Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Pastry
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?
Glazing pastries if you don’t have apricot glaze
Sep 21st
As I mentioned in a previous post, glazing pastries can make all the difference to how they look and how well they keep, but what do you do if you don’t have glaze?
I suggested one idea which is cheap apricot jam, but this isn’t the only possibility.
Pectin glazes (which are totally vegan/vegetarian despite what you may read on the internet) are made by boiling pectin with sugar and water until it’s a sweet paste. For that you need pectin, which is available most of the year with the gelatin in stores, but it’s not too common an ingredient to have on hand.
Another alternative is to use a different another kind of jam/jelly. For example, if you’re making a strawberry tart, why not use a strawberry jam glaze? Again, as with the apricot glaze be sure to boil it and strain it before use. If you want a really nice thin coat to not alter the sweetness of your product, simply dilute it with some water, and then use. You can also use marmalades for this purpose but keep in mind that they are generally quite sour and bitter.
Types of flour and their substitutions
Jul 14th
Lately, Culinary Tips has been getting a lot of searches for types of flour, substitutions of flour types, and uses of flour, so I’ve expanded the entry here on flour. Hopefully this helps answer some questions. If not, as always, drop us a comment below or email a question.
Firstly, to understand flour, it helps to understand its source, wheat. There are several varieties of wheat, which I won’t delve into here. They vary in colour, protein content, and texture. The seed of which, has three distinct parts: the hull or bran, the endosperm, and the embryo or germ. In whole wheat flour, the husk of the wheat grain is left on and ground, hence the term whole wheat. In white flour is it removed, and only the endosperm and embryo are ground.
Inside flour are two important proteins that make baking possible – glutenin and gliadin. When these are kneaded together in the presence of water, they interlink and form a network called gluten. Gluten gives baked goods a chewy/firm texture, and captures the gases released from yeast during fermentation, and the carbon dioxide released from chemical leaveners in baking.
For many baking projects the right type of flour can make all the difference, but how do you know what the right type is? First lets discuss the types of flour, and what they are used for. The four basic types of wheat flour on the market are:
- All Purpose
- Cake and Pastry
- Bread
- and Self-Raising
Apart from self-raising, which has a chemical leavener (baking powder) already added, the others differ from each other in respect to how much protein is left in during the milling process.
Though there are many different proteins found in flour, the ones that are of concern to bakers are gliadin and glutenin. These proteins form gluten. Gluten is what makes dough elastic. When making bread you want maximum gluten formation, so the CO2 from the yeast will have a place to stay, but when you’re making say, scones or pie dough, the less gluten the better so the product will not be chewy.
Strong / Hard / Bread Flour
Bread flour has the highest protein content of them all, and though it varies from brand to brand and place to place, the protein content is 12-14%. It is often made using a type of wheat called Durum. Due to the high protein content, when worked with water, the most gluten is formed resulting in a chewier product. Strong flour is typically used for making pasta, bread, and other yeast leavened baked goods. Strong flour is also the type that should be used when dusting a workbench because of the large particle size. Unless you are using yeast in your product, or making pasta, consider another type of flour.
All Purpose Flour
Next in strength comes all purpose, which has an 8-10% protein content, putting it basically in the middle of the road when it comes to gluten forming potential. It is a blend of hard and soft flours. If you are going to be making a variety of products, but only want to buy one type of flour, this is the one for you.
Cake Flour / Pasty Flour
At the grocery store, you will often see a single product called Cake and Pastry Flour, with generally the lowest protein content of around 7-10%. Cake and pastry flour has the lowest protein content of all common types of flour, and should be used in making products with a light texture as gluten development is to be avoided. For example, using a high protein flour will make your cake tough, causing it to not rise when baked.
If you only have bread flour and you want some scones tonight, by all means use it, but be extra aware that the potential for chewy scones is higher with bread flour than cake flour. If you are making bread, and you only have cake flour, you may be in for a little more trouble. Soft bread depends on proper gluten development to trap the gases from the yeast, creating leavening, and therefore a nice soft crumb. With cake flour, there is only about half the protein in bread flour, so the potential for gluten development is lesser. To get fully developed dough, you may have to knead for so long that the heat from the friction in the bowl kills the yeast, leaving you with a big sticky pile of mess.
Quite a few British recipes call for self-raising flour because in the UK, self raising flour is roughly the same price as regular flour. For each cup of unleavened flour, add 1 1/2 tsp baking powder. If you only have self-raising flour, and your recipe calls for regular, omit the baking powder and/or salt (if your flour already has it mixed in).
