pastry

A festive stack of crêpes

maki — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 02:47:46 +0100

While I was in the U.S. last month, I stumbled upon a segment on the Food Network about a New York patisserie called Lady M Confections. I didn't have time to go there when I was in New York unfortunately, but I sure will make the effort next time! Apparently, their signature cake, the Lady M Mille Crepes (trademarked even), is a stack of crêpes alternating with a custard filling, finished off with burnt sugar.

I haven't tried this yet but I've been making savory stacked crêpes for years, since I read a recipe somewhat like this one in some magazine. Crêpes are the perfect bland, buttery vehicle for a creamy filling. The standard one I make is the one pictured here - the filling is a cream cheese / crême fraiche / base (like a good old '70s dip) with a lot of possible variations. Chilled and cut into very small segments (it's very rich, so be careful!), it's a great party snack or appetizer. It looks very pretty, as you can see.

Festive Stack of Crêpes

The key to making this all look pretty is to make the crêpes fairly uniform in size. I always make my crêpes in the same 8" / 25cm nonstick frying pan, since I don't really make them often enough to justify having a specialized crêpe pan. And that circumference is just about right.

For the Crêpes: This makes about 15-20 crêpes, depending on how many you mess up! You can still use ones with a small tear in them.

4 eggs
1 cup white flour
1 cup whole milk
2 Tbs melted, clarified unsalted butter, plus more for cooking the crêpes
1/2 tsp salt

To clarify the butter, melt it in a small saucepan or in the microwave, let sit a minute or so until the solid white stuff floats to the top, and scoop off. The golden liquid you're left with is clarified butter.

Beat the eggs. Mix in the milk. Add the flour a little at a time, until it's all incorporated. (You can also mix the batter in a food processor, or with a hand mixer - this ensures no lumps.) Add the salt and the butter. (If you're using salted butter, halve the amount of salt or omit it entirely.)

Let the batter sit, covered for at least one hour (in the refrigerator if it's hot in your kitchen) - this allows the flour to absorb the liquid. As you cook the

To cook the crêpes, heat up a nonstick frying pan or crêpe pan (see above) over medium heat. Thinly coat the bottom of the pan with oil or clarified butter (additional from the amount put into the batter). Spread about 1 tablespoon of batter rapidly over the bottom of the pan. Cook until the edges curl up, then flip over and cook for another minute. As anyone who has made crêpes knows, the first one always turns out terrible looking, but after that they shape up.

Cool the crêpes before proceeding.

The filling

Note that the filling is basically a cream-cheese dip. You can vary the ingredients quite a bit: instead of bacon or proscuitto, try smoked salmon, or other types of ham. It's also fine just with the oniony base.

Since cream cheese is sold here in different units (200g) from the U.S. (8 ounces per Philadelphia Cream Cheese pack), I've given the ingredients as proportions which you can scale up or down.

1 part cream cheese
1/2 part sour cream or crême fraiche
1/3 part mayonnaise
1/4 part (for 1 pack of cream cheese, about 3 Tbs) finely chopped green onions
Finely chopped parsley (for 1 pack of cream cheese, about 2 Tbs)
Precooked bacon or panchetta, crumbled, to taste, and/or chopped proscuitto
A couple of dashes of Tabasco
Salt and pepper to taste, if neede

Mix all the ingredients together, by hand or in a food processor. When it's done it should be soft and spreadable.

Put a crêpe on a flat plate, and spread with some of the filling. Repeat until you end up with a stack of crêpe-filling-crêpe about 15-20 high.

Finish with a thin layer of filling, and decorate the top with chopped parsley, etc.

Chill in the refrigerator for several hours to let the filling set and also for the crêpes to sort of amalgamate itself a bit with the filling. This makes it a perfect day-ahead item for a party. Cut into very small wedges or tiny squares with toothpicks for a party snack. To serve as an appetizer, serve a small wedge (each 'cake' can be cut into 12-16 pieces) with a small lightly dressed salad of arugula or watercress.

Basics: Choux pastry

maki — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 23:10:00 +0200

Choux pastry is what is used to make cream puffs, profiteroles, and eclairs. It is also used to make such delights such as the Paris-Brest, a giant cream puff ring filled with flavored cream.

