Tarting It Up

Pearl Bakery

Ah, back from the moss-covered, drizzly, and tremendously fun city of Portland, Oregon.  We stayed downtown at the 5th Avenue Suites, which seems to be right in the heart of a variety of excellent bakeries, coffee shops, and sandwich joints.  We were just a couple of blocks away from the city-block-huge Powell's Books.  And if you're shopping at Powell's, you need to scoot a few blocks south and visit Pearl Bakery. 

But before we get into the fabulous baked goods that Pearl Bakery offers up, look in my hand.  In my hand there is a bag.  And in that bag there is a Pearl Bakery t-shirt (by the way, you're meant to believe in terms of storytelling that I'm looking into the bakery before going in...the bag ruins the illusion a little.  Suspend disbelief!)

Where was I?  Ah yes, the t-shirt reads "Still Baking" across the chest.  Here is a recreation of the dialogue that I've had with several strangers when I've since worn this t-shirt.

DIALOGUE ONE: LOCATION - ACELA EXPRESS

Woman Stranger: Hey, (eyes read across the breasties) still baking?
Me: Ha ha ha...no...it's for a bakery and...
Woman Stranger: (interest in conversing visibly floats away from her body)

DIALOGUE TWO: LOCATION - STARBUCKS

Another Woman Stranger: Hey, (eyes read across the breasties) still baking?
Me: Ha, no it's...a bakery t-shirt
Another Woman Stranger: Ha ha.  Funny.
Me: Yeah definitely
(conversation quietly curls up on the floor at our feet and passes away)

What I'm saying is that this t-shirt conjures uncomfortable small talk into being.  From Woman Strangers.

I want a place just like this near us.  A bakery with a droolworthy selection of brioche, croissants, and pastry, and a clever selection of artisan sandwiches.  If anyone knows of a place like this in or around D.C., please do tell.  I suppose Breadline comes close, but its baked goods don't compare to those that Pearl Bakery offers.  Just look.

We showed a moderate degree of restraint and each selected one pastry and one half sandwich.

Ahem.  Disregard the above picture where my bag is clearly holding more than just one t-shirt.

Here's what we chose:

Clockwise from the 6 o'clock position, ham sandwich with fontina on wheat, asiago and apple croissant, chocolate croissant nestled up against an almond croissant, salami sandwich with provolone, and smoked turkey with muenster.

What can I say; these are great sandwiches.  I loved the contrast of the creamy tangy sweetness of the red pepper aioli with the bitterness of the arugula on my turkey sandwich.  The turkey was freshly carved as well.  Fabulous.  J. loved her ham sandwich as well - the yellow dots that you see on the wheat bread is their home-made mayonnaise peeking through.  Delicious.  A. loved the tapenade on her salami sandwich.

And on to our desserts...

 

The almond and chocolate croissants were excellent: buttery flaky croissant dough, generously filled.  Well worth having, but let's face it: you know what they look like.  But look above at the asiago-apple croissant.  Interesting, no?  I was expecting an "apple pie with cheddar cheese crust" vibe off of this croissant, but it was much subtler than that, almost more savory than sweet.  Flaky as all hell and delicious.

This place had such a laid back vibe; we talked and laughed and had a chill early lunch here.  Now that I'm sitting back in my living room stressing about work that I needed to get done today, I look at this picture that we took, looking out of Pearl Bakery's window, and I yearn...

 

Pearl Bakery

102 NW 9th Ave.
Portland, OR 97209
(503) 827-0910

Still baking?

Pastries By Randolph

It's been a while now that we've been blogging... and it suddenly occurred to me that we had never posted about one of my favorite food places in Arlington, The International House of Pancakes!

I'll wait for your laughter and applause to die down before I continue.

Thank you.  But seriously, PASTRIES BY RANDOLPH.  We may have mentioned it in passing, but this place deserves a mention all of its very own.

Aside from Patisserie Poupon, this is by far the best bakery in the area, and if you don't want to make the journey into DC, stopping by this Lee Highway establishment will not disappoint. 

As you walk in, the smell of the place is divine.  This is the real thing, people: they use BUTTER in everything and you can tell...it lingers in the air.  Sadly, I could go on and on for hours about the treats and cakes I've tried from here, but really there is no substitute: go visit and dare to say you didn't like what you had. 

