Tag: pastry

Categories
Pies, Tarts, and Pastries The Book

124. Berry Tart with Mascarpone Cream p.777


The recipe

I was impressed with this tart, it’s very simple, beautiful, and delicious. I’m not fond of precious pastry bag tricks, or marzipan statuary on my desserts. I prefer the natural good looks of fruit, or decoration that’s an extension of the dessert making process. I tend to bake cakes, dust them with icing sugar, and call it a day. In large part this is because I’m not fond of icing. I’ll often eat the cake out from around the icing if it’s too sweet. I’m OK with whipped cream based icings, and some butter creams, but super-sugared toppings like penuche just aren’t my thing. The beauty of a summer tart is the casual elegance, it’s effortlessly gorgeous, and usually looks and tastes better than a tortuously composed winter-time confection.

The recipe was very simple. It starts with Sweet Pastry Dough, rolled out between sheets of wax paper, and baked with pie weights. It’s filled with a whipped mixture of mascarpone, cream, and sugar. It’s then topped with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries which have been coated with marmalade and berry liqueur. As I mentioned in the write-up for the dough, I had some problems getting it to roll nicely, but it was still quite tasty. The mascarpone cream was excellent, it added body and richness with a very subtle tang, and not too much sweetness. The berries were allowed to carry the dish, they provided the bulk of the sweetness, a nice boozy accent, and all of the visual appeal.

My only complaint with this recipe are the instructions for the berries. They’re put in a bowl, covered with melted marmalade and liqueur, and gently stirred together. I did my absolute best to stir very very gently, but the delicate blackberries and raspberries suffered for it. Next time I’d put the berries on the tart and drizzle them with the glaze. You might not get as thorough a coating as you’d like, but it’s a real shame to damage perfect summer fresh berries. Incidentally, the recipe calls for a dark berry liqueur like blueberry, blackberry, or creme de cassis. I was convinced we had creme de cassis the back of the liquor cabinet somewhere, but it turns out that belonged to an old roommate. I used Grand Marnier instead, and it was delicious. No doubt Grand Marnier is sweet, but it’s got a much more pronounced Cognac edge than many other fruity liqueurs. I welcomed that firey addition to the tart, while a more syrupy liqueur might have pushed it in the wrong direction.

I was extremely happy with this dish, it was simple, delicious, and seasonal. It hinges on amazing fresh berries, I don’t think a winter time replication with frozen fruit would work out. I’m watching giant fluffy snowflakes drifting down outside my window right now, and it’s making me long for the amazing bounty of fruit I got to enjoy in August. This is a quintessential summer tart, a thousand variations are possible, but I could happily stick with this version for the rest of my life too.

Categories
Pies, Tarts, and Pastries The Book

123. Sweet Pastry Dough p.791


The recipe

I should state at the outset that I’m a pastry neophyte. Before I started The Project, I think I’d made two pies in my life. Sure, I baked stuff in pie shells, but I always picked up the Tenderflake pre-made ones, and figured it was good enough. I don’t really have a knack for pastry, but I’m working on it. This is the inaugural entry for the Pies, Tarts, and Pastries chapter of The Book, so hopefully my pastry skills will improve as I work my way through it.

This pie dough is a sweetened and butter based. It gets used in all sorts of other recipes in The Book. I definitely prefer a sweetened dough for dessert pies and tarts. My mother is a rolling pin virtuoso whose pies always turn out perfectly, but she uses the same lard based dough for all her recipes. We have tourtière (a spiced meat pie) every Christmas, which I adore. I particularly like the way the crust is infused with the meaty filling’s flavour. However, when summer comes around and she starts baking up fruit pies using the same dough, I can’t help but imagining the taste of the meat filling along with the crust. Tourtière innards and strawberries aren’t destined to be the next great taste sensation. She recently started adding sugar to her dough for sweet pies, and it made a world of difference. Somehow a little sugar gets rid of the yuletide association, and the pies become pure summer.

The ingredients and method for this dough are pretty standard, combine flour, sugar, and salt, then blend butter in until you’ve got pea sized lumps in a sandy mixture. Then egg yolk and a bit of water are incorporated, until the dough barely holds together. The dough is then divided up, smeared once with your palm, and refrigerated for an hour.

I had some trouble with rolling this dough out. I’ve made it twice, the photo above is the most recent attempt. You can see the scraps to the left, which were probably 40% of the pie dough. I had a really tough time getting it to roll out evenly, and small cracks at the edges developed into big fissures as I was rolling. It was actually fairly easy to work with, and I think my problems were a matter of technique rather than the recipe. The first time I made it was much more of a fiasco though. I made it in late August, on a day with 95% humidity, and it didn’t go so well. Here’s a photo of the crust after baking. 123_sweet_pastry_dough_p791_bad_attempt.jpgYou can see that I had to do a lot of patching before I even got the dough into the oven, and small cracks I’d missed developed into chasms once baked.

The flavour of the dough is excellent, but the texture isn’t ideal. Butter doughs are usually tender, but not flaky. Using a mixture of lard or shortening with butter should give a flavourful dough with great texture. The Book’s Basic Pastry Dough takes this approach (without sugar), and I’m looking forward to trying it. This dough was perfectly fine, it tasted good, and the texture was totally acceptable, but I don’t think it’s the definitive sweet pastry dough. Perhaps as I make and remake it for all the recipes that call for it I’ll get the technique down. For now it’s very serviceable, and I’m content to keep using it.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

75. Sour Cream Pastry Dough p.419

The recipe

This is the crust for Twenty-First Century Beef Wellington. It’s folded over a browned beef tenderloin, covered in Cilantro Walnut Filling, and baked. It’s a very simple dough, made with flour, butter, sour cream and a dash of salt. It’s brought together, then smeared to distribute the fat, and chilled for a couple of hours before rolling.

The dough was exceptionally strong before baking, it put up with a lot of folding, and pinching, and crimping, without tearing or stretching out too much. It rolled out easily, and stood up to the fillings during baking. Between the filling and the meat juices this dough was asked to encase a lot of liquid, and it did an admirable job. Not a drop leaked out, and the bottom of the crust remained crisp.

The final texture was flaky on the outside, and rich and moist on the inside. The sour cream gave it a bit of a bite, which I really appreciated. I was thoroughly impressed with how beautifully it browned up. The central problem of beef wellington is arranging things so that the pastry is nicely browned at the same time as the meat is medium rare. I took the wellington out when the beef was done, and just hoped for the best on the crust. As it happens I turned my back for a bit too long and ended up closer to medium than medium rare on the beef, but the crust was absolutely perfect.

The crust was probably my favorite part of the final wellington recipe. It tied the flavours of the meat and filling together, and had a wonderful crisp – tender texture. You could replace the tenderloin and filling with all sorts of things in this recipe. The dough would be great filled with vegetables, or fish. It would also be a delightful dough for a savory pie. Maybe I’ll use it for a tourtiere at Christmas.