Flo Braker's PDQ (Pretty Darn Quick) Puff Pastry

Puff pastry is is close to alchemy as baking gets. As Joe puts it, 'it’s comprised of hundreds and hundreds of individual layers of dough, all of them separated by ultra-thin layers of butter. When the pastry is inserted in the oven the butter melts, freeing and lubricating the dough sheets so they can separate from one another.' The result? Hundreds of layers of feather-light, fragile sheets of buttery goodness shattering in your mouth, vanishing into nothing. As with all good things, it's ephemeral, and you can't help but give it another bite to re-experience that nanosecond of hedonistic pleasure. It's one of the most wondrous gastronomic sensations one could have.

All good things come at a price; and puff pastry takes a lot of time to make and even longer to master the art. You need to make a dough (détrempe) which encases a butter slab, from there you begin a process of folding and turning that can easily take half a day. As much as I love puff pastry, I usually go for 'quick' puff pastries, which skip the process of making a dough and a butter slab. In this quick version, you partially mix the butter into the dough. As you roll out the dough, the butter bits are stretched to laminate the dough. The other shortcut is that instead of having six folds, there're only four. It doesn't provide as dramatic a rise as a real puff pastry dough, but the result is good enough for most purposes, and vastly superior to anything you can buy. The following recipe is one by Flo Braker's from her Baking for All Occasions.

For lovers of puff pastry, I highly recommend the fantastic book by  Gregoire Michaud. The imagination behind his puff pastry creations is staggering!

Flo uses two kinds of flour here: a combination of all-purpose and cake flour. It helps with lowering the
gluten formation and therefore ensures that your final product will be light. Be sure to use the best butter you can find, preferably an European high-butterfat butter, and use a scale to weight the flour. Once you have made your puff pastry, there're endless pastries you can make. From palmiers to puff pastry tarts and mille-feuille, the possibilities are endless.

Tarte à la crème

Cantonese-style sesame cake 芝麻糕

The Asian answer to brownies?

The semester finished a few weeks ago and here I am with almost four months of holiday awaiting me! That should mean that I have a lot more time for cooking and baking, and for the most part, I have been cooking more. That said, I've been sticking to simple-but-true kind of cooking and baking and have steered away from fancy frosted cakes and pastries.

I've also been making and experimenting with Chinese desserts. Compared to western desserts, Chinese (and Asian) desserts are more straightforward, usually concentrating on one or two flavours and textures. There're simply no plated desserts as such. I personally think that western desserts are a more developed and sophisticated art form, Nevertheless, there's still something homey and comforting about Chinese desserts that I return to from time to time.

Chinese desserts can be divided into two kinds: sweet soups and solid cake-like desserts called gao 糕. They're usually starch-based, and the texture of the gao ranges from soft to chewy, almost jelly-like. I think most people translate it as 'cake', even though they are worlds apart in texture!

I recently noticed that I have two jars of sesame paste that I bought in Beijing last year sitting in my cupboard. I decided to put them to good use by making a sesame cake that is quite popular in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the commercial ones are often too sweet and lacking in sesame flavour. Fortunately for us, it's quite easy to make at home if you start with store-bought black sesame paste/butter. The drawback to that it is that it's usually pretty pricey. You can, of course, toast the sesame seeds yourself and grind it to a puree with a food processor!

The other ingredient that you'll need is water chestnut flour (馬蹄粉), which is often used for thickening soups and gao-making (water chestnut cake 馬蹄糕). This flour gives a chewy but light texture that works well in cutting down the richness of the copious amounts of fat in sesame puree. I've tried making it with some rice flour (粘米粉) in addition to the water chestnut flour, but it made the cake unplesantly sticky and heavy. Better to stick with water chestnut flour only!

Brown butter chocolate chip cookies

Chocolate chip cookies. That iconic cookie that is loved and raved about universally, and one that provokes the strongest personal responses and biases. Crisp vs chewy; giant vs dainty; nuts vs plain. A quick search on Google yielded 24,200,040 results which only shows how popular and divisive this humble cookie is! Every serious baker has got to have his own chocolate chip cookie recipe in his sleeves. Well, this is mine. I must qualify that statement because I always tweak the recipe slightly depending on what I have on hand - less nuts, no nuts, more chips, using a higher percentage of chocolate, etc. I suppose that's what makes this American cookie so endearing and endlessly creative - it's the fact that you can mix and match to suit your own taste.

