BEFORE YOU GET STARTED

Before you clear space on your kitchen bench, roll up your sleeves and put on your apron, let’s just go over some basic facts about your key ingredients — flour, salt, water, butter, yeast and sugar. It’s quite incredible to think that with just six common pantry ingredients, and a bit of technique, you can make the most deliciously wonderful sweet things...

TYPES OF FLOUR

Flour is the basis of many recipes in the pastry chef’s repertoire. The flours we used to test the recipes in this book were those labelled ‘plain flour’ and ‘self-raising flour’, which are readily available from supermarkets and providores.

In a professional pastry kitchen a number of different wheat flours will be used for various products. A good providore should be able to supply you with the following flours:

WHICH FLOUR TO USE, AND WHEN?

When baking bread, you generally want a hard (strong) organic flour, which means flour with a high protein percentage. This is best bought at health food stores, or from bakeries such as ours.

When baking cakes or making pastry, you will want to use soft flour. This is flour with a low protein percentage. When making cakes, there is no need to mix and stretch the gluten to create an elastic dough. Plain flour is often the best option, as it is a low-protein flour that will leave your product with a crumbly, softer texture – generally what you want in a cake.

Organic plain (all-purpose) flour will often have too high a protein percentage, and can restrict the rising agents within your recipe. Organic plain flour generally has a beautiful deep, earthy flavour, which you may not want in a cake – you don’t want the flour to overpower any other flavours. However, the same also works in reverse, when you might have a cake that would benefit from the flavour of an organic flour. This is a matter of taste.

When making croissants, you want to find a middle ground. Many chefs use a combination of hard and soft flours, as they want to work the gluten within the dough so it is able to stretch and hold itself; however, nobody wants the croissants to have a tough internal crumb.

SALT

It is fashionable today to see an array of salts on supermarket and providore shelves. These salts are technically all just sodium chloride. Some have slightly different crystal structures, and some contain trace minerals from the area in which they were acquired. For pastry, we use good old-fashioned cooking salt. If sprinkling salt on a product, larger crystal structures with trace minerals can add some interest. An example of this is pink salt.

WATER

As a home pastry chef, you could possibly afford to use bottled water. We cannot, so we filter tap water. If your tap water is highly chlorinated, allow a bucket of tap water to sit at ambient room temperature overnight; some of the nasties within will disperse.

When making pastry, generally you use cold water, as you want the butter to crumble into the flour, rather than melt into it.

BUTTER

Butter is as important in pastry as flour is in bread. Butter has different fat contents and different flavours, but most importantly it has different roles.

A pure and simple product like the croissant relies on good butter; without it, you will produce a sub-standard croissant. We have always imported butter from Europe — first from Denmark, now from Belgium. These cultured butters are made from cream that contains a culture similar to that in yoghurt. It adds a distinctive flavour that carries into the flavour of our croissants. When making croissants at home, use a good European butter, with a fat content of around 80%.

Butter is as important in pastry as flour is in bread. A pure and simple product like the croissant relies on good butter; without it, you will produce a sub-standard croissant. When making pastry, however, it’s generally best to use a cheaper butter, as it will have a lower fat content and, consequently, a higher water content. This will make your pastry lighter and flakier.

When making pastry, however, it’s generally best to use a cheaper butter, as it will have a lower fat content and, consequently, a higher water content. This will make your pastry lighter and flakier.

At one point we were not able to import a Danish 80% fat butter that we had grown to love, so we switched to a Danish 99% fat butter. This turned out to be catastrophic; the croissants were too rich and oily. So, you can see the increased purity of an ingredient is not always an advantage.

A pastry chef generally uses unsalted butter in recipes. There is no real need for salted butter anymore; salt was added to extend the shelf life of food, and now we have wonderful refrigeration.

YEAST

For our yeasted pastries we use compressed fresh yeast, which is a one-celled fungus. This is a living organism with a life span. Using fresh yeast every day keeps us ahead of the use-by dates. For home bakers, dried yeast is a more convenient option, but we still recommend using fresh yeast if possible.

You can often buy fresh compressed yeast from brewing shops or bakeries. We sell fresh yeast at our Banksmeadow store.

Always check the use-by dates on both fresh and dried yeast. Fresh yeast has to be stored wrapped in the fridge. The fresh yeast we use only has a lifespan of a month, although it gets weaker in strength with every day that passes, causing the croissant or yeasted product to rise more slowly.

Dried yeast lasts for months, and even longer if it’s kept in the fridge or freezer. For baking purposes, the dried yeast labelled ‘active dry yeast’ is better than the variety labelled ‘instant dry yeast’, which just works too quickly.

