Choux Pastry

This week DC 9 Group 5 was making choux pastry with Chef Jean Michel!

Choux pastry is a light pastry dough used to make profiteroles, croquembouches, éclairs, French crullers, beignets, St. Honoré cake, and gougères. It contains only butter, water, flour, and eggs. Like Yorkshire Pudding or David Eyre's pancake, instead of a raising agent it employs high moisture content to create steam during cooking to puff the pastry.

Choux pastry is usually baked but for beignets it is fried. In Spain and Latin America, churros are made of fried choux pastry, sugared and dipped in a thin chocolate blancmange for breakfast. In Austrian cuisine, it is also boiled to make Marillenknödel, a sweet apricot dumpling; in that case it does not puff, but remains relatively dense. They are sometimes filled with cream and used to make cream puffs or éclairs.

Now, lets start making pastry!

First things that you need to make the choux dough are prepare water, butter, sugar, salt, strong flour, and eggs. 

Melt the butter into simmering water, add a bit of salt.

And then remove from heat add in strong flour and mix it using wooden spoon until it forms into a dough.

Leave it cool for about 10 minutes before put in the eggs to avoid the eggs become cooked.

Transfer dough into bowl and add in eggs one by one, or two by two in our case because we made twice as much dough

Mix it until it gets just the right consistency, or like chef jean-michel said,

"until it hangs off the spoon like a tear"

Grab a piping bag and fill it with the choux dough, pipe it to tray that was covered with parchment paper.

Before baking, apply egg wash.

Make the filling and topping.

*top left: chantilly, top right: pastry cream, bottom: chocolate ganache*

Bake for 30 minutes at 200 degrees celcius. DO NOT OPEN THE OVEN UNTIL YOUR CHOUX IS DONE BAKING! OR IT WILL NOT RISE!

  

After baking, fill the choux with the filling and top it with almond flakes or ganache.

Well, that’s all you have to do for making the choux pastry! Enjoy and have a good day :) 

Fruit Cake Day!

This week, we made Panettone and Stollen.
According to the all-knowing Internet, more specifically the almighty Google, these two pastries are Christmas classics. Christmas was still a month away, and yet here we were, making traditional fruit cakes! If only Christmas would come this early!

Panettone is basically,

"..a type of sweet bread loaf originally from Milan (in Milanese dialect it is called paneton), usually prepared and enjoyed for Christmas and New Year in Italy, southeastern France, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Peru, Malta, Germany and Switzerland, and is one of the symbols of the city of Milan. In recent years it has become a popular addition to the Christmas table in the United Kingdom. In South America, especially in Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, and Chile, it is a Christmas dinner staple and in some places replaces roscón de reyes/bolo rei (King cake)."

while Stollen is,

 "..a fruit cake containing dried fruit and often marzipan and covered with sugar, powdered sugar or icing sugar. The cake is usually made with chopped candied fruit and/or dried fruit, nuts and spices. Stollen is a traditional German cake, usually eaten during the Christmas season, when it is called Weihnachtsstollen or Christstollen."

Thank you Wikipedia.

No, I did not upload the recipe we worked with because..well, I don't know, for no reason apparently. Just because. I couldn't screenshot the recipe and just don't feel like it. Stop whining.

Anyway, let's go through our class last week.
Oh, and pardon the bad quality pictures. I couldn't afford a gadget with better camera o(--<

We start off with the dough. This is stollen dough.

Stollen and panettone are basically fruit cakes.

So it's only natural to have raisins, sultanas, glazed cherries, and mixed peels inside.

This is the stollen dough, ready for proofing!

In the meanwhile, the birthday girl is busy grating zest for the panettone.

Stollen and panettone into the proofer for 40 minutes and 1 hour, respectively.

..what's next? We wait! And what do you know, waiting for an hour in the kitchen with nothing to do is boring. We finished doing all the preps for the next steps, and now we're left with nothing to do.
So we did what we do best; DERPING

The lemon slice challenge, performed by a classmate persuaded by some scumbag (me) to do so.

(Sorry for the bad quality of the video. Blogger's fault. Why Blogger, why.)

Anyway, long story short the 1 hour wait is done, we took out our proofed dough and on to the next step.

"Make sure the mould is greased, okay?"

"Yes, marzipan is almond paste. We'll use this cylinder for the stollen."

Chef JM showed us how to roll the stollen dough to put the marzipan into the dough.

And the dough into the mould.

1. We brush the panettone dough surface with melted butter, and then bake at 200 degrees Celcius. After 20 minutes, reduce the heat to 180, brush with melted butter again, and bake for another half hour.
2. We don't need to brush the stollen with melted butter before baking, just put in in the oven for 20-30 minutes at 190 degrees. After 20-30 minutes in the oven, take out the stollen, and then we brush it with butter. And sprinkle icing sugar on top.