With this in mind, this version sums up how I like my chocolate chip cookie: flat and crisp, with nuts, and loaded with the finest dark chocolate chips. I'm fully aware that in America, which is where this cookie originated, the majority of the people fancy the thick and chewy kind. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've always found that underbaked chewy centre rather challenging. Most American versions also contain an astonishing amount of sugars (white and brown) to attain crispiness/chewiness. In fact, it's impossible to recreate the traditional American cookie texture if you cut down on the sugar.

Lemon chicken 西檸煎軟雞

We are all (or at least myself...) slaves of our habits, and I've been finding it extremely difficult to drag myself to go back to writing blog posts after a three-month absence! But here I am - the semester is drawing to a close and I'll try my best to dig up all the saved photos and recipes that I meant to post up ages ago. Thank you for checking for updates!

A few days ago the great British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher passed away. It was a news that I had anticipated for a long time since her health had been on the decline for more than a decade, and yet when the news struck I was still shocked and saddened. Growing up in Hong Kong, many of us had a special fascination for all things British, and I remember that I went through a phase of Anglophilia in my teenage years. I held Margaret Thatcher in very high esteem and even read his memoir The Downing Street Years as a thirteen-year-old even though I hadn't the slightest clue about British politics!

 Even today, many Hong Kong people are still nostalgic about our colonial past. I dare say many of us wish the clock could tick back in time! It's common in human history to look at the past with somewhat misplaced nostalgia and think of the past as a bygone golden age. Such a tendency is even more pronounced when the current state of affairs is a cause for discontentment - which is the case with Hong Kong at the moment.

While the Brits aren't known for for their gastronomy, they had left an unmistakable stamp on the food culture of Hong Kong. Think of milk tea, custard tarts, and the fusion dishes that were created as a result of British influence on Cantonese cuisine. The dish that I'm preparing today, lemon chicken, is undoubtedly a product of Hong Kong's colonial melange of East meets West. Its name in Chinese, 西檸煎軟雞 'pan-fried succulent chicken with western lemon', clearly shows that it's a fusion dish. The Chinese didn't use fresh fruits in their savoury cooking traditionally, and the sauce for this dish usually contains Bird's custard powder, an unmistakably British product that lends a fluorescent yellow colour and a custardy flavour and consistency. It is the sort of sweet-and-sour flavour that Westerners love, and it's no surprise that it's a popular item in Chinese takeaways overseas - although I heard that orange (rather than lemon) chicken is the default version in the USA?

Würzburg, Germany

Sorry for abandoning my blog for more than three months! In the past three months I was focusing on my real major - piano - and was preparing for an international piano competition focusing on the works of J S Bach. Bach's music has been closest to my heart since my early childhood, so this was a challenge that was as pleasurable as it was challenging. Since I didn't have the foresight to start preparing sooner, in the past three months I had to spend all the spare time I had practising the pieces for the competition. The actual competition took place in March in Würzburg, central Germany in mid-March:

In the event, I got to the semi-finals. I was very nervous on stage and hardly played my best. In retrospect, even if I had played my best I doubt if the judges would have chosen me as a finalist. It turned out that they had rather dogmatic tastes and my style wouldn't be what they were seeking.

The former bishops's palace, opposite the music school

I hadn't heard of Würzburg prior to this competition, but it is a very beautiful city in Bavaria. Despite the devastating bombings in the Second World War, one could feel an unmistakable link to Germany's glorious cultural heritage.

Darkest dark chocolate cookies

I received these Scharffenberger 99% chocolate and cocoa nibs in the post a few days ago. I had been wanting to have unsweetened chocolate for baking for some time since its high cocoa content gives me more room in eliminating sugar in the recipe. If you haven't figured out by now, I like my chocolate desserts very dark and minimally sweetened, but sadly a lot of recipes that require a whole egg foam or a meringue need a good amount of sugar for the foam to be stable. If I used a 70% chocolate in such a recipe, the dessert would end up too sweet for my taste. Much better, then, to use less chocolate quantitatively, but up the cocoa content to 99 or 100% so that you have complete control of how much sweetness you add!

