Week 6 -- Classic Pastries (Lecture)

This week we talked about classic pastries, such as puff pastry, eclair paste (pate a choux), meringue, and phyllo dough.

Puff pastry is a buttery dough that bakes up into hundreds of layers. Puff pastry is time consuming to make. You have to roll fat into the dough and chill the dough each time you roll the dough out. Classic pastries made out of puff pastry include bouchees, vol-au-vents, and feuilletees.

Eclair paste is a cooked dough that is used to make cream puffs, eclairs, paris-brest, beignets, churros, and gougeres. To make it, you add flour to boiling water, milk, and butter. After you cook the mixture, you mix in eggs. You want the product to have large pockets of air inside when it bakes. This makes the product lighter and allos for you to fill the inside.

Meringue is egg whites whipped with sugar. It is also the term used when referring to a confection/cake baked from egg whites whipped with sugar. The texture of the meringue depends on the ratio of sugar to egg whites. If you have a low sugar content, your meringue will be softer. A high sugar content will produce a harder meringue. I did not know that there were different types of meringue. The three types are common, Swiss, and Italian. Common meringue is made by beating the egg whites to a soft foam and then gradually adding sugar. Swiss meringue is more complicated than common meringue. It is made by warming unwhipped egg whites with sugar over a bain marie. After the egg whites/sugar reach 100 degrees F, they are whipped until cool and stiff. To make Italian meringue, you pour hot sugar syrup into soft peak egg whites.

Phyllo dough is the last of the classic pastries we discussed in class this week. When you use phyllo dough, you brush it with melted butter and stack it together. Phyllo dough is made of flour, water, oil, and eggs. The dough is spread super thin. It is really hard to make, so it is much easier to buy than to make.