EXPECTATION

REALITY

REALITY HURTS OK. Well, that's it for this week's practical class.

Danish Pastry and Baguette

This week Pastry Practical Class for DC9 with Chef Jean Michel (7 November 2014), is continue from last week Danish Dough.We make Danish Pastry with Filling and Baguette.

Danish pastry

A Danish pastry or Danish (especially in the United States) is a multilayered viennoiserie pastry, of Viennese origin, which has become a specialty of Denmark and neighbouring Scandinavian countries. Danish pastries are popular around the world.

Danish Dought Ingredients:

-Strong Flour

-Plain Flour

-Butter

-Instant Yeast

-Sugar

-Salt

-Milk Powder

-Shortening

-Egg

-Water

Danish Dough after cut and folding

Prepare and Adding Filling 

Almond fillings

Ground almond

Sugar

Whole eggs

Vanilla essence

1. Combine almond and sugar

2. Add egg and vanilla essence

3. Mix well

Pastry cream

Milk

Egg yolk

Sugar

Vanilla essence Corn flour

1. heat the milk up

2. Cream yolk , sugar and vanilla essence till creamy white

3. Add corn flour

4. Combine warm milk into yolk mixture

5. Stir on stove until thickened

Rolling The Dough

Result of Danish Pastry

Baguette  is "a long thin loaf of French bread  that is commonly made from basic lean dough (the dough, though not the shape, is defined by French law). It is distinguishable by its length and crisp crust.
 A standard baguette has a diameter of about 5 or 6 centimetres (2 or 2⅓ in) and a usual length of about 65 centimetres (26 in), although a baguette can be up to a metre (39 in) long.

Baguette Ingredience .

Strong flour

Plain flour

Instant yeast

Salt

Water

diagonal cuts on the surface of each dough

Result of Baguette

CREPES TIME! DC9-G5

This week Pastry Practical Class for dc9-g5 with Chef Jean Michel, made crepes.

Crepes basically using flour, eggs, milk ,butter and seasoning.

We made 3 types of crepes :

1. Crepes Normandes

2. Crepes Forrees

3. Aumoniere de crepe creme anglaise

And here are our class  

  

                                                      Chef show us how to make crepes

                                             And now, everyone tried to make it by themselves

Cutting strawberries for garnish

Apple Jam for our crepes

Here are the results. ENJOY!

Danish with fillings & French Baguette (DC 9 G1)

Hello humans ~!

This wednesday our group DC9 G1 was making Danish with fillings and French baguette !

First of all lets talk about Danish history and French baguette history :)



History Of Danish 

A Danish pastry or Danish (especially in the United States) is a multilayered viennoiserie pastry ,of Vienneseorigin, which has become a specialty of Denmark and neighbouring Scandinavian countries. Danish pastries are popular around the world.

The origin of the Danish pastry is often ascribed to a strike amongst bakery workers in Denmark in 1850. The strike forced the bakery owners to hire workers from abroad and among these several Austrian bakers, who brought along their own baking traditions and pastry recipes, hitherto unfamiliar in Denmark. The Austrian pastry of Plundergebäck, soon became popular in Denmark and after the labour disputes ended, Danish bakers adopted the Austrian recipes, but adjusted them to their own liking and traditions, by increasing the amount of egg and fat for example. This development resulted in what is now known as the Danish pastry.

One of the baking techniques and traditions the Austrian bakers brought with them was the Viennese lamination technique. This was new to the Danes and hence the Danish name for Danish pastry became "Wienerbrød" (meaning bread from Vienna) and this name is still used in much of Northern Europe today. At that time, almost all baked goods were given exotic names in Denmark.^{[citation needed]}

The Danish bakery Mette Munk^[5] was the first company to export frozen Danish Pastry to the UK and USA and is still producing.

History Of French Baguette

 A baguette (/bæˈɡɛt/; French pronunciation: ​[baˈɡɛt], feminine noun) is "a long thin loaf of French bread"^[1] that is commonly made from basic lean dough (the dough, though not the shape, is defined by French law). It is distinguishable by its length and crisp crust.

A standard baguette has a diameter of about 5 or 6 centimetres (2 or 2⅓ in) and a usual length of about 65 centimetres (26 in), although a baguette can be up to a metre (39 in) long.

The word "baguette" was not used to refer to a type of bread until 1920,^[2] but what is now known as a baguette may have existed well before that. The word simply means "wand" or "baton", as in baguette magique (magic wand), baguettes chinoises (chopsticks), or baguette de direction (conductor's baton).