Choux pastry isn’t just for sweet things though: add cheese to it to make gougeres, which are cheesy puffs; poach it to make Parisian gnocci; and, it also makes great snacks or appetizers. Fill big choux buns with tuna or chicken salad, or make tiny little puffs and fill with some sort of intensely flavored filling. Sprügli, a famous and impeccable Zürich patisserie, makes these tiny puffs filled with a mixture of Gorgonzola cheese and butter, as part of their “apero” (appetizer) selection which one can buy by weight.

I was going to include the choux pastry recipe in my cream puff entry, but since it is such a versatile basic, here it is on its own.

The key to successful baking of puffs is to use a silicon baking sheet (sold under brands such as Bake-O-Glide). You can grease the pan or use parchment, but the silicon sheet ensures that the bottoms won't stick.

Choux pastry

This recipe yields about 2 1/2 cups of pastry. This amount makes about 48 little puffs, or 24 eclairs or bigger cream puffs. Your results may vary, depending on how big or small you make them.

1 cup of water
1 cup of beaten eggs (about 5 large eggs, but be rather accurate about this - it will really affect the results)
100g / 3 1/2 oz. of unsalted butter
1 cup of all-purpose white flour
a pinch of salt
Equipment: two baking sheets lined with silicon baking sheets; a sturdy ziplock plastic bag; a pair of scissors

Heat the oven to 210 ° C / 420°/ F. Line the pans with the silicon sheets.

Cut up the butter, and put it with the water and salt in a pan. Heat over medium heat until the butter has melted. Dump in the flour, and mix vigorously with a wooden spoon, until the flour is completely incorporated. The dough ball should slightly film the pan with a floury residue. Take off the heat and cool the bottom by putting it on a damp kitchen towel, or briefly running cold water over it.

Add the eggs, little by little, to the pan, mixing vigorously between additions. It may look like someone threw up at first, but it will all get incorporated.

Scoop the warm dough into the plastic bag. Cut the end off one corner with scissors, to make an opening about .5 cm / 1/4 inch or so. Now you will squeeze the mixture onto the pans - the shape dictates what you'll call it eventually. You can make long blobs, which would make them eclairs, tiny blobs, or bigger blobs. To smooth out any parts that stick up when you squeeze out the dough, just wet your finger in water or milk and smooth out. You can also glaze the puffs with a beaten egg wash, to give a shine to it. In this case use a pastry brush, and smooth out the top with it as you glaze.

Baking time also varies, depending on how big your blobs are. For about 5 cm diameter / 2 inch puffs, bake for about 20 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through. (Rotating means to switch the pans so that the top one is on the bottom, and vice versa. You may also want to turn the pans at this point too.) Watch the puffs and when they are a medium brown color, take them out.

When the puffs are done, immediately slash into each of them with a serrated knife. This lets out the steam and prevents the inside from getting soggy. You can then return the puffs to the oven for a few minutes. To ensure there will be no sogginess whatsoever, some people cut open the puffs and let them dry out a bit in the oven, but I sort of like some softness inside so omit this step.

You can also poach the dough in boiling water, to make light gnocchi. Squeeze blobs of the dough into the salted boiling water and cook until the bits float to the surface. Serve with butter, cheese, fresh parsley and so on.

Blini, caviar and local sparkling cider

maki — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 22:05:25 +0100

Happy new year!

Last night, we had two favorites for our little New Year's Eve party - blini with caviar and smoked salmon, with a local speciality called Blauacher Chlöpfmoscht.

First about the Blauacher Chlöpfmoscht. This is a sparkling wine made from apples - so I guess you could call it a cider. But what a delicate, lovely thing it is. It's a very pale champagne white, with a faint scent of fresh apple, sparkly and very festive. (The color is so delicate in fact, that I couldn't get a good photo of it...I'll try again next time we get a bottle.) By local, I really mean local - it's made at a farm that is about 3 minutes walk from our house, Müller. The town where we live is not that rural really - we are about 30 minutes by commuter train from the center of Zürich - but there is still plenty of farmland around. And we are very lucky to have Herr and Frau Müller, who operate a small organic farm where we can buy the most delicious fresh, large eggs, not to mention totall chemically free beef. Unfortunately their operation is too small for them to ship their products, including the Blauacher Chlöpfmoscht. Whenever we go visiting and know that our hosts appreciate wine, we try to bring along a bottle, and it's always appreciated.

Blini, on the other hand, can be made anywhere, with the right ingredients. It's the perfect buttery yet bland carrier for caviar - the sturgeon kind, or salmon eggs, or even (undyed!) lumpfish. Any kind of smoked fish goes well on it too. A dollop of creme fraiche or good sour cream, or unsalted butter, never hurts. You can also try sweet toppings like butter and marmelade. Unlike crepes, blini batter contains yeast. Blini are great make-ahead party food. Just make a big stack, lay out the toppings, and let everyone go at it.

Below are two variations. The first uses buckwheat flour. The second uses some ripe desem. Both recipes make a lot of blini. Blini freezes very well, stacked with a piece of parchment or waxed paper in between each and then wrapped in several layers of plastic wrap.

Buckwheat blini

2 cups buckwheat flour
1 cup unbleached white flour (all purpose, or soft - not bread flour)
2 packets of dry yeast
1/2 cup lukewarm water
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
4 cups 2% milk (or 3 cups whole milk + 1 cup water)
120g or 4 oz. or 1 stick of unsalted butter, melted
5 large eggs
Oil for cooking

Sift together the buckwheat and white flours.

Dissolve the yeast and about a 2 tablespoons of the sugar in the lukewarm water. By lukewarm, that means if you put your finger in, it should feel a bit warm but not hot. Let it proof (bubble up) for a bit, about 5 minutes.

Mix together 1/3 cup of the flour mixture with the yeast-water mixture. Cover and let proof (bubble up) for 30 minutes to an hour. If you leave it for the longer time, the yeast flavor will dissipate more - which I prefer. I don't really like the flavor of commercial dry yeast that much.

Add 2 cups of the milk (or milk and water mix), the rest of the flour, salt, the rest of the sugar, beaten eggs and melted butter to the dough, and mix. Add more flour if necessary to bring to the consistency of mayonnaise. Cover and let proof (bubble up) for about 30 minutes. It will get quite bubbly, so be sure your bowl is big enough to avoid a countertop volcano effect.

Heat up the rest of the milk (it's easiest to do this in the microwave). Pour it over the batter and mix gently to make a thinnish but not too thin batter. It should be the consistency of unwhipped cream.

Heat up a griddle or a couple of nonstick frying pans over medium heat. Put about 2 Tbs. worth of batter in the pan or on the griddle, let the batter spread to about 4 inches / 10 cm diameter. Cook until the batter on top of drying out, then flip to briefly cook the other side. Repeat often until you end up with about 50 blini. Enjoy with whatever toppings you like.

Desem blini

1 1/2 cups ripe desem
1 cup unbleached white flour (all purpose, or soft - not bread flour)
1 packet of dry yeast
1/4 cup lukewarm water
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
4 cups milk
120g or 4 oz. or 1 stick of unsalted butter, melted
5 large eggs
Oil for cooking

Mix together the desem, lukewarm water mixed with yeast and 1 Tbs. of sugar (see above), and about 1/2 cup of the white flour. Let proof (bubble up) for 1 hour, no less. Desem seems to need a bit of time to get used to the yeast (and note there's only 1 packet of yeast, since desem has its own leavening power.)

Add 2 cups of the milk, the rest of the flour, salt, beaten eggs and melted butter to the dough, and mix. Add more white flour if necessary to bring to the consistency of mayonnaise. Cover and let proof (bubble up) for about 30 minutes. It will get quite bubbly so be sure your bowl if big enough.

Scald (bring to boil) the rest of the milk. Pour it over the batter and mix gently to make a thinnish but not too thin batter.

I think you could substitute whole wheat flour for the white flour in the desem blini recipe, though I haven't tried this myself. The desem blini has a slight sourness which is very good with fishy toppings like caviar.