In Pursuit of Pastry

During the Pandemic of 2020, most grocery stores have run out of one of the most basic staples of everyday life:  bread.  Several people will resort to making their own.  It's not really that difficult!  However, what do you do if you've run out of yeast and you live in one of those areas under lockdown (or you simply want to avoid going back to the grocery store or the local bakery)?  How on earth do you make bread without yeast? It's simple!  Do what the Irish did during the hard times of the 19th Century potato famine when yeast was a rare and expensive commodity....make SODA BREAD!  Soda bread uses baking soda as its leavening agent instead of yeast.  All you need to make a basic soda bread is flour, buttermilk, baking soda, and salt. And if you don't have buttermilk on hand, as many don't?  Make it yourself!  All you need is 1 cup of milk and a teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice, or even cream of tartar.  Stir them togethe...

This week’s practical assignment taught us about the “modified sponge method” for mixing cookie dough.    The sponge method involves whipping egg whites in a Bain Marie (a pot over simmering water) to make a meringue.   The modified sponge method uses either the yolks of the egg or the whole egg instead of just the whites.   To learn this technique we made decadent Double Chocolate Cookies.   They’re double chocolate because they have melted "dark chocolate" and cocoa powder added.   My cookies were actually triple chocolate because I also added dark chocolate chips.   (I don't consider the white chocolate chips I added to be "real" chocolate, but that's another story...) Compared to learning Baker’s Math, which we also worked on this week (don't ask), this was pretty straight forward and easy.   The only challenge, really, was making sure the cookies were actually done baking when taken out of the oven.   The cookies are already...

Did someone say cookies???  Yes!  It’s week three and we’ve begun our study of those “little cakes”, better known as COOKIES!  For the next month, we will be studying the various methods of production of the cookie dough and the cookies’ makeup (that is, how they’re transferred from a bowl of dough and shaped on the baking sheet).  But first things first.  Just what is a cookie?  The word itself is from the Dutch language; Koekje means “small or little cakes”.  According to the website whatscookingamerica.net , “the first historic record of cookies was their use as test cakes.  A small amount of cake batter was baked to test the oven temperature.”  That makes perfect sense and frankly, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how easily these little “test cakes” could quickly become as popular, if not more so, than the full-size cakes. It is in the making of these little cakes that we see science (chemistry) start to take center sta...