Pȃtisserie 101: know thy pastry

The word, pȃtsserie comes from the French word pȃte, meaning pastry and that's what it's all about.   Pȃte is basically a mixture of flour and water, known as a détrempe, to which other things are added to give variations of taste, texture, and puffiness. These variations will serve as the basis for most of the recipes on this blog, so let's take a quick look at them, and their differences.

Pȃte brisée: similar to shortcrust pastry, this mixture of flour, salt, and butter with a flaky texture, is the basis for sweet or savory tarts, such as the quiche lorraine.

Pȃte sablée: a sweet pastry with a sandy texture, this is a mixture of flour, sugar, and butter. Sometimes eggs are added and it can be flavored with nuts. This is the basis for many sweet tarts.

Pȃte sucrée: a sweet pastry with a crisp texture, this is a mixture of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, often flavored with nuts. The difference between this and pȃte sablée is the way in which the butter is mixed with the other ingredients and this affects the final texture. This too, it the basis for many sweet tarts.

Pȃte feuilletée: also known as puff pastry, this is made by adding butter to a détrempe. By a magical process, known as tourage, 729 microscopic layers of butter are created which puff up into flaky layers when cooked. This is the basis for vol au vents, gallettes, and mille feuilles.

Pȃte à choux: eggs, flour, water, milk, and butter form the basis of this pastry which puffs to form small hollow buns when cooked. This is the basis for profiteroles, réligieux, and chocolate éclairs. 

A piece of this ...

When I was twelve years old, I wrote an essay at school on the origins of the pizza. I invented a creation myth for the dish in which a neapolitan woman took the random contents of her larder, placed them onto a circle of dough and put the whole thing into her wood-fired oven. When admirers asked what the creation was called, she said a pizza, because it was made of 'a pizza dis and a pizza dat!'

This story contains an essential truth about Italian pizza, that the dough is really a vehicle for whatever you feel like eating. In Italy, outside the big tourist centres, people are often surprised that familiar pizzas, such as 'capricciosa', 'quattro stagioni', and 'pepperoni'* are not listed but are replaced either with fantastical names, or shopping lists of the toppings used. The name 'capricciosa' can actually be translated as 'whatever you feel like'. One of the pizzerias close to my farm in Tuscany boasts 100 types of pizza, each given the name of a local hamlet.

The plain cheese and tomato 'pizza margherita' is usually found on most menus, it being one of the only truly Italian pizzas familiar in the English-speaking world. The authentic version, contains red tomatoes, white mozzarella, and green basil leaves, the colours of the Italian flag. The original was named for the Queen of Italy, who made a visit to Naples in 1889, by pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito of the pizzeria Brandi.

Friday night is pizza night in my house and I usually top them with whatever I have left in the fridge. The hand-made pizza dough and tomato sauce are easy to make and can be kept in the fridge until you are ready for action.

Pizza Fantasia

Ingredients

Dough (makes 2 large pizza bases)
1 sachet of dried yeast
300ml tepid water
10g salt
3 tablespoons of olive oil
1 teaspoon sugar
10g salt
12g yeast
500g flour

Dissolve the sachet of yeast in about 100ml of tepid water. A good way to test for tepid is to place your fingers in the water. If you can't feel it, then it's the right temperature. Then leave the yeast for about 10 minutes to activate. It should start bubbling. If it doesn't throw it away and start again as your yeast is not working.
Then dissolve the salt in rest of the water and add the olive oil. Place the flour in a large bowl and add the sugar, the yeast mixture and then the salt, oil and water. Bring the mixture together with your hands and then turn out onto a worktop and knead for about 10 minutes. The dough it done when it has achieved a smooth elastic consistency.
Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with a tea towel and leave in a warm place for about two hours, by which time the dough should have doubled in size.

Tomato sauce
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion finely diced
1 tin chopped tomatoes (400g)
1 tbsp tomato puree
100 ml water or red wine

Heat the olive oil in a high-sided frying pan over a low heat. Add the onion and fry slowly for about 10 to 15 minutes until golden. Cooking the onion slowly will allow the sugars to caramelise meaning that you don't have to add sugar. Do not allow the onion to turn to dark or it will create a bitter taste. Add the chopped tomatoes, tomato puree, water / wine,  and sprinkle with salt. Turn up the heat, bring to the boil and allow to simmer for about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and allow to cool completely before using on the pizza. If you want, you can pass it through a strainer, but I like the lumpy bits, which give the pizza texture. This can also be used as a pasta sauce and will keep in an airtight container for about a week in the fridge.

Pizza

grated mozzarella cheese
toppings of your choice

Heat the oven to 230 degrees. To make up the pizza, divide the dough into two and each piece into a pizza shape using your fingers. Then cover with a layer of the tomato sauce, a layer of grated mozzarella cheese and a piece of this and a piece of that, whatever takes your fancy. The place it in the oven, I would recommend using a pizza stone, and cook for about 25 minutes. Buon appetito!

*A word of caution to anyone travelling in Italy. Order 'pepperoni' and you will be presented with red or green peppers ('peperoni'), the actual Italian meaning of the word. 

Quiche au saumon

A very good (french) friend of mine was leaving town on a business trip and presented me with some of the food from her fridge, including some delicious looking smoked salmon. So, I couldn't just eat it, but instead decided to make a quiche out of it.

I have a fool-proof french recipe for flaky shortcrutst pastry, which is definitely as easy as buying it ready made but a thousand times more tasty.

So, I added blanched asparagus, chopped capers and dill to the mix and here is the result! Saturday night quiche!

Real men DO eat

I learnt how quick and delicious it was to make Quiche Lorraine from scratch, while sharing an apartment with a very dear French friend of mine here in Zürich. I had always been of the opinion that French food was excellent but living with her was a real eye opener in terms of how the French actually cook view food. My daily repetoire of food was heavily dominated by Italian food, but now I am keen to add more classic French dishes.

Quiche Lorraine is remarkably simple but freshly baked is so much better than shop bought, even if only for the satisfaction of having performed alchemy with milk, butter and cheese. And, although it is possible to buy nice ready made pastry and even ready blind baked flan cases, it really is very simple, quick and satisfying to make your own.

Aside from watching my dear great aunt Ada baking in her kitchen, my first experience of making shortcrust pastry was when I was 11 years old, having my first term of Home Economics classes at secondary school. The fearsome teacher, Mrs Cook (I kid you not!) barking orders at us as we all got our hot little eleven year old hands stuck into the beige ceramic bowls in front of us clouding the room in flour and melting the butter. I don't remember what the pastry tasted like but I remember being put off by this experience.

It is a commonly held belief that you need cold hands to make shortcrust pastry by hand, as warm hand melt the butter in the initial mixing with the flour and ruin the final texture of the pastry. If this was the  case then I would be doomed from the start since I have the warmest hands of anyone I know. Even in subzero temperatures my naked hands feel warm: it can get to -15 here in Zürich in the winter, and if I do venture out in gloves, I have to remove them within a few minutes as my hands feel too hot. As a child, my snowballs always melted as I was making them. However, by following a couple of basic tips, even I can make good pastry by hand.

First, make sure your butter is really cold. Unlike making cakes, making pastry calls for cold butter and not room temperature. Secondly, run your hands under the cold tap before putting your hands into the bowl and thirdly don't work too hard. The correct technique for rubbing butter into flour is a gentle tickling motion, picking up small amounts of flour and butter and combining them as they fall from your hands. It's quite sensual really, but I will stop there.

So here are some photos of my Saturday Quiche Lorraine made with a home made shortcrust pastry shell.

Blind baking the case with beans

add some lightly fried lardons

and some grated Gruyère cheese 

milk, eggs, salt, pepper and nutmeg

et voilà!