Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Desserts
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.
Use apricot glaze to make attractive pastries
Jul 7th
Do your homemade pastries not look as yummy and glossy as the ones you see at the stores and in pictures? A common error of omission is the absence of glaze. In a professional kitchen, the most common product is some variant of apricot glaze. The exact product isn’t commonly available, but a really decent home substitute is easy to make. A cheap apricot jam, (with the smallest amount of fruit chunks possible) thinned down with roughly 25% water, and brought to the boil is perfect to apply to pastries. Be sure to bring it to the boil each time you use it or it will set up and still be very sticky. Apricot jam is used because of its neutral flavour and colour. Be sure to strain any small chunks out once it’s brought to the boil or your finish may be lumpy.
Glazing fruit on top of whipped cream
Jul 7th
When making a dessert that calls for fruit on top of whipped cream, it’s helpful to glaze the fruit to prevent drying. But, you say, glaze is best when applied boiling hot, when that drips down onto the cream it’s gonna melt it. Ah yes, but the trick here is to place the fruit in a bowl and pour the glaze into that, mix it around and now that the fruit it glazed, apply as you would before. This doesn’t work so well with carefully arranged items such as intricate fruit flans or such, but works perfectly for rustic pavlovas and the like.
Waterbath Depth
Jun 26th
I’ve mentioned a few times working with custards baked in water baths like creme caramels or brulees. They aren’t anywhere near as complicated as they seem, but the depth of the water bath is important.
Too shallow a water bath and the custards will bake very fast, giving you only a small window when they are perfectly done. The water may also evaporate entirely, leaving uninsulated custard to bake with too much heat overcooking the edges before the centre is set.
Too deep a bath and your brulees will be in the oven until the cows come home, and you run the risk of water spilling into the custard at any point.
The best level to have the water is about 1/3 of the way up the side of the dish. Another trick is to place the ramekins in a small enough water bath that there isn’t too much surface area of just water, this will stop the water evaporating too fast.
Burning the perfect creme brulee
May 29th
Creme Brulee is one of the classic desserts of French cuisine. It is a baked custard (the name literally translates from french to “burnt cream“), which after cooling is coated in sugar and either placed under a broiler or torched with a blowtorch to caramelize the sugar, making it crunchy and flavourful. It can be sublime, or it can be a sticky, burned, wet mess. You can make a beautiful, perfect custard, bake it slowly and carefully, and ruin the entire thing when it comes time to burn the top. Many things can go wrong, from the sugar not being fully melted and caramelized, to the custard getting too hot for too long and separating, to there being a syrupy mess on top.
The most important thing to remember is that sugar draws in moisture from the air, which means that if you burn the brulees too long before they are served (holding anything over 15 minutes is really pushing it), the perfect caramel you just made will melt into syrup.
The next thing that can go wrong is the burning itself. As previously mentioned, there are two main ways to burn the sugar; using a blow torch, or under a broiler or salamander. Both have pros and cons. A blow torch will give you more control, enabling you to direct the heat exactaly where it’s needed; but it is also a specialized tool that you may not have any other use for. A broiler will not provide you such control and if not sufficiently heated, it may take so long to caramelize the sugar that the custard gets too hot and separates. On the other hand, most people have a broiler, and it has many other uses.
There is some debate about the perfect amount of sugar to use on a brulee. Some people say that the amount that the surface can hold when turned upside down, others say that a heaped mound in the middle works best. I’ve found that somewhere in between gives a breautiful crackling top. Put a lot of sugar on the surface, roll it around to make sure that there is no custard left exposed as this will burn and blacken when torched, and pour some of the remaining sugar off, leaving about a teaspoon to tablespoon in the ramekin, which is then re-distributed around the surface. The next step is to wipe the rim of the ramekin clean, removing any sugar that happened to stick to it, as this will get burned on, look messy and be hard to clean.
