Baking
Mankind has loved baking for a very long time. Even before humans mastered fire there was already baking using hot stone surfaces. In ancient Egypt we started using yeast and in Turkey archeological finds included ovens and worktables with thousands of years.
The Portuguese love baking and even in Brazil baking is very much associated even today with the Portuguese community. The main ingredient for baking is the wheat flour. It has proteins up to 70%, but typically below 15% in our day-to-day baked goods, it is low in fat (<2%) and has some carbohydrates to feed us and the yeast (when used). It is the flour that gives bulk and structure to all we bake and that is why in baking we always use flour as our starting point, even in recipes.
Visit the pages below and get to know a little bit of the chefs baking experience and learnings.
With or without sesame seeds, in one, two knots, round, etc, dinner rolls can be presented in many shapes. Practice your palming of the dough (in 1 & 1/2 oz pieces) to get really consistent results.
Pizza is essentially a type of bread, and Italian bread where we work the dough and get some gluten in there to get to the right consistency.
The blind bake above will be pre cooked for ˜15 minutes. It is blind because it "does not see" what filling we are using later on.
If you don't add sugar to the dough it is more flexible as you can use later for sweet or savory configurations.
Pâte Sucre is just french for sweet paste, that is, the dough with sugar used for tarts and tartlets. You will typically find tarts in shallow straight sided pans so you get the beautiful result in the picture above.
If you want your cookies to be perfectly chewy like the chocolate chip cookies above be very aware of the time in the oven. They get out of the oven just undercooked and finish out of the heat, if you bake longer they will get harder and flakier.
All the air built into the famous Eclair paste is perfect for our Crème Pâtissière (Pastry Cream) filling. This is certainly why these sweets are so faMOUSE...
The process of laminating the dough creates layers of dough and butter that separate and expand when the croissant is baked, resulting in the characteristic flakiness of the pastry.
This Swiss Roll is made by using an egg foam cake (a spongecake) as a basis that is rolled with Jelly. Learn more about these mixing methods in this part I of cakes.
Cursive writing maybe getting our of use in the US but we still believe the best cakes require this lost art. To learn how to make this cake click below.
There are many different types of custards, including baked custards, which are cooked in the oven, and stirred custards, which are cooked on the stovetop.
Ladyfingers are small, light, sweet sponge cakes that are shaped like fingers. They are often used in desserts such as tiramisu and trifles, we pipe them on a sheet tray with the height of the pan we are using and the length of the circumference of the pan.
Sorbet, Bombe, Spiced Pineapple, Tuiles and much more information inside.
The Classic Charlotte Royale and other frozen favorites like the Tiramisu, Passionfruit Charlotte and Ice Cream, click below to see the details.