Missionary of pâtisserie

Yesterday evening I made my way over to Bath for another delicious evening at Topping & Co where Richard Bertinet was coming to talk to us about Pastry. Learning from my previous experience, I arrived in good time and secured a seat in the front row with a fabulous view. Richard and sidekick Brett brought boxes and boxes of goodies and busily circulated offering freshly-baked sausage rolls (they were still warm, does that have VAT implications?) and salted caramel brownies on wooden peels. The frenzy of sharing was interrupted by the small matter of a talk and demonstration, and after a short and enthusiastic introduction, it was Richard's turn to take the floor. I think this photo shows him contemplating his recent fun and games donning his radio mike...

 Richard's approach to pastry is to remove the faffing and make things easy. Don't worry about the temperature of your butter, he says. Don't chop it up, he says. Just take it in a block straight out of the fridge and, sandwiched between two papers, wallop it escalope fashion. This keeps it cool but renders it pliable and workable. Now you throw it into your flour and tear it up, then flake it between your fingers. Like breadcrumbs? Nope, just get to a point where there are no bits of butter larger than your fingernail.

 

 Add in the liquid (in this case, eggs), work in with a scraper and finish on the worktop with your hands. If it feels like something's wrong, take your hands away - the biggest crime at this stage is overworking it. At this stage, you can optionally skate a fine layer of flour onto your worktop with a cheffy flourish before you shape your pastry before resting. Or you can just chuck flour on the front row, it's up to you. Richard passed the greaseproof-wrapped (never sweat-inducing clingfilm-wrapped!) pastry around for us to get an idea of the feel and taste of it.

 

Then he showed us how to make divine tartelettes using cases made from this sweet pastry. First, he showed us lemon curd meringue tartelettes, doing the cheffy business with a flamethrower and only crisping his fingers once or twice.

Mine, all mine!

 He then turned to frangipane tartelettes topped with raspberry and pistachio, and glorious they were too.

 

 I took a nibble first for the purposes of exposing the frangipane filling, honest.

 

 Richard enjoys a glass of wine and warm applause.

 

 Once again, it was a brilliant evening at Topping, a wonderful chance to watch an expert at work, to gain insights and inspiration, to be showered with flour, to try exquisite food. I redeemed my voucher against a copy of the book which Richard then signed, and made my way home with my head full of ideas and plans and thoughts of lemon curd.

The long and the short of it

I made pastry at the course on Tuesday. With my hands. Using bread flour. It was delicious.

I think it's pretty unlikely that you're reading the above with the same sense of amazement with which I wrote it. I've always found it next to impossible to make decent pastry - the closest I've come is doing the rubbing in in the food processor, but this makes it so hard to get the water right. And even if I did get the water right, I'd then have to handle it and it would transform from pastry into a lump of closely-knit grey stuff.

So the fact that I made pastry with my hands, using strong flour, and that it was delicious is still a source of absolute astonishment to me. Clive demonstrated the method of emulsifying the butter and the water, which we then followed. When I added the emulsion to the flour it produced a pliable, yellow and smooth paste which I handled as if it were Play-Doh and which remained supple and beautifully pale. Clive pinned his out and used it to make jamless jam tarts - just to demonstrate to us the texture and shortness of the finished pastry shells. They were incredible, lovely to eat plain just as they were, short as you like, crisp, wonderful. We took our pastry paste home in our boxes and I stashed mine in the fridge for a couple of days.

I decided that I was going to make biscuits with mine, so I took it out of the fridge and let it come up to ambient temperature. When it was ready to be worked, I zested a lemon onto the worktop then started working the paste on top of it so that the zest was incorporated fully into it. I rolled it out and cut out little circle and star shapes and transferred to a parchment lined tray. I rerolled the trimmings time after time without the paste degrading, and at no point did I need any flour on the worktop. A quick flash in the oven and a sprinkling of sugar and I had the loveliest, lightest, crispest, shortest little biscuits. Which I placed next to Tallboy on the sofa, and which inexplicably disappeared within a very few minutes.

The advantage of paste made with this method is that it is less likely to shrink back or puff up when being baked, which is a relief because in the past, if I did manage to make rollable pastry, I always managed to have it fall in on itself when baking the quiche case blind, with the distressing consequences of quiche filling escaping and pooling in unsuitable places.

This, then, is why I am most excited by this new discovery that I can make pastry, with my hands, even using strong bread flour, which is fantastic and delicious and manipulable and rollable and rerollable and everything. It's magic!

