, ready for mixing, flavoring, filling pastries with… or sitting on the couch and eating out of a big bowl.

Still waiting for those angry letters from Mrs. Obama.

In the meantime-

Stay classy,

     Good evening, friends and neighbors! 

    Last week, I talked a bit about how to approach baking scientifically. At its heart, baking is edible chemistry- a careful and calculated combination of substances with the intent of causing a series of chemical reactions that produce a different (tasty) material.  If you haven’t read the last blog entry yet, I suggest you do so- and read the rest of the blog while you’re at it. A lot of cool stuff is discussed!

     This week, we are going to be discussing one of the most vital parts of scientific baking, and also one of the most feared and intimidating parts- baker’s math.

*”O Fortuna” plays in the background*

In what has almost become a scripted discussion, when I ask people why they don’t like baking, these are the answers I get:

• “Oh, I just don’t get it!”
• “You have to be so careful about everything! I’m not good at that.” (This came from a nurse.)
• “It’s so much work!”

Far and away, though, the most common answer I get is:

“I stink at measuring- all those numbers and everything.”

Ok, I get it. I’m not heartless. Not everyone “gets” math- or so they think. People use math every single day. They are so accustomed to seeing math as a monolithic wall of formulas in a textbook, that they fail to realize just how much they rely on it every moment of their lives. Here’s the big secret:

If you can count money, slice a cake, or make a cocktail- you can do baker’s math.

“Wait… cocktails? Money? What?”
Hold on, stick with me. We’ll start with…

In the last blog entry (have you read it yet?), I mentioned in passing that in professional baking, it is more common to use “formulas” rather than recipes. This choice of words is not just to make bakers feel smug and smart. Bakers math was formerly known as “bakers percentages,” but people got confused because they don’t ACT like the percentages people understand, as I will demonstrate soon.

First of all, quick crash course- a percentage is a way of describing part of a whole. It is another way of depicting a fraction or decimal number. For example: 

This is the way percentages work in any other walk of life- demonstrating fractions in relation to 100. This is the same way U.S. currency works-

Still with me so far? Good.
Bakers formulas don’t work like that.

In a bakers formula, percentages are used to show RATIOS- that is, different amounts relative to EACH OTHER, rather than to a whole. (Here’s where the cocktails I mentioned before come in.)

As a treat for reading this far, here is my personal favorite recipe for a Gin and Tonic-

Besides a tasty beverage with which to relax on a summer day, I’ve also just provided you with a ratio- whenever you make this drink, you use twice as much tonic water as gin, whether making it for yourself (advisable!) or making a giant jug of it (inadvisable, unless you share), and it will always taste the same. 

This is a little thing called “scaling”- and it’s what allows me to make one loaf of bread or a hundred loaves from the same formula, and have them all come out the exact same without doing an insane amount of extra calculation.
Yes, using math to prevent more math. You’re welcome!

With the idea of ratios still firmly in mind, consider the following formula, borrowed from Realbreadcampaign.org:

After everything about percentages above, you can already see there’s a problem here:
“100% flour?! That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?!” “That adds up to 171%! Impossible!”

Remember though: we are dealing with RATIOS. All the ingredients are in RELATION to something else- in this case, the flour (100%.) In most breads, flour is obviously the most prevalent ingredient, so it becomes the standard against which all the other ingredients are related- 100%. 
Therefore, in making this formula, you are being told that your water should be 68% the amount of your flour, your yeast should be 2% its amount, and salt 1%.

Now the astute among you might notice something else- what amount? Pounds? Cups? Handfuls? Stone? 

That’s the beauty of using bakers math: it doesn’t matter. It can be anything. As long as you apply the same unit to everything, it will come out right. 
Want to make the 100% flour equal ounces? 

You’ll come out with a LOT of dough (nearly 11 lbs), but it will work. 

That’s quite enough for tonight I think- next week, we’ll be talking about measurement: weight vs. volume, scaling, and more!

Till then…

Stay classy,

     Good evening, friends and neighbors! I hope everyone’s spring is going well, and you’re enjoying the warmer weather! 