Now it’s time to burn. Using a blow torch, start at the sides, and working in a slow inward spiral, move the torch around the dish just before the flame turns the sugar to a golden caramel as the residual heat will continue change the colour, and even if you’re a little fast, you can always go back over it again, but you can’t un-burn it. If using a broiler or salamander, it will probably have hot-spots, so rotate as often as necessary to get an even colour. An important thing to remember is that the broiler should be as hot as it can get, to cook the sugar quickly without doing too much damage to the custard beneath it.
Dividing Rounds
Mar 29th
Being in the pastry field, I spend quite a large part of my day it seems, cutting round things into wedges. Now as sad as that may seem, it can make a large impact on the final product if all your slices come out without crumbs and all the same size. There are a few tricks to help with this. First off, figure out how many pieces you want. Some numbers are easier than others, and there are even products on the market to make the more difficult numbers a bit easier. 
for instance, when pressed into your 8″ round iced cake, will leave impressions telling you where to evenly cut for 14 pieces. But you may not have one of these nifty tools, or you may be cutting into a different number than 14, or you may be cutting something that does not easily impress, such as a pie. What do you do then?
First off, get set up. For cakes, mousses, anything soft and without 2 pastry crusts, this will require a deep container of very hot water, a clean dry towel, a clean wet towel, a sharp knife at least as long as the radius of you cake and a ruler. For pies with 2 crusts, you can use the same method, or you can omit the hot wet knife in favor of a smaller serrated knife.
Place the item on a cutting board (it helps to have a non-slip mat underneath, or a wet towel so the board will not slip as you cut. ) If you are cutting into an even number of pieces, the first thing you should you do is cut your cake in half. The best way to cut perfectly in half, is to measure the centre. Take the ruler, and as best as you can without ruining your icing, place it across the widest part of the cake, hovering if necessary, mark the halfway point with the tip of your knife, or another sharp object, leaving an impression just large enough that you can see it. Rotate the cake 90º and using the center mark, place the ruler along the cake again, marking the middle again. With 2 points now, you should be able to discern a center. From this you can divide the cake in half. Hold your knife into the container of water, until it is warm to the touch. Dry it on your dry cloth, and make your cuts. The most important thing to watch for is that your knife stays at a 90º angle to the board, so you don’t get sloped pieces (this sounds easier than it is, especially with denser cakes).
Now that you cake it halved, it is easier to work with one half at a time (though admittedly not as speedy, but you can’t have it every way). Using your centre mark as a guide, and always starting your cuts there, you can begin to divide into your desired number. After each cut of the knife, (not necessarily slice divided), place the knife into the hot water until it is warm again, and wipe it clean on your wet cloth, drying each time on the dry cloth. This sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but it’s the only way to prevent crumbs from getting on top of the cake. You may need to change the water in order t o keep it clean and hot. If you cake is frosted with a soft icing such as buttercream for example, you can mark where you are planning on cutting before you do and just smooth the line out if it’s wrong later, which will enable you to go back and double check your lines with a ruler first.
Using the basic technique of marking a centre with a ruler and cutting from the at point, you can quite easily divide the cake into most numbers that you will come across. The exception for this is 10. I have seem a lot of cakes divided into 10 (or 20 for buffets or rich cheesecakes).
To start to cut into 10 or 20, you must first halve your cake. The next step is to lightly using your knife, mark what one fifth slice of this half would look like (it may not be perfect, but it will probably be quite close). The more accurately you make this cut, the more even your slices will be but it’s not going to look too bad whatever happens. Once the first fifth slice is done, all you have to do is divide the remaining cake into 2 and then each slice into 2 again. Do this with the other half, and you have 10 perfect slices of cake. Half each slice again for 20.
Baked Custards
Nov 22nd
When you’re making baked custards, (e.g. creme brulees, creme caramels…) and you want a perfect, bubble-free surface after baking, there are several ways of accomplishing this. You can scoop the foam off with a spoon, you can torch the bubbles lightly to pop them, or you can use my favourite method. A fine mesh strainer will remove all the bubbles without damaging the surface like a torch, and with minimal loss to final yield. Just pour the liquid through the strainer and into the final container it will be baked in to reduce any further bubbles.