Nose to the grindstone

It was a long and busy day yesterday, but brilliant fun. I've been on a breadmaking course with Clive at Shipton Mill, learning new techniques and getting a better understanding of working with flour. He has a great perspective and depth of knowledge, and clearly enjoys sharing this with others, encouraging them and opening them to new ideas and ways of thinking. Six of us gathered at the mill in Frampton-on-Severn, and after a cup of tea off we went, grouped around a large wooden-topped bench and working separately on our own doughs.

To start the day, Clive handed round examples of breads that he'd made by different methods. It was lovely to see him slice them open to reveal the inside, then pass it round so that we could smell it and see and feel the texture. The variety and textures were brilliant to see and compare, and I'm sure I wasn't alone in aspiring to produce something that good as I followed with my eyes each loaf that I passed on.

We started our own baking with a white dough using a sponge (a basic white dough left to ferment and stored in the fridge). Clive referred to the ingredients using the baker's percentage (expressing each ingredient as a percentage of the mass of the flour used). I'd seen this used in various recipes but had found it strange and was reluctant to tackle it, so it was really helpful to see this approach in action. Although it requires a bit of mental agility, it frees you from a written recipe and makes it so much easier to scale your quantities. He also talked about taking control of the process and how you can adapt variables like temperature and added ferments and time to help you to do this.

Working this dough involved tearing it, using the heel of the hand to stretch it away along the bench, then rolling it back up again. This was very different to how I'd been working my dough at home but was easy to get the hang of and although I'd been concerned that it would feel like I wasn't incorporating enough air, the rolling back up was certainly doing this. Folding the dough was similar to what I'd learned before, but the moulding action was new to me - with hands flat on the bench, palms up, you bring them in close to each other at the base of the dough, sliding one away from you and one towards you, twisting the base of the dough - creating tension and a neat rounded form. With this dough we made a cottage loaf (my first ever), pittas and a plaited loaf (mine suffered a bit of a collision with the back of the oven as a consequence of some rather overenthusiastic peel wielding). The pittas cooked quickly and elicited oohs and aahs from the group peering through the oven door as our breads inflated beautifully before our very eyes. Pittas are the one bread I still buy in the shops - but not, I think, for much longer...

We made a soda bread with coarse brown flour, sunflower seeds, herbs and feta. These were the first out of the oven, and a collective swell of pride in the room was almost tangible, the results looked so good. Each had a cheeky little paper tag poking out of it to identify its creator. 'So that nobody can disown theirs, ' smiled Clive - but nobody wanted to disown any of them.

The next dough was a sweet dough for Chelsea buns, using a flying ferment to get things going so that the yeast had a chance against the retardant effects of the sugar and butter. This was very sticky work, mixing the ferment and the main dough by hand and squishing in the butter. The proud-o-meter in the room rose a notch or two when those beauties came out of the oven and we finished them off with a quick brush of runny icing.

Finally, we used an emulsifying method of preparing the non-flour ingredients for a sweet shortcrust pastry, producing a paste which could be handled and re-handled without danger of the water and gluten interacting. I think I might finally have found a way that I can make good pastry!

Lunch was a delicious sampling of the breads Clive had shown us first thing, allowing us to compare even more closely the texture, smell and taste. The rye with figs was extremely popular.

Included in the day was a tour of the mill, a fascinating journey from the testing done before a delivery of grain is accepted, to the final bagging and despatch of the sacks.

The last hands on operation before assembling our goodies and making our way home was the feeding of Clive's sourdough mothers - a white and a rye. Once they were snoring after a good feed, he generously gave us a portion of each to take home - so all my agonising about how to get one going for myself was completely unnecessary. Perversely, just before I left for the course, I saw that the starter I'd attempted had caught, and was bubbling happily. With three to juggle, I can see that I've got scope for a lot of experimentation over the next few months, and I'm starting to wonder what happens if you mate a couple...

I had a tiring but brilliant day, learned a huge amount about flour and how to work with it, enjoyed myself immensely, made bread that I'm very proud of, and was once again hugely impressed at how well a good kitchen works. Everything was to hand, used stuff was tidied away instantly, the bench was cleaned and tidied at every opportunity and it all just worked like clockwork. This was in no small way attributable to Washing-Up Fairy Lesley who not only washed and dried but kept us going with tea and lots of smiles.

As I drove home I reflected on the day and the very great pleasure that there is to be had in watching an expert doing what they love - the fluid, assured movements and handling of materials, the unhurried pace and the wonderful results. I loved, too, Clive's clear enjoyment in sharing with others and seeing them grow in confidence and skill.

Big thanks to Clive and Lesley and everyone else at the Mill for a fantastic day full of information, hard work and good humour which has left me happy and proud and with a head full of possibilities.