All the recipes in this book use fresh yeast. If you wish to use active dry yeast, just halve the amount listed and hydrate it with warm water — about 10% of the liquid used in the recipe.

SUGAR

Ahh, sugar… Although sugar is fuel for your body, it has no other nutritional value — but in terms of pastry, its value is indescribable. Sugar is one of the building blocks of baking, and has many virtues:

In this book we mostly use caster (superfine) sugar, as well as pure icing (confectioners’) sugar, which is just granulated sugar that has been pounded to a powder, as well as icing sugar mixture, which is pure icing sugar with about 5% cornflour (cornstarch) added to prevent it getting lumpy, and to stop some products ‘weeping’.

We also use brown sugar in many recipes, and love the deep, complex flavour it adds. Darker sugars used to be made by removing the sugar early from the refining process. However, these days a syrup is often put back into sugar that has reached the end of the refining process, and it is then re-crystallised. Dark and lighter brown sugars, as well as molasses, are hygroscopic, meaning they attract moisture, making the product last longer and increasing its shelf life.

Another sweetener we use is glucose syrup, which is made from corn, potatoes or wheat syrup. This is great for softening a product such as nougat.

Although we love and respect sugar, we try to limit the amount we use in a recipe. Sugar can sometimes overwhelm other flavours, so we aim for a balance of flavour and sweetness that people will keep coming back for.

MILK AND CREAM

Cream always used to rise to the top — so the longer milk stood, the higher the fat content of the cream layer and the lower the fat in the milk. These days, however, dairies often homogenise the milk to prevent separation of the cream.

Usually in our recipes in this book we use 35% cream, which is commonly known as pouring, single or pure cream. Milk has a fat content of about 3.5%, whipping or pouring cream has a fat content of 30–36%, and heavy/thick cream is anywhere from 36–45%. And then there is double cream, which in Australia is usually 48%. Cream has different names in different countries, so, if you are not baking in Australia, check the fat.

You can generally whip any cream with a fat content higher than 30%. When whipping your cream to ‘soft peak’ stage, it means exactly that — to soft, slight peaks of cream, which hold their shape but then fall away if shaken too much. You will see the cream starting to set into peaks around your whisk.

CHEMICAL RAISING AGENTS

Baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) is an alkaline ingredient that reacts to acid by generating air bubbles. It also counteracts the acidity of a dough or mixture, improving the flavour. To test if your baking soda is still active, drop a teaspoon of it into some lemon water... if it ‘hisses’, it is still alive.

Cream of tartar is an acid derived from tartaric acid, which is a by-product of winemaking. This is used as a chemical acid that can react with baking soda within a mixture, and can also be used as a stabiliser when beating egg whites.

Baking powder is a combination of baking soda and cream of tartar, which then creates carbon dioxide bubbles when it comes into contact with liquid in a mixture. This would be an example of a ‘single acting’ baking powder.

In baking, we mainly use ‘double acting’ baking powder, which means it reacts to the liquid, and then again to the heat of the oven.

Double-acting baking powder consists of baking soda and two different types of acid — one slow-acting and one fast-acting. To test if this type of baking powder is still doubly active, drop a teaspoon of it into a cup of hot water. It will ‘hiss’ if it’s still good.

GELATINE SHEETS VS POWDER

Used as a setting agent, gelatine is an animal protein which comes from the collagen in skin; most gelatine is made from pig skin.

Powdered and sheet gelatine are the same compound; they just mix differently with water.

We use gelatine sheets as they set to a clearer finish than powdered gelatine, with a smoother texture. They also don’t add any flavour to a recipe, which powdered gelatine can sometimes do.

We generally use ‘titanium-grade’ gelatine sheets, although ‘gold-strength’ sheets are also available.

Always soak gelatine sheets in cold water for a few minutes before adding them to a recipe. Acidity is not good for gelatine, so be careful when you are making a product with fruit, vinegar or alcohol.

If you are vegan, agar-agar (a tasteless by-product of seaweed) is the best substitute. It’s fairly hard to convert gelatine sheets and powder to agar. However, agar is stronger, and the ratio is roughly 1 tablespoon powdered gelatine to 1 teaspoon of powdered agar.

SUGAR WORK

When working with sugar syrups, the soft boil stage is about 115°C (240°F), which is when you can drop a small amount of sugar syrup into cold water and then form it into a ball that does not hold its shape and is sticky.

The firm ball stage occurs at about 120°C (250°F), when you can drop a small amount of sugar syrup into cold water, then form it into a ball that holds its shape.

Although we love and respect sugar, we also try to limit the amount we use in a recipe. Sugar can sometimes overwhelm other flavours, so we aim for a balance of flavour and sweetness that people will keep coming back for.