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baking

It’s named after the guy they quote on “Iron Chef”

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The traditional Savarin is a rum-soaked, ring-shaped, yeasted cake filled with some sort of pastry cream. It’s also April’s Daring Bakers Challenge, which is why I made it. It is a labor-intensive beast of a cake, and I very likely will not make it again.

The following recipe uses a peach syrup in place of the rum. I didn’t have any peach tea on hand, though, so I made a pear-vanilla syrup using pear nectar, sugar, water and a few vanilla beans. The syrup was good, and the pastry/Chantilly cream was unbelievable.

Some Savarins (Savari?) are rather attractive, but mine was not:

Rockford & his dad said they loved it, but I was pretty disappointed with the cake overall. The first day the yeasty flavor was overpowering, but it did taste a little better the next day. Not better enough to convince me to make it again, but a little better.

Savarin

2 1⁄2 cups bread flour
2 tablespoons water, lukewarm
6 large eggs at room temperature, separated
1 1⁄2 teaspoons instant yeast
4 teaspoons sugar
2/3 stick butter, room temperature
1 tablespoon orange and lemon zest (optional)
1 teaspoon salt
1⁄4 cup butter for greasing the work surface, hands, dough scraper & baking pan

Directions for sponge:
In a small bowl mix 2 tablespoons lukewarm water, 3 tablespoons flour and yeast. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise 60 minutes

Directions for dough:
After 30 minutes put the egg whites in the mixer bowl and start working with the paddle at low speed, adding flour until you have a soft dough that sticks to the bowl and work until it comes together; cover with plastic wrap and let rest 30 min.

Add the sponge to the mixer bowl along with a tablespoon of flour and start mixing at low speed (if you wish to add the zests do it now). When it starts pulling away from the sides of the bowl add one yolk and as soon as the yolk is absorbed add one tablespoon of flour. Add the second yolk, the sugar and — as soon as the yolk is absorbed — add one tablespoon of flour. Raise the speed a little. Add the third yolk and the salt, and as soon as the yolk is absorbed add one tablespoon of flour. Keep adding one yolk at the time and the flour, saving a tablespoon of flour for later. Mix the dough until is elastic and makes “threads.

Add the butter at room temperature and as soon as the butter is adsorbed add the last tablespoon of flour. Keep on mixing till the dough passes the “window pane test.” Cover the dough with plastic wrap and let it proof until it has tripled in volume (2 to 3 hours).

(You can prepare the Pastry cream now if you chose to use it, and refrigerate it.)

While you wait, prepare your baking pan buttering it very carefully not leaving too much
butter on it.

Grease your dough scraper, your hands and your work surface and put the dough on it and fold with the Dough Package Fold two or three times around (5 folds twice or three times). Cover with plastic wrap and let it rest 15 minutes on the counter.

Turn the dough upside down and with the help of your buttered dough scraper shape your dough into a rounded bun. Make a hole in the center with your thumb and put it in the prepared pan. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm spot until the dough reaches the top of the pan (about 1 hour).

Pre-heat oven to 340 degrees. Bake the Savarin for about 40 minutes until the top is golden brown. Meanwhile, prepare the Syrup.

When the Savarin is done take it out of the oven and let it cool. You have two choices now: you can immerse it in syrup right now or you can let it dry out (so it will lose some of its moisture that will be replaced by the syrup) and soak it later on.

To immerse it in syrup, it is a good idea to place it in the mold you baked it in and keep adding ladles of syrup until you see it along the rim of the pan. Or you can just soak it in a big bowl keeping your ladle on top of it so it doesn’t float. Once the Savarin is really well soaked carefully move it on a cooling rack positioned over a pan to let the excess syrup drip.

Whatever you decide, the day you want to serve it glaze it and fill the hole with pastry cream. You can serve the Savarin with some filling on the side.

Peach Syrup

1 1⁄2 cups peach tea
1 1⁄2 cups peach juice
1 1⁄2 cups water
1 cup sugar
zest of one lemon
one cinnamon stick

Combine tea, water, sugar, lemon zest and cinnamon stick and bring to a boil. Let boil 5 minutes and remove from the stove. When cooled a bit, add the peach juice.

Glaze

2 tablespoons apricot jam
2 tablespoons water

In a saucepan, mix jam and water and warm up. When the savarin is cool and soaked, brush it with the glaze. 

Pastry Cream and Chantilly

2 cups milk
1⁄4 cup sugar
zest of one lemon
2 large egg yolks
1 large egg
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1⁄4 cup sugar
1 cup heavy cream

Bring milk and sugar to a boil in a saucepan.

Whisk together egg yolks, egg, cornstarch and sugar in a bowl.

Add the hot milk to the eggs one tablespoon at the time to temper it. Pour the mixture back into the saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. When the cream thickens, remove the mixture from the stove. Cover it with plastic wrap with the plastic touching the surface and let cool.

Pour 1 cup cold heavy cream in mixer bowl with the whisk attachment and beat until whipped. Combine with the cooled pastry cream, adding a tablespoon at the time of whipped cream until it gets to the right consistency.