Their carrot cake is the real thing with its soft cream-cheesy frosting (to die for); they have a chocolate walnut cookie that's about an inch thick, moist like a brownie, and generally food-orgasmic; their made-to-order specialty cakes are beautifully executed and great value.  Just look:

We know how to party.  For this cake, the birthday-girl ordered the cake equivalent of Jacob's Coat of Many Colors: yellow cake, chocolate filling, hazelnut syrup and white chocolate buttercream on the outside.  It might sound like a panoply of flavors, but I do so swear and affirm that the cake was a hit, sweet but without overpowering the nutty/chocolatey flavors that birthday girl wanted.  Ahh, another success for PBR.

Pastries by Randolph
4500 Lee Highway
Arlington, Virginia
(703) 243-0070

Danish

We finished our final laminated dough tonight with the shaping, proofing and baking of small danish pastries. The danish pastry dough is related to the other two laminated doughs we made in class, puff and croissant.

The major difference between danish, puff, and croissant is the amount of yeast: puff pastry contains no yeast, croissant dough contains a tablespoon, and danish dough contains one and a half tablespoons. There's also less butter in the beurrage of danish than in either puff or croissant. Finally, danish turns only twice (compared with six times for puff and three times for croissan).

We froze our dough after the last session and picked up where we left off tonight. The action of the yeast was really visible - once again my dough had grown more than others and a whole portion of it had no sheet of butter in it at all. Dangit. Undeterred, I rolled my dough and we completed our last single turn by folding the dough into thirds. It then went back into the fridge to rest for about a half an hour.

Non sequitur - my birthday this year really rocked the gifties - one of the items was a set of rolling pin rings that guide the rolling pin to the exact thickness of dough you want. A big shout out to whoever designed these.

Chef recommended that we cut blank squares of unbaked dough no bigger than 2 square inches. His philosophy: you want your customer to eat multiples, so you offer them a variety of fillings. Apparently some people don't eat multiple 5 square inch pastries. God knows I don't. And never would. Again, it's the thinness that prevents me.

We learned three basic shapes: the diamond (two opposite corners folded into the middle):

I see two eyes and a face, but that's probably just the schizophrenia talking. The square (each corner folded into the middle):

And the piece of resistance, the pinwheel (four cuts made from the center outwards towards the corner, taking care not to cut all the way through the middle, and then every other side of each cut folded into the middle):

I chose to fill my diamond with pastry cream topped with a tangerine piece, the square with cream cheese filling and a half walnut, and the pinwheel with an almond filling and kirsch cherries. I was entirely satisfied with the finished product. And the result was delicious. Look at how brownley wonderful these turned out - and so small, you can have several dozen without feeling uncomfortably full:

Puff Pastry

I just came home from Class No. 6 with fantastic-tasting apple turnovers and puff pastry shells filled with pastry cream and fruit. Yum - here are some pictures. Notice the flakiness? HOME MADE PUFF PASTRY. Turned it all on my own. I know, I rock.

Palmiers

I concede that many more pictures like this one (see, e.g. Raspberry photo infra) might start to constitute macro-setting-abuse, but can't you taste the sweet crunch of each individual sugar grain?

Someone ever so special to me was in a palmier mood today. They're a fantastic cookie to make (it would be my go-to cookie recipe if I entertained over afternoon tea, or wanted to provide sophisticated-looking nibblies over coffee). Palmiers definitely have an appealingly high ratio of attractiveness to simplicity of preparation. I used the grande dame's recipe (which will expire in a few weeks).

It all begins with puff pastry, a laminated wonder made out of about a zillion discrete layers of butter and dough.  Some sites guide you through the process of making this monster, turn by turn, but why on earth bother?  There appears to be but one company that manufactures puff pastry for the common man, and using this pre-fab stuff simplifies the palmier baking process like nobody's business.

So phase one, allow the puff pastry to dethaw. I never think of making puff pastry well enough in advance (I think it's supposed to refrigerator-thaw overnight), so I always have to fight the dough more than I should. Unfurl dough.

Phase two, sit the unfurled dough on a layer of sugar and sprinkle another layer atop it.  I've used demerara sugar before, thinking that more expensive would obviously be better, and it wasn't at all.  The sugar became TOO caramelized, like hard candy between layers of puff.  Not how do you say "good."  Here's my unfolded puff pastry (with plain old white sugar) on the trusty Roul Pat:

So you mush the sugar into the dough, then fold the dough as the recipe instructs better than I could. Here are my moodily lit folded palmiers, ready to enter the oven. Can you find the mutant that I couldn't photoshop out without messing up the composition? Of course you can.