Though the baguette today is often considered one of the symbols of French culture viewed from abroad, the association of France with long loaves predates any mention of it. Long, if wide, loaves had been made since the time of Louis XIV, long thin ones since the mid-eighteenth century and by the nineteenth century some were far longer than the baguette: "... loaves of bread six feet long that look like crowbars!" (1862);^[3] "Housemaids were hurrying homewards with their purchases for various Gallic breakfasts, and the long sticks of bread, a yard or two in length, carried under their arms, made an odd impression upon me." (1898)^[4]

A less direct link can be made however with deck ovens, or steam ovens. Deck/steam ovens are a combination of a gas-fired traditional oven and a brick oven, a thick "deck" of stone or firebrick heated by natural gas instead of wood. The first steam oven was brought (in the early nineteenth century) to Paris by the Austrian officer August Zang, who also introduced Vienna bread (pain viennois) and the croissant, and whom some French sources thus credit with originating the baguette.^[5]

Deck ovens use steam injection, through various methods, to create the proper baguette. The oven is typically heated to well over 205 °C (400 °F). The steam allows the crust to expand before setting, thus creating a lighter, airier loaf. It also melts the dextrose on the bread's surface, giving a slightly glazed effect.

An unsourced article in The Economist states that in October 1920 a law prevented bakers from working before 4 a.m., making it impossible to make the traditional, round loaf in time for customers' breakfasts. The slender baguette, the article claims, solved the problem, because it could be prepared and baked much more rapidly,^[6] though France had already had long thin breads for over a century at that point.

The law in question appears to be one from March 1919, though some say it took effect in October 1920:

It is forbidden to employ workers at bread and pastry making between ten in the evening and four in the morning.^[7]

The rest of the account remains to be verified, but the use of the word for a long thin bread does appear to be a twentieth century innovation.

____________________________________________________________________

Same as usual prepare the dough .

Strong flour 350G

Plain flour 150G

Instant yeast 10G

Salt 8G

Water 310G

Add in all dry ingredients and mix well 

after 1 min add in water 

Put some flour at the side of the machine to avoid the dough stick at the side and easy to clean .

 

Fall in love with the dough ?? Why everyone is looking at the dough ? haha

 Take one for the WindowPane Test

FAIL

Simon never give up !
Take two

 Uhhhmmmmm...
It should be okay .....
Congrats you have success ! Theehee

Simon fall in love with the FLUFFY DOUGH !!

 Put in the proofer for the first fermentation .
(1 hour)

Ingredients of the day !!

Yummy peaches .......

 Start making danish fillings !

Almond fillings team

Ground almond 100G
Sugar 100G
Whole eggs 1no
Vanilla essence 2TSP 

1. Combine almond and sugar
2. Add egg and vanilla essence
3. Mix well

Hey Louis , why you so creepy ?!
Do your work la .... :P

Pastry cream team

Milk 250G

Egg yolk 2no

Sugar 60G

Vanilla essence 1TSP

Corn flour 35

1. heat the milk up

2. Cream yolk , sugar and vanilla essence till creamy white

3. Add corn flour

4. Combine warm milk into yolk mixture

5. Stir on stove until thickened

Adrian was explaining why we need to heat up the pastry cream with Jovita :)

Creepy Louis why you're not working again ?

While preparing the danish fillings lets take out the Danish dough
and make it to 9mm thickness
Chef wanted using the machine ....

But fail ... because the danish was hot and the butter melted 

So we are not using the machine , we gonna use our hand to make it !

* Danish dough must keep cool 

Put some flour on it , if not will stick on it 
please keep moving your danish dough !

 The layer of the danish dough !!

Everyone is using effort to make it flat into 9mm thickness !!!
Gogogogo!!!

Jason's dough need to put into the blast freezer 

After roll into 9mm thickness let cut into pieces 

 Measuring using a RULER make it into a nice even shape....

  Cut into 12x12 or 9x11

Before making patterns all put some flour on it !

 Danish with fillings ..
Yummy 

After 1hr fermentation
What a big dough !

 Simon fall in love again .....

1. divide equally into pieces (250 per nos)
2. punch and knead the dough again 
3. place baguette 
4. Put back into proofer for 30 mins for 2nd fermentation

 The Baguette team VS Danish team 

We also can use danish to make Cinnamon rolls !

After 2nd fermentation make 3 diagonal cuts on the surface of each dough and bake in the oven at 210 degrees celsius for 30 mins !

After baking the danish dough and french baguette my friends was like ZOMBIE eating the danish and baguette .....
as you can see in the picture ....soooooooommmm
Mess in the kitchen ... everyone was haunting the food and DA BAO the food ..

after zombie friends haunting the danish ..
The leftover danish .............

End of the fun pastry class !

Extra bonus , John Saiyan !! :P