Natalia of Gatti Fili e Farina challenges us to make a traditional Savarin, complete with soaking syrup and cream filling! We were to follow the Savarin recipe but were allowed to be creative with the soaking syrup and filling, allowing us to come up with some very delicious cakes!

recipes

The Daring Bakers challenge resurrects a rather old point of contention

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I often can’t remember exactly how old I am this year or which exit I need to take to get to my brother’s house. But I do remember the first time I heard of empanadas, something like 13 years ago. I remember because Rockford told me about them on the phone one evening, after a fellow intern on whom he still says he did not have a crush introduced him to them one day when they went out for lunch.

Jealousy is a powerful thing. Maybe if Rockford developed a crush on my shoes I could remember where I put them.

The only empanada that I knew of before this month’s Daring Bakers Challenge was the small, handheld pastry version — like the Empanadas Mendocinas featured on From Argentina with Love — so I was surprised when I read through the recipe to find that I wouldn’t be making what I was already thinking of as homemade Hot Pockets. This recipe is for Empanada Gallega, which hails from Spain and, according to Wikipedia, is the great-granddad of the little empanadas I was expecting. This empanada is a big freeform pie that’s cut into slices to serve.

The host for the September challenge had a few suggestions for filling the empanada — salt cod and tuna were both suggested — but I decided to go my own way this time. I made a vegetarian version using black beans and plantain. The filling was tasty, but the bread on my empanada was much thicker than I’d originally envisioned. I think I could fix that by rolling the dough out thinner.

The finished product was kind of like a giant sandwich. Rockford thought it was great, but that may have been because it reminded him of the days when he got to have lunch with cute South American interns.


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baking, recipes

I finally faced my fear of pastry

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The monthly baking challenge at The Daring Kitchen is always announced on the first of the month. The date for participants to post about the challenge is always the 27th of the month, which gives you plenty of time to make the recipe. Or, if you are me, it gives you plenty of time to think about the recipe, be intimidated and decide to put it off until later about four times, until finally it’s the 26th and you realize that you must make the recipe right now or miss doing this month’s challenge all together. And you’ve aways wanted to make cream puffs, so it would be a shame to miss it all together.

Because the August challenge? It’s a filled pate a choux, and that is precisely what a cream puff is.

I’m so glad I didn’t let this challenge entirely intimidate me, because I discovered that pate a choux really isn’t very hard to make. It takes some time and attention and a lot of work from your mixing arm, but it comes together pretty easily. And it’s well worth the trouble.

The recipe we were given included instructions for turning your vanilla creme and pate a choux into adorable little swans. That required a pair of sheet pans, though, and one of my sheet pans appears to have run away. I’d imagine it’s lounging somewhere on a beach in the Keys by now, or it might be trying to get a job on an Alaskan fishing boat. Wherever it is, it left me in a little bit of a lurch yesterday, as I now seem to be down to one sheet pan. So I had to choose between making swan heads or swan bodies. I don’t think swan heads hold much cream filling, so I opted just to make the bodies. Which, without the heads, are really just cream puffs. That’s a scientific fact.

But there is nothing at all wrong with just cream puffs. A cream puff is a beautiful thing.

Vanilla Creme
1 tablespoon unflavored gelatin
1⁄2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
4 large egg yolks, well beaten
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup heavy whipping cream

In a medium saucepan combine gelatin, flour and sugar. Mix very well.

Add milk and egg yolks and turn heat to medium-low. Stir almost constantly until mixture is thick enough to cover the back of your spatula or spoon. This should take about 10 minutes. Once thick, immediately dump into a bowl, staring the mixture if you are concerned about lumps of cooked egg.

Add the vanilla, and mix in well. Cover the surface to prevent a skin from forming and chill for about 45 minutes. You do not want the mixture to set, just to continue thickening.

(Now is a good time to begin your choux paste.)

In a large bowl, beat cream until light peaks form. Carefully fold the vanilla mixture into the whipped cream until the mixture is well-blended and fairly smooth.

Refrigerate mixture if not using immediately.

The vanilla creme recipe makes considerably more filling than I needed for the cream puffs. I piped it directly into the puffs, though. You might use more of it if you cut them in half, plopped on some filling and gave it a top-o-the-puff chapeau.

Pate a choux
1⁄2 cup butter
1 cup water
1⁄4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 large eggs

Line a baking sheets with a silicone mat or parchment paper, or grease pans well. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

In a small saucepot, combine butter, water and salt. Heat over until butter melts, then remove from stove. Add flour all at once and beat, beat, beat the mixture until the dough pulls away from the sides of the pot. Add one egg, and beat until well combined. Add remaining eggs individually, beating vigorously after each addition. Resulting mixture should be somewhat glossy, very smooth, and somewhat thick.

Using a 1⁄4-inch tip on a pastry bag, pipe out about 12 puffs. Bake about 30 minutes, until golden and puffy. Remove the pastries to a cooling rack, and let cool completely before filling.

For more information about how to make pate a choux and what to do with it once you’ve made it, check out these thoroughly excellent sources:

Kat of The Bobwhites was our August 2012 Daring Baker hostess who inspired us to have fun in creating pate a choux shapes, filled with crème patisserie or Chantilly cream. We were encouraged to create swans or any shape we wanted and to go crazy with filling flavors allowing our creativity to go wild!