I scratched my head looking for a good recipe to use these fruity and pretty acidic Scharffenberger unsweetened chocolate. I dug in my word document of recipes and was reminded of these very dark and quintessentially American chocolate cookies. They're unusual because they rely on beating whole eggs until they reach a stable foam before folding in melted unsweetened chocolate. A minimal amount of flour is then blended in along with more unsweetened chocolate chips. I saw versions of this cookie by David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich as well as Essence of Chocolate (by Scharffenberger). My version is based on Alice Medrich's with some amendments:

1. I'm using baking soda rather than baking powder to neutralise some of the acidity of all the unsweetened chocolate.


2. Since I've kept the sugar amount very low, it's difficult to keep the centre of the cookies moist and gooey. I came to think of these cookies as miniature cakes, and I use Shirley Corriher's technique for adding a little cream to flourless chocolate cakes to keep them moist. I therefore replaced some of the butter with cream. Use only butter if that's what you have on hand.

3. I also added some SP cake emulsifier to fight with the deflation that inevitably comes with folding chocolate into a whole egg foam. Your cookies will have less volume if you don't add SP, but the recipe doesn't use SP to start with. Worry not!

Crème caramel - plain and caffeinated

There're certain dishes that I often associate with individual people around me. It's usually because of a person's love of a dish - or in some cases aversion to a dish - that gives me this association. I used to have a Taiwanese friend here in Cincinnati called Willy who absolutely loved all kinds of baked custards - custard tart, crème caramel, crème brûlée, etc. Initially, I was secretly shocked by how much he loved his custards especially since he didn't have a sweet tooth in general. He was also something of a purist in the sense that preferred pure eggy custards to flavoured ones. I really treasured Willy's friendship but he moved back to Taiwan a while ago. I continue to think of the time I spent with him and his friends in Cincinnati even though I cannot bake these custards again for him for some time.

Crème caramel is wonderfully simple to make but yields maximum deliciousness. You make a caramel, pour it onto individual ramekins, add custard on top and bake the ramekins in a water-bath in the oven. After a good chill in the fridge, you run a knife round the edges and invert the whole thing to serve so that the caramel (which by then has re-liquefied) runs seductively around the custard. It's amazing how a little caramel could elevate a simple baked custard to undreamt-of heights.

I'm offering two versions here: plain and coffee-flavoured. For the plain version, I use extra egg yolks to boost the custardy flavour; for the coffee version, I replace part of the milk with strong espresso and stick with whole eggs. It's really worth seeking the best eggs and milk you can find for the plain version. In either case, I've kept the sugar in the custard to a minimum since the caramel sweetens it plenty anyway.

Incidentally, it seems that people in the States don't really know these custards by their French name 'crème caramel'. I've always called them crème caramel and my friends always give me a bewildered look for that. Apparently 'flan' is how they're known here, like in Latin countries.

A few observations:

1. It's better to bake these custards in the lower third of the oven. In the past when I baked them in the centre of the oven, the top half of the custards was overbaked and wasn't as smooth as the part that was submerged in the water. You want heat to be away from the custards as much as you can.

2. You can steam these custards rather than bake them if you wish. If you decide to go down this route, make sure that you cover each ramekin with cling film / plastic wrap before steaming or the texture will be rough.

3. Gentle baking is the key to a smooth baked custard. After the initial 10 minutes at 180C/350F, I turn the heat down to 130C/250F which is a lower temperature than most recipes. This gentler temperature ensures that the custards emerge smooth and creamy.

4. The caramel will harden upon contact with the cold ramekins. If you're really picky about getting perfectly caramel-filled bottoms, you can preheat the ramekins (in the roasting tin) in the oven first so that they'll be warm when you pour the caramel on them. Even if your caramel doesn't cover the entire surface of the base, remember it will liquidy eventually to cover the entire base (or top) by the time you serve them.

5. I like to pour fridge-cold milk into the saucepan you made the caramel with to dissolve any stubborn bits of caramel that stayed on the pan. This isn't just frugality, but adds an extra something in the flavour of the custard itself. This also conveniently warms up the milk every so slightly to shorten the baking time.