TRICKS OF THE TRADE

David and I have been in a professional kitchen for over half a century between us, first as chefs, then pastry chefs and bakers, so you’d hope after such a long innings we’d have a few tricks up our sleeves. So, I will try to distil here a few things we have learnt along the way — observations from spending hours trying to make a pastry or cake better, working it until we get to that point when the food hums — the moment when we know, taste and feel that ‘it is damn good!’. You want to use all your senses: I’m often feeling and tapping breads or pies, touching and reading their texture, listening for the right sound. Even though at Bourke Street Bakery we insist upon mastering technique, using beautiful ingredients and keeping an organised kitchen, you must never forget about the sensory aspects of baking – that’s what will make your sweet things sublime and unique.

With pastry and sweets in particular, technique is everything. Understanding, and adhering to, the tenets of science that bind that technique is so very important.

The difference between a bread baker and pastry chef is a level of obsessive compulsiveness. Pastry chefs are an anal, rigid bunch who like to deal in absolutes. Technique is one of those absolutes.

At Bourke Street Bakery we have always prided ourselves on an absolute dedication to the technique required to make an excellent product. That means we buy the best ingredients and work a recipe until it is ready, but we do not dress it up. The traditional aesthetic is not something we aspire to — we want our products to taste great first, and look like what they are actually made of, rather than their covering or icing.

MIXING

In most cases it is best to undermix than overmix cake batters or biscuit doughs, because often you will continue to mix a dough, even when you think you are not.

For example, a batter will continue to be mixed as it is poured into a cake tin, as will a dough when it is being rolled out and worked on. So, be careful when doing the last stage of pouring, or rolling and cutting, and try not to fiddle with the mix too much. Whenever I bake with my six-year-old she cannot help touching the dough and overworking it, which I let her do, as with her it’s about having fun — but if you want a cookie that isn’t tough, or a cake that is light and airy, try not to overdo it.

When mixing the base dough of a puff pastry or croissant, you need to consider the strength of the flour, as you want the dough to stretch far enough to trap and hold the bubbles as it finally rises, but you don’t want the end product to be too tough or chewy. This then means you need to think about gliadin and glutenin. These are two proteins that exist in flour, and which form strands of gluten during mixing. The gluten’s job is to trap little bubbles of carbon dioxide within the elastic dough, that will then rise up and form a larger structure. So you would need to cut a ‘strong’ flour with a ‘soft’ flour to get the best of both worlds. See here for more on this.

RESTING

There are many stages at which a pastry dough needs to ‘rest’. The principle behind resting is to allow the gluten strands to relax back to their original position. It is much like a muscle that has been working and then relaxes back to an original resting position. The dough is developing all the time, even when it is resting.

Resting is imperative when you are working with a dough like a croissant or puff pastry, because if you try to pin or roll it too early, you will end up tearing the dough and ruining all your hard work.

Resting the dough before dividing it into shapes is very important to achieve consistency in shape. For example, when you are rolling out croissants, the dough must be allowed to rest as a whole before you cut the croissant, letting the gluten strands relax back into their original shape. If you cut the croissant without resting the dough as a whole, the gluten strands will still relax back into their original shape, shrinking and distorting the shape of each croissant.

PROVING

‘Proving’ is a process needed only for yeasted products, and is where most home bakers fall down. All yeasted products need warmth to rise, and humidity to facilitate that rising. Heat will activate the yeast (wild or not), which will eat the sugar in the mixture, creating carbon dioxide, and thereby growing in size.

A temperature of 20–27°C (68–81°F) and humidity of 80% are conditions you will need to find or create in your kitchen. There are different inventive ways you can do this. You can fill an electric frying pan with water and leave it gently boiling to provide heat and humidity, and leave the dough nearby to prove — or, if you have a closed kitchen, you can put the oven on to create some heat (leaving the door closed), and leave a pan filled with water boiling, to create some humidity. Either way, be sure to keep an eye on the water level so the pot or pan doesn’t boil dry.

BAKING

Baking the final product really should be the easiest part of the process. Remember to follow the pre-heating instructions in the recipe, then turn the oven down to baking temperature if necessary.

At the bakery we prefer to use a fan-forced oven for croissant products. For cakes and cookies, we prefer an oven with no fan, heated from a top and bottom element. With small domestic ovens, we find electric ones usually provide a more even heat than gas ovens. That said, as most ovens are fan-forced these days, all the recipes in this book have been tested in a fan-forced oven.

For the most consistent results, ensure your oven’s thermostat is reading correctly, by checking it with an independent oven thermometer.

Towards the end of the baking time, check the cake or pastry and turn it around if necessary. Don’t open the oven at the beginning of the bake, as heat will escape, causing cakes and croissants to collapse.

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Okay, so that was the ‘Baking 101’ section of the book — now the real fun begins. Are the kids on standby to lick your bowls? That’s one of the joys of baking at home, right? We can’t do that at work!