Bake bake bake - flip midway through, bake more, and ooooh:

Crisp, flaky, sweet.  Perfect with coffee or tea.  Perfect for binging.

Ok so these palmiers maybe look nicer than mine, I suppose, but there's something about the long, oven-browned, outstretched finger look that gives me the creeps.

Class 1: Pate a choux

Pardon me boys, is that the Chattanooga Choux-Choux?

Oooo - egg washily browned! But flat. Too many eggs in my practice choux. Story to follow.

There's something about pastry chefs who have had years of training and experience. Watching them work is like going to see a play or an exhibition. Both my Food TV heroine Gale Gand and Chef Ramsdell work like they were born to be in a kitchen - it's seamless and beautiful to watch the creativity at play in the making of their culinary delights. They seem so at home in the kitchen. I'm not quite there yet.

But I digress...

Pâte à choux (or choux paste) is a dough begun on the stovetop and finished off in a mixer or by hand. It's classicly French and is the basis for profiteroles, gougère, and Paris-Brest (more on this later). The basic recipe goes like this, but Chef emphasized that this is more a series of guidelines to achieve the right texture. Fiddle with as desired to make the choux crisper, flatter, etc.

1 c. milk
4 oz. butter, cut into 1/2" cubes
7 oz. AP flour
1/2 T salt
5 large eggs
(water to adjust)

I'm finding that pastry and baking is less recipe-based than I thought. I guess the precision of it was one of the things which attracted me to pursue baking more seriously in the first place, but I'm quickly realizing that recipes need to be tweaked to adjust to varying ovens, varying tastes and varying weather conditions. Unfortunately I neglected to take pictures from the class, but I will definitely post some pictures from my practice at home.

It's time to PUT ON YOUR DANCING CHOUX (obligatory choux pun #2)

1. Heat the milk and butter together in a medium saucepan to a full boil.

We used milk in the recipe, but you can substitute any liquid in its place, like water or chicken broth if you're going for something more savory. Milk produces a softer dough. The butter really needs to be in eensy pieces to ensure that it melts just as the milk comes to the boil.

2. Remove the saucepan from the heat and add AP flour and salt. Stir to combine the flour into the milk/butter mixture.

The flour acts as a sponge and absorbs the liquid quickly. The result is a "mashed potato" consistency mixture. I think it's called a 'panade' in French.

3. Return the saucepan to the heat.

Stir constantly to dry out the dough. It’s done when steam rises from the mixture and when it coats the bottom of the saucepan.

4. Transfer dough to a stand mixer and churn for a couple of minutes.

The dough is really hot at this point and you want to let it cool so that you don’t cook the eggs as soon as you add them. You’ll see steam rising as you begin to churn the dough – once there is no more steam, you should start to add the eggs.

5. Add eggs, one at a time and combine fully before adding the next egg.

As you start to get closer to the last egg, start checking the dough for the right consistency. It should be soft but still firm enough to pipe. Look for a little slump of the dough from the paddle when you lower the bowl. Add your last egg a little at a time. You may not need it all or you may end up using all of it depending on how well you’ve dried out the dough.

There are two tests for “doneness”: when you take the bowl out from under the paddle and remove the paddle from the mixer, bring the paddle down into the dough and then lift it up. If the dough forms a perfect point trailing down then it is ready, OR there’s the canyon test where you pull your finger through the dough and it is done if the dough doesn’t bounce back significantly.

6. Transfer the dough to a pastry bag. Pipe rounds onto a prepared baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

7. Egg wash the piped rounds, lightly indent each round with a fork. These are expansion slots, which, if you’ve done everything right so far, will allow for the pate a choux to puff even more.

8. Bake in a 375 - 400˚ oven for 15 – 18 minutes; fill with pastry cream.

I baked up a batch of these guys at home, and D'OH I didn't take photos of the process. I think I added one too many eggs, though, because the choux didn't rise when it cooked. It also tasted more eggy than did the one from class. Kinda a choux-yorkshire pudding hybrid. The pastry cream, however, was divine.