Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Baking and Pastry
Macerated Fruit
Jan 19th
Some summer fruits are still around at this time of year, but they don’t always have the most flavour for eating out of hand. That’s not to say they won’t be good, but what to do if you get stuck with bland or sour fruit? Macerate it.
Macerating fruit could be seen as something akin to artificially ripening it. You’re drawing moisture out of the fruit, and sweetening it.
To mascerate, clean and take any inedible parts out of the fruit. Then sprinkle it with a little granulated or icing sugar. Cover the fruit with saran wrap, and it leave for about half an hour. The sugar will draw some of the moisture out of the fruit, and the resulting liquid can be drained off. You may wish to save it for another use. The longer you let the fruit and sugar sit together, the softer your fruit will become.
Related Blogs
Use lecithin to keep your bread fresh longer
Jan 8th
Have you found that your home made bread just doesn’t stay fresh as long as the loaves you buy from the store?
It is typical for home made bread to stale faster than the store bought stuff. Commercially produced breads have many shelf life extenders added to them to keep them nice until the end of the week. These chemicals have all kinds of chemical and trademarked product names to go into, but if your bread is still soft a week after you bought it, at least a couple of them are in there.
A home baker probably couldn’t easily get their hands on them even if they wanted to, but there is one additive you you might want to use when baking your bread.
Lecithin is an extremely common and very useful substance derived from soy and found in egg yolks. It is an emulsifier, which is a substance that allows fat and water to mix. In a chocolate bar, lecithin keeps the cocoa butter and solids together. It is also what allows oil and water to mix when making mayonnaise.
Adding it to bread will keep the fats in a stable emulsion with water and keep the moisture in the crumb of the bread, thus postponing the staling. Lecithin is also a surfactant and lubricant, so it will make the dough easier to work, allow ingredients to disperse more easily, and relaxes the gluten for a chewier loaf.
To use lecithin to improve your bread dough (rather than buying some expensive dough improver product), use about 3/4 tablespoons of lecithin granules per cup of flour, and mix it in with the dry ingredients. If you have liquid lecithin, 1/2 tablespoon per cup of flour, added with the moist ingredients should do the trick.
This and other molecular gastronomy ingredients are available at Le Sanctuaire. Lecithin can also be found at GNC, as well as other nutrition and health food shops.
If you find your newly shelf stable bread is going mouldy too fast, let it cool THOROUGHLY before packing it away in any type of airtight container. Warm bread is still giving off small amounts of moisture, which if trapped in an airtight container will settle on the bread and provide the perfect breeding ground for airborne spores.
Simple technique for great nut or seed brittle
Jan 3rd
Nut or seed brittle can be a wonderful accompaniment to many dishes. I love a piece of pumpkin pie with pumpkin seed brittle as a garnish as it adds a great crunch. Pumpkin seed brittle sprinkled with sea salt is also nice with coleslaw.
Pecan brittle broken up into little pieces is great in a green salad with goat cheese and dried cranberries.
Brittles are quite simple, but they can be go so very wrong. Too sweet, grainy, too hard… there’s so much room for badness.
A simple technique for brittle is:
- Make a simple syrup (1 part sugar, 1 part water, brought to a boil).
- Wait for the syrup to cool a little, and simply toss your seeds or nuts in the syrup. There shouldn’t be too much extra syrup – just enough to coat the nuts and hold them together.
- Spread the mix on a cookie sheet lined with a piece of parchment or a silpat, then bake at 325ºF for aprox. 15 minutes, or until the nuts around the edges start to brown. The brittle will set up once cool. If it’s too soft, put it back in the oven for a few minutes.
If stored in an airtight container, they should keep for a week or so, but I’ve never had any around that long.
My New Favourite Thing: Super Quick Fresh Pizzas
Dec 6th
Fresh home-made pizza is one of the best things ever. But who can be bothered to make a dough, let it proof, punch it, let it proof again only to still have to make everything you want on the thing?!
The solution I’ve found, (sad that it took me so long to implement even though we’ve been doing this at work since long before I started a year ago) is to make all the components separately and freeze them in individual portions.
For the base, simply make the dough as you would regularly, make enough for however many pizzas you want, and after rolling, freeze.
A sub-tip here is to freeze them all on a baking sheet with a piece of wax paper in between and once frozen, wrap individually in saran wrap to prevent freezer burn.
For the sauce and the toppings, make as per the recipes you like, and freeze in small zip lock baggies. I’ve found this works brilliantly for garlic mushrooms, caramelized onions and sauce so far, and from work I know this also works with sausages (cut to size first).
When you want a pizza, simply pull one bag each of whatever you want on it from the freezer, let them defrost in the fridge (or in the microwave) and there you are home-made from scratch pizza any time you like.
Scaling Ingredients
Dec 4th
When scaling multiple ingredients into a bowl (for example a bowl full of flour that sugar is being scaled into), mound your second ingredient into a tall pile in the middle of the bowl. If you pour too much into the bowl, it’s easier to pull some out if it’s in a deep pile rather than scattered all around.
When flouring a pan, try using cocoa powder
Nov 29th
When a recipe calls for the pan of a chocolate cake or cupcakes to be buttered and floured to prevent sticking you will often get a final product covered in dusty, crusty white bits rather than having something deep brown and tasty looking.
To prevent this try using cocoa powder alone or a combination of flour and cocoa. Cocoa powder does have fat and less starch than flour so there is a slight risk of sticking, but it’s never been a problem for me. If you’re really worried, try the combo first.
Which type of flour has the most gluten?
Nov 27th
Q. Which type of flour has the most gluten?
A. This is sort of a mis-question as no flour actually contains gluten. They all contain various amounts of protein which when mixed with liquid and agitated, can develop into gluten. Bread flour contains the most protein (roughly 9-10%) all-purpose is next with approx 8-7%, and cake and pastry can contain as much as 6% or as little as 4%.
You can read more about flour, the types, and substitutions here in our types of flour post.
What type of flour to use for pies?
Nov 26th
Q. What type of flour to use for pies?
A. This is a tough one. It depends on the type of dough you’re making and how flaky you want your crust to turn out.
For regular pie dough, all purpose works perfectly well, since you’re cutting the fat into the flour the strands are fully coated and shouldn’t develop too much gluten anyway.
For sweet short pastry (SSP, sweet dough or pate sucree), a combination of half bread and half cake flour works best. But whatever you have on hand will work fine.
Puff pastry requires bread flour ideally, but it’s not too common for that to be made at home. In Michel Roux’s awesome book, Pastry, he uses all purpose flour for all his doughs, and he has 3 michelin stars, so who am I to argue?
Cake flour of bread flour for scones?
Nov 25th
Q. Cake flour of bread flour for scones?
A. It depends on your recipe. If yours calls for the fat to be cut into the flour, then use the bread flour, for any other method, use the cake flour.
Making great double chocolate chip cookies
Nov 24th
I don’t love the taste of cocoa powder, as I find it distinctively different from chocolate, so I thought I’d give a couple of tips about double chocolate cookies that use it differently or not at all.
1.) Replace it. But with what you say? Place your chocolate chips or chunks in a food processor and pulse until there are still chunks left but you have some dust in the bowl. Alternatively blitz some extra chips to dust. Use this to replace the cocoa powder in your recipe and the result will not have the cocoa powder colour, but it will have a more chocolately taste.
2.) If you want to use cocoa powder, try creaming it into the butter with the sugar. This will sort of make chocolate as the cocoa powder is chocolate with the cocoa butter removed and then ground to a dust. Mixing it with fat will give a more chocolatey taste and still give the dark colour people associate with double chocolate cookies.
