Patisserie 3.5: Puff pastry experiment

 You may recall the pear and almond cream tart from a few weeks ago, where the base was a shell of puff pastry that represented my first venture into that category of pastry. In this tart, I was disappointed that the bottom of the shell was very gummy, while the edges were flaky as expected. 

In an effort to ascertain whether the remaining 950g of the homemade puff pastry I had in the fridge was viable, I took out the 250g quarter from last time and let it thaw in the fridge overnight, with the intent of running a mini experiment on this piece of dough. I had a few different things I wanted to try on this pastry: 

• Bake a piece on its own to figure out whether the lamination itself was a failure to create layers, and thus, whether the remainder of the batch could be used in other recipes
  
• Be more gentle in rolling out, letting the dough rest if it was starting to stretch
• Keep my workstation colder and not roll out a delicate butter pastry on top of a hot dishwasher counter
• Flour my cutting board so any stretching/sticking would be an immediately obvious sign to stop rolling and let the dough rest/chill

Patisserie 4: Pâte à choux/Choux Pastry/Cream puff tartlets

 You would think that my track record with The Book would have me a little more humble in my approach by now. A few months ago, while I was still reading up on how to begin my patisserie journey, I stumbled upon the blog Patisserie Makes Perfect, which was the final inspiration for my method. But very early on, the author has extreme difficulty with this recipe for Cream Puff Tartlets, and mentions that they have much difficulty with choux pastry in the past. Now, I've made choux pastry to varying success before, but as described in my very first post, I have no idea why or why not some of my attempts worked. So I assumed that, if I followed the recipe by The Book, everything would at least turn out on par to the blogger's attempt. 

I was half-right: I didn't have to really worry about the choux pastry itself. But everything else that could go wrong in this "intermediate" recipe went wrong in some way. 

According to Wikipedia, the name for pâte à choux is mistakenly attributed to its literal meaning and appearance (choux=cauliflower in french), when instead, it stems from pâte à chaud, or "hot pastry," due to its being cooked butter, flour, and water, to allow the flour to absorb more moisture. This moisture is in turn released during the baking process, creating steam which leavens the pastry dough, usually creating a hollow center and a browned but tender crust. This is the pastry dough that becomes both profiteroles (cream puffs) and eclairs (long cream puffs), as well as paris-brest and religieuses (which are just a profiterole with a smaller profiterole on top), and unfilled versions like chouquettes (small unfilled puffs) and gougeres (savory cheese puffs). 

Patisserie 3: Feuilletage/Puff pastry/Tarte aux Poires/Pear tart with almond cream

I had some pears I wanted to use, so I skipped ahead to an intermediate recipe from the holidays section for a tart with pears, dried fruits, and almond cream. The note at the very bottom of the Tarte aux Poires recipe says: "Readymade all-butter puff pastry dough can replace the homemade." Since I had yet to make any of the puff-pastry-type recipes in the tarts section, I decided to make this one from scratch, essentially turning this one recipe into three (candied orange peel being the third component I needed to make from scratch, also from the holiday section). 

Puff pastry is often used in napoleons and more traditional galettes (french open-faced tinless pies), though recently galettes have sort of fused with pie dough as a base. Puff pastry, like other laminated doughs (doughs that are folded and rolled out multiple times to create layers of butter between layers of dough, rather than creaming together sugar and butter and flour), is very reliant on keeping the dough and butter cold while working with it to minimize the amount of butter absorbed into the dough. The distinct layers then separate slightly during baking, with the steam from the butter layer helping the dough layers puff up and the fat from the butter layer gently frying the dough, achieving a bunch of flaky, crisp layers as a final result. 

To keep the dough cold and flaky, there's three common strategies, usually employed together: 

• Use cold workpieces (marble rolling pin, marble worksurface, or iced work surface)
• Use multiple days to prepare the dough, chilling well in between each folding and rolling process
• Use as little flour as possible and a cold dough to prevent sticking

There's a small fourth rule, for the final rolling out prior to baking, to be gentle and not smush or stretch the dough too much, which I failed to do well, but more on that later.