        Last entry, I talked about how baking was similar to alchemy- a mix of science, art, and magic. Tonight, I’m going to focus on the science part, and specifically how to develop a recipe, tweak a recipe, take notes, keep track of changes, and generally turn your kitchen into a laboratory- just because you don’t have bubbling beakers and Bunsen burners doesn’t mean you can’t do science with an oven and and stand mixer!

     To start with, we go back to basics. A long time back, I told you what the most useful and important tool you can have in a kitchen, baking or otherwise. Remember what it is? Here’s a hint: 


NOTEBOOK.


     Yes, the humble notebook. Pocket size, composition book, binder, whatever you like. Something with blank pages eager to be filled, and a thing to write with. You will be writing down EVERYTHING: Temperatures, procedures, ingredient amounts, ingredient forms and types, scalings and calculations, ALL OF IT. When you want to keep track of all the changes you will be making, having a hard record is vital. 


      Got a notebook? Good. Then we can begin.


All of culinary arts involve some kind of scientific knowledge and method. A fry cook needs to understand how proteins behave with heat so he can grill a steak. 
In baking, the name of the game is chemistry- your goal is to arrange ingredients in such a way that, with heat applied over time, you get accurate replicable results- meaning, if you hand your recipe over to someone else, ideally, your two products should be identical.  


The BHB’s Guide To Scientific Baking 

• Keep the original recipe 

             “Hmmm.. what kind of flour did this recipe have in it to start with? How many eggs? Grr.. where did I put that recipe?” Keep yourself organized. Everytime you make a change, attach it somehow to the original, but KEEP THE ORIGINAL INTACT.

• Work in ONE unit of measure whenever possible. 

             Home recipes out of cookbooks (at least in the US) tend to go off volume (cups, teaspoons, etc.) There are numerous problems with this- a cup could be a level cup, a heaping cup, a scant cup, a packed cup, etc. Professional bakers tend to use “formulas” rather than recipes, and almost all ingredients go by weight, rather than volume (i.e. a pound of flour rather than 2 cups flour) It increases the reliability and replicability of your work. ALWAYS work in the same measuring system- there is no percentage in bouncing between metric and imperial in a recipe.

• Leave space for random notes in your book. 

             Did a little something different that time? Want to remind yourself of something in the future? A garnish? A flavoring? Keep notes.

• Document from ALL 5 SENSES. 

            Your senses are the most basic and finest scientific apparatus you have. Did your cookies taste too sweet? Have a weird smell? Crumbly texture when you want chewy? Don’t JUST rely on numbers. Keep notes on EVERY thing related to your product- what you want to change, what you want to keep the same, and how.

• Quantify as much as possible. 

            Yes, I know I just told you not to rely strictly on numbers. They DO, however, help create exactitude. How many times did you fold the batter? How long did you let it sit after baking? Remember- the goal of a good recipe is to give you the SAME PRODUCT, regardless of when it’s made or who makes it. No flukes- if you got lucky, keep good notes so yo can get that lucky AGAIN.

• Mess up your cookbooks. 

            You know how your folks told you never to draw or write in books? Screw that. Cookbooks are meant for the kitchen- they are SUPPOSED to be scrawled in and messed up with notes, calculations, and food stains.

• Scale into a separate column– NOT IN YOUR HEAD.
  At the moment, I do not care to say how many recipes I’ve botched because I was clever/ in a hurry and tried to scale up or down a recipe in my head, only to get confused and ruin everything. Keep separate columns on your recipes for multiplying or dividing batches. 
• Keep track of variations, and note changes between. 
  You just finished a new batch of a recipe you’ve been tweaking. You’ve been working at it for months now- this batch though is missing something you liked from the one before.  Keep track of all the variations of recipes, and mark down every change between them so you don’t get yourself lost.
• Get and value feedback

          This one is incredibly important. You are naturally going to be biased toward your creations, so you need to get honest feedback from people.  BE OBJECTIVE. Don’t take anything to heart. Learn especially to tell the difference between constructive and destructive criticism- and do not deal with anyone that gives you destructive criticism. 

Tomorrow, I’ll get into baker’s percentages, and give you the development sheets I use for hashing out new products. In the meantime,

Stay Classy,