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.
Vol-au-vents
Jun 25th
Some of the classic French canapés involve vol-au-vents, which are puff pastry cups filled with tasty savoury or sweet fillings. These are surprisingly easy to make, especially with the availability of top-quality all-butter puff pastry in stores now.
To make the vol-au-vents, roll out a sheet of puff pastry to 3mm thick, or simply take out a pre-rolled sheet of puff which should be roughly that thickness. You will need 2 circle cookie cutters: one in the size that you want the base to be, and one the size that you want the hole to be.
One to two bites are best for canapés, but larger ones can be served as appetizers and entrees. Simply cut out twice the number of large disks that you want final vol-au-vents (plus a few extra for errors). Now use the smaller cutter to cut a hole in half of the pastry disks, forming O shapes. Next, egg wash the underside of the O shapes, and sandwich them onto the bases, creating cup shapes. Egg wash the whole item just prior to baking. Bake fully, cool and then fill with the pre-cooked filling.
Keep that galette from getting soggy
Jun 22nd
Galettes are free form pies that are made without a pie pan and with only a single sheet of pastry. The filling is placed in the middle of a pastry disk and the sides are folded inwards an inch or two around the filling, creating an edge.
One thing to watch with galettes is the amount of liquid in the filling. Since there isn’t really a steep edge to hold in the juices released during baking, if the filling is too wet it can seep out and make the pastry soggy. One solution is to use a thickener, such as cornstarch, just as you would a regular pie. Another option is to drain the filling before baking and reserve the juices for another purpose (such as a sauce for the pie), and just put the fruit in the pie. A third option is to line inside of the pastry with some white cake crumbs that will absorb the moisture released when it bakes.
Cutting in fat for perfect pastry
Jun 1st
Rubbing butter or another type of fat into flour or dry ingredients is a common first step in many recipes such as pie dough, scones, and cookies. Under or over mixing the fat can lead to less than perfect results. For all of these purposes you want to use cold fat. If flakiness is something that is of the utmost importance, you can even freeze and pre-cut the fat beforehand.
The next step is to cut the cold fat into small chunks — rough 1-2 cm cubes are best. If you want to be very dedicated, you can chill everything from the flour to the bowl. Cold hands are best, but working fast will compensate for this if you dont’ feel like rubbing ice cubes on your wrists until they are painfully cold. You can cut the fat into the dry ingredients using forks, hands, a pastry cutter (a special tool for just this purpose), or even the paddle on an electric mixer. What you’re trying to avoid is gluten development which is what makes doughs tough and chewy.
Two things need to be present for gluten development, flour and moisture. While butter does contain a certain amount of moisture, there is not a sufficient amount to develop gluten. When mixing, I like using either my hands or an electric mixer as forks are too messy and hard to control, and a pastry cutter is another gadget that only does one thing (Alton Brown’s much hated unitaskers!). When you mix with your hands, put the cold cubed butter into the bowl, and stir it around gently just to get all the chunks coated in flour. Now you can start to rub the chunks between your thumb and first 2 fingers. Don’t rub too much, just enough to break the chunk of fat up. Any larger pieces can be come back to.
The mixer method is basically the same with a slight difference. You will need to, after a couple of minutes, turn the mixer off and scrape the bottom to make sure all the flour gets a chance to be coated in fat.
Eventually after enough rubbing or mixing, the mix will change colour becoming more yellow and the texture will become more and more fine. For items like flaky pie pastry and scones, stop when the fat is still in visible chunks the size of your little fingernail. For less flaky doughs, continue cutting in the dough until it is the texture of soil or sand. During baking, the fat will melt trapping the moisture released from the butter or shortening which will leaven the item.
Cheap weights for blind baking pastry
May 31st
When blind baking a pastry shell, whether for further baking with or without filling, it is best to weigh down the parchment with something to further prevent rising of the crust.
You can use any number of things, from old dried beans to special pie weights, but the thing I like to use best is change. Any old loose change like pennies will work. They conduct the heat of the oven which will enable to base to cook through and also weigh down the shell to prevent it rising up. The only problem with this method is that the sides can still brown as you only need one layer of coins, if this is an issue, you can cover the sides with a layer of tin foil.
Since change can be dirty [as can old baking beans or pie weights], it is best to use a circle of parchement paper to cover the pastry.
