Breaking past cupcakes and diving into the deep end of pastries
Sunday, during our “stay-in-our-jammies” weekend, I convinced Ray to help me bake cinnamon buns from the new book I got him, . Ray is the bread and pizza dough guy—and is fantastic at it—whereas I’m the sweets girl (of course). But as Cupcake Friday Project grows, and I grow and improve as a baker, I want to tackle new baked goods. Hence, cinnamon buns.
Now, doughs and I have never really been friends. Batters, yes. As my friend described in a column he wrote (inspired by my bread-baking aversions), there are some major differences between bread and pastry baking. He writes:
With cupcakes, cakes, muffins, pies, and similar pastries, you barely want any gluten at all, because the methods of creating air bubbles in pastries are subtle compared to bread. With pastries, you get:
- Little pockets of air hidden inside of butter;
- A delicate egg foam waiting to burst or set depending on how you cook and cool it;
- Some carbon dioxide wafting in a gentle chemical reaction.
All of these things are great in their place, but bread has hearty yeast cells bursting with life doing their best to turn sugar into, among other things, gasses. The gluten you need for pastries is a goldfish net; it has to have small holes to catch the goldfish, and you don’t want to kill it when you transfer it from one tank to another. The gluten you need for bread is a tuna net; tuna would tear through a goldfish net as if it weren’t even there, so it has to be strong.
Therefore, all of the pastry reflexes will cause someone to completely underdo the gluten formation for bread. In pastry, overworking the dough will cause tough and unappetizing baked goods. In bread