Patisserie 2: Pâte à étirer/Apple Strudel Tart

 One week into my regimented study of patisserie, and I'm already mixing things up a bit. Due to the apple excess in my house and the fact that my smaller tart rings were not slated to arrive until later this week, I thought I would go ahead and skip to an "Advanced" recipe for Tourte Landaise, or an apple strudel tart. 

Strudel pastry: Thin, unleavened sheets of elastic dough roughly the thickness of phyllo. Usually contains flour, oil, and some salt; this recipe included an egg and cold water as well.

Firstly, this recipe makes 2 9" tarts. Who needs that many tarts? I set out with the intent to split the dough into halves before the resting step so I could freeze one half for a later date. 

I decided to use my stand mixer for mixing, which was one of the options given in the recipe, because the dough looked like it would be sticky at first and require a fair amount of kneading for the gluten formation to create adequate stretching ability. 

Patisserie 1: Pâte Sablée/Orange cream tart/Apple upside down tart

 I've recently found myself with a surplus of time due to some unforeseen circumstances, so I've decided to spend the next few months working on improving my baking skills in a quantifiable manner. As a fan of fancy looking cakes and entremets, I was drawn towards the beautiful works in Modern French Pastry by Cheryl Wakerhauser, but I had no doubt in my mind that this would be a different beast than all my previous baking. 

I've been baking what I roughly categorize as "American Pastry" for the last decade or so: quick breads like banana bread or zucchini bread, flaky biscuits, savory scones, large chewy cookies, muffins, and pies. I started with box mixes (in the interest of not turning this into a "my life story" type of blog, I can provide details of my journey upon request) and have gradually improved to the point where a Pulitzer Prize winner once told me, "this pie crust is like crack." It's one of my proudest cooking moments. 

My first attempt at a NY style cheesecake, which came out perfect even without a bain-marie

 

 

First attempt at chocolate babka, where I threw in some cacao nibs.

 I figure if you're already here on my blog, you're down to see me flex my talent at baking, where somehow I've accumulated enough XP through sheer quantity of the procrastibaking I did in college that I can make pretty good things the first time around.

But I have a terrible habit.

Two-stage Cryptex: Fabrication and build

As it turns out, it's a lot harder to fabricate things when you aren't a student that has a 24 hour machine shop at your disposal (or a free machine shop anywhere, period). Bemoaning my separation from the CSAIL shop/stockroom and the ever-helpful staff of the Pappalardo machine shop, I began my lengthy search for outside resources. 

First up were the two endcaps, which absolutely needed some portion, if not all, of them to be CNC machined. I shopped around at a number of fabrication services (as an aside, why does every place require you to submit a model and then wait around for a quote? It's incredibly awkward to ask for a quote from someone for a tiny one-off personal project, knowing their answer will be way outside your budget and use case). Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the companies I'm going to mention, I'm just a broke recent-grad who designed a thing way beyond her means to produce at a reasonable price.

Two-stage Cryptex: CAD Design

It is a truth universally acknowledged that raccoons like puzzles. Raccoons like, in fact, touching all things:

raccoon (n.) 

also racoon, c. 1600, arocoun, from Algonquian (Powhatan) arahkun, from arahkunem "he scratches with the hands." Early forms included Capt. John Smith's raugroughcum. In Norwegian, vaskebjørn, literally "wash-bear."

Disgusting.

Whether I like it or not, I have long suffered (like, for two whole years) an excess of raccoons and abundant inevitable raccooning from my boyfriend, who is absolutely three raccoons in a trenchcoat. And we both love puzzles. One of our first dates was an escape room, which, while having the possibility of turning out horribly, we absolutely destroyed. He introduced me to Myst via Steam gift while I was bedridden after surgery, and I in turn introduced him to the style of puzzle hunts, e.g. MIT Mystery Hunt. For my birthday/christmas last year, he gave me an ingenious Japanese puzzle box, inside which he had hidden a puzzle hunt that he himself wrote. Thus, I was inspired to create my own physical fiddly puzzle box, complete with puzzles and a small gift inside, to satisfy both raccooning and puzzling tendencies. But a single puzzle to fiddle with was too easy, and so I began to investigate a double-stage puzzle box, resulting in the design of this two-stage cryptex.

SolidWorks model