sugar, give me sugar

Monday, March 16, 2009

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I've just recovered from a nasty fever which robbed me of my appetite (it is possible!). Its near fatal effect set me thinking about my life and my achievements (namely my baking ones). HAHA. no la. I did have a fever though! Im just bored now and have time to blog about my previous baking adventures!

NAPOLEAN OR STRUDEL?

Apparently the french calls it the "strudel", since I did (hand)copy the recipe from a "French" recipe book. But i tried googling "strudel" and it turns out that most of the strudels were more like pastry wraps. The famous German Apple Strudel (or the Apfelstrudel) was just apple baked in a pastry. It didn't make sense then to have cream in it cos well the cream can't be baked? The "strudel", born from the Austrian-Hungarian empire, only seemed to have one similarity to the one i knew from Ritz Apple Strudel back in SG : the thinness of the puff pastry.

" Pertaining to anecdotes, purists say, it should be so thin that a newspaper can be read through it[9]. A legend has it that the Austrian Emperor's perfectionist cook decreed that it should be possible to read a love letter through it. " - Quoted from Wikipedia.com , under "Strudel"

It, however, didn't require chilled butter to be rolled and folded umpteen times like what we know of puff pastry now. Alas! If only i did a "Baking History" module! Then i wouldn't have made the fatal mistake of thickness in my puff. I'll get to that later.

One version of the Napolean, or the mille-feuille, i discovered (!) was much more similar to what we perceive as strudel. Layers of puff pastry alternating with cream and filling. But most of the other versions were petite slices (as suggested by its alias "Cream/Vanilla Slice") with pastries skin-thin, like the one mi friends got me for my bday this year from Gobi @ Central.

So now it boils down to what to name whatever-i-was-trying-to-emulate : as Confucius said, 名不正言不顺. I decided STRUDEL it is! Since it was Ritz who inspired. So,

STRAWBERRY STRUDEL

There's nothing much to say about the filling. It was creme patisserie + whipping cream (less so the cream had more consistency) and well strawberries! (my favorite one from Qingpu - rural shanghai). It was the PUFF pastry that almost killed me.

Many many people have remarked : the Puff pastry is the baker's nightmare. Yeah some people try to dispel this baking myth by uploading youtube videos of themselves looking all matyr-like noble(like a knight battling a dragon) when surviving through the 6 hour process. But of course there's alot of fastforwarding in between and a possibly intentional lack of camera-focus when shooting the final product. So i still believe in the herculeanity of the Puff.

The tricky part, simply put, is rolling out a piece of chilled butter in a dough and folding it and repeating above routine about 12 times, without : 1) tearing the dough; 2) melting the butter; 3) sticking dough to surface-top or rolling pin; 4) killing yourself.

I had a hell lot of problem with that. My dough was leeching madly to the rolling pin despite using maybe 500 gm of flour to dust the pin and table top! I ended up with the dough tearing up so bad , i almost had butter on the outside of the dough instead of the reverse! But then i thought, hey all they wanted was 496 layers of dough/butter , didn't need to care which was outside and which was inside. I think MY biggest problem was the butter melting prematurely. It should remain "at the same temperature with the dough" throughout. I'm lucky its winter, or i might have to return the dough to the freezer every 5 minutes (worsened by the fact i'm a pretty slow worker). Oh wait no. My BIGGEST problem was that i got my instructions wrong. *ROLLS EYES* Not only did i do the roll out and fold in like envelope routine 12 times. I did the roll-out-dough-into-cross-and-fold-in routine 12 times too! That resulted in yes alot of layers but NO-ALOT of tears.

So what i suggest is
1) return the dough after 2 turns to the FREEZER for 20 minutes to save time. Cos i figured that all they need was cold dough and not dough-resting so i save 30 minutes if i use the freezer instead.
2) Work FAST. Like godspeed.

Upon baking, roll the puff REAL thin. Like real thin. 1-2 mm. 1/8 inch. Whatever the measurements are. I think "so thin you can read a love letter through it" is a little bit exaggerating. My pastry was er... 5 mm thick so i ended up with alot of uncooked portions in between. But hey, i'm not complaining cos i was almost crazy at the end of the dough-making, and the fact that puff actually "puffed" is enough to keep me smiling. So look at the photos :

So i removed the top and bottom layer of all my puffs (since i had er 3 puffs to spare) and stacked em up to make me strudel! It doesn't really make sense though, cos if i rolled out my pastry dough REALLY thin, i would have enough pastry to make... 10 strudels? Hmm. I wonder how big a strudel the recipebook was thinking of.

But anyway, after arrangement:

Voila!

(i really should get my comments and counter up, so i know i'm not talking to myself!)

3/15/2009 12:12:00 PM