Posts Tagged ‘Pastry’
Friday, January 13th, 2012
We moved to South East London a few weeks ago, and last weekend finally made it down to Brockley Market.
It’s only been going for a few months, but the organisers have pulled together a really nice selection of stalls including organic fruit, veg, meat, as well as a few street food style vendors and some great coffee. Special mention should go out to Mike & Ollie for their delicious mackerel wrap, and the Mother Flipper burger I sampled. Brunch of champions.
In general I have a bit of a problem with the prices of farmers markets in and around London, particularly when it comes to meat, so I decided to set myself a challenge. Spend a tenner or less to put together some decent grub. After spying a nice slab of chuck steak at Jacob’s ladder, I hit on the idea of making pasties. I cheated a bit as the flour and butter I already had at home, but including the cost of store cupboard ingredients I probably still only spent £8 or £9, which is pretty decent for 4 chunky pasties.
Ingredients
For the filling
450g chuck steak
1 medium carrot
1 medium potato
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Tags: Bake, Brockley Market, Carrot, Chuck Steak, Cornish, Crimping, Onion, Pastry, Pasty, Potato, Salt, Swede, White Pepper
Posted in Dinner, Lunch, Recipes | No Comments »
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
Like Hot Cross Buns at Easter, one of the things that make Christmas for me are mince pies. I love them. So when my mate Luke who co-runs clothing label Percival asked if I fancied making some for late night shopping evenings at their new pop up in Covent Garden, I was all over it like a cheap suit.
This recipe is a bit of a remix. Inspired by and finished like the mighty Eccles Cakes of St John, the filling is simpler than traditional mincemeat, but the spices, currants, muscavado sugar and rum pack a treacle-like punch, and instead of beef suet, or that horrible veg substitute, I use frozen, grated butter, so the veggies can chow too. I’d recommend making the filling a good couple of weeks before you make your pies. Over time the flavour gets better and better, and if you keep it cool it will last for ages.
This recipe will make 24 or more mincers. I make them in muffin trays with 6 x 3 dimples which gives them a meat pie like appearance after they’re baked.
Ingredients
For the pastry
480g Plain white (pastry) flour
25g Caster sugar
10g Salt
340g Unsalted butter, cold
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Tags: Allspice, Butter, Christmas, Clothing, Currants, eccles Cake, Mince Pie, Nutmeg, Pastry, Percival, Pop Up, St John, Sweet, Treat
Posted in Recipes, Snack, Sweet Stuff | 2 Comments »
Saturday, November 12th, 2011
The classic French fruit tart has to be one of my favourite deserts. The combination of the sweet, crumbly pastry, the vanilla spiked crème pâtissière and the sharp fruit tick all the boxes for me. I know it’s more of a Summer dish, but I got hold of some late season British raspberries the other day, and decided to make it as part of a ‘welcome home’ lunch at my folk’s house.
The other great thing about this recipe is that once all the elements are made, it’s an assembly job. So you can make everything in advance, then throw it all together a the last minute and lap up the applause like it ain’t no thang. NB. As with most pastry, it’s good to let the pâte sucrée rest in a fridge for at least a few hours, both after making it and after lining the tart mold as this should stop the case shrinking when it’s being baked off.
Ingredients (makes 27cm tart / 8 slices)
For the pâte sucrée
145g All purpose flour
60g Icing sugar
65g Unsalted butter
50g Egg yolks
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Tags: Bake, case, Classic, crème pâtissière, Custard, Desert, French, Pastry, pâte sucrée, Raspberries, Sweet, Tart, Tarte aux framboises, tin, Vanilla
Posted in Recipes, Sweet Stuff | 2 Comments »
Sunday, September 11th, 2011
So that’s it. It’s over. 4 and a half months, 18 weeks, 90 days, 720 hours, 43,200 minutes of hardcore baking action. We graduated from the SFBI Professional Bread & Pastry Programme last Friday, and I’ve go to say it was a bitter sweet occasion.
In the week running up to the graduation, as a group we made over 160 products, and most of them in multiple numbers. We were split into four groups as usual, with two groups concentrating more on bread and the other two predominantly on cakes and pastry. It was a full on week of late nights, early mornings, little sleep and lots of coffee. We all started on pastry, prepping stuff to be frozen and items with good shelf life, and the production schedule steadily ramped up over the week to fever pitch, particularly on Thursday and Friday for us bread people. It was full on, but hugely enjoyable. I have to admit, I felt pretty emotional as I scored the very last loaf that went into the oven.
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Tags: Baking Institute, Bread, Chocolate, Class Of 2011, Diploma, Graduation, Michel Suas, Pastry, Production, Products, San Francisco, SFBI, Viennoiserie
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 10 Comments »
Thursday, July 28th, 2011
Last week started where the previous week finished, with a bevvy of tarts. For any newcomers, don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a tale of my sordid weekends in San Francisco’s brothels, but rather the pastry variety. And what a way to start.
Using the left over Pâte à Foncer and the vanilla Sucree, as well as a chocolate version made for us by our instructor, Juliette, we made a trio of tasty treats. The first was a Pear Bourdaloue. A rectangular tart filled with frangipane, jam and topped with artfully sliced pears. Right up my ‘rue’. Next, using the chocolate sucree, a salted caramel tart. Quite a lengthy process this one, as it involved making a salted caramel with which we lined the base, a chocolate ganache which formed the bulk of the filling, all topped off with ‘black glaze’, which contrary to it’s name isn’t a new tone from Dulux, but a silky chocolate flavoured glaze which gives the finished tart a shop ready sheen.
The final tart of the trio was a creamy passion fruit tart, which had a tasty curd like filling similar to a tarte au citron, topped (slightly un-necessarily in my opinion) with blow-torched Swiss meringue, to give a nicely burnished effect. Or at least that’s the theory. For most of us, this was the first time we had used a piping bag to finish a desert, and there were some mixed results. My effort (not pictured) wasn’t too bad, but lets just say Pierre Hermé hasn’t been knocking down my door to offer me a job.
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Tags: Blow Torch, Caramel, Chantilly, Choux, Cookies, Cream, Creamy, Eclairs, Frangipane, Gateaux Saint Honoré, meringue, Muffins, Paris Brest, passion Fruit, Pastry, Peanut Butter, Pear Bourdaloue, Praline, Salted Caramel, Tart
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Sweet Stuff, Travel | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011
So, after a fair few months of planning and saving, I’ve got some exciting news. Hand To Mouth is re-locating to the US for six months. The wife and I are upping sticks to head to San Francisco at the end of April, where I’m going to be doing a professional bread and pastry diploma at the awesome San Francisco Baking Institute.
Photo: Unknown
The seed for this adventure was first planted a little over a year ago when I read this post on the Chow blog. My wife and I were feeling increasingly disillusioned with our careers / industries, and had been talking for some time about opening our own cafe bakery. But with very little in the way of experience, we didn’t really know where to start. It was beginning to feel like it may always be a bit of a pipe dream, and then I read the Chow post and a large penny dropped.
So we did some research, found out more about the course, talked about it for a while, and decided to go for it. To be honest, it’s all a bit scary, but also exhilarating. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’ll know that I’ve been bitten by the baking bug, but this is a whole new ball game. I’m going to be well out of my comfort zone, and when you throw into the mix quitting a perfectly good, well paid job at one of the UK’s most respected ad agencies, you’ve either got a recipe for disaster, or the best thing I’ve ever done with my life.
We don’t have any time frame on when / if we’re going to start our own business, but that’s partly what this trip is all about. As well as doing the course, we’re going to do some work experience, travel around the States, and generally immerse ourselves in country’s food culture, whilst getting a plan together of the kind of business we want to open. But I guess there’s also every chance that we might end up by missing our day jobs, and we’ll yearn to return to London at the end of our adventure. Only time will tell.
So can an Advertising Wanker be transformed into a Master Baker? You’ll have to keep it locked right here to find out.
Tags: Advertising, Baking, Bread, Chef, Course, Escape The City, Life Change, Master Baker, Pastry, Professional, San Francisco Baking Institute, Travel
Posted in Opinion, Travel | 5 Comments »
Sunday, January 23rd, 2011
Apologies for the radio silence, but yet again the day job has been getting in the way of me putting finger to key. It’s been what can only be described as an unpleasantly busy start to the year, but at least I got to head out to Stockholm earlier in the week, if only for 24 hours.
Rewinding again to Christmas, if you can remember that far back, here’s a recipe for a classic lemon tart. It’s basically a piece of cake (or rather tart), particularly if you use shop bought pastry, which I’d recommend unless you’ve got the time to make your own.
I’ve not managed to work out how patisseries manage to get that glossy finish on their tarts, so I cheated and added a festive twist by glazing mine with a bit of raspberry jelly.
This recipe was made in a 30cm / 12″ tart case to serve around 8-10 people, if you’re making desert for less use a 20cm / 8″ case and half the quantities. Lets begin.
Ingredients
500g all butter shortcrust pastry
10 free range eggs
8 lemons, juiced
380g caster sugar
500 ml double cream
Zest of 4 lemons
4 tablespoons of raspberry jelly for the glaze, optional
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Tags: Bake, Clotted Cream, Cream, Eggs, Glaze, Jelly, Lemon, Pastry, Raspberry, Shortcrust, Sugar, Tart, Zest
Posted in Dinner, Lunch, Recipes, Snack, Sweet Stuff | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
So, as mentioned in the previous post, we hit Morocco for our honeymoon. If I’m honest, I don’t think I was that excited about the food as I’d heard mixed reports, and was led to believe there wasn’t much variation. I was kind of expecting expecting tagines, tagines and more tagines, but whilst there were certainly a lot of them about, there’s definitely more to Moroccan cuisine.
There were certain things that really struck us, the first being the amount of sugar the Moroccans use. It seems to be in pretty much everything, from bread to the ubiquitous mint tea, each glass of which must have more sugar than a can of coke. Check out the picture if you don’t believe me.
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Tags: Essaouira, Food Stalls, French, Jamaa El Fnaa, Marrakesh, Mint Tea, Morocco, Offal, Pastry, Patisseries, Pigeon, Sugar, Tagine, Vegetables
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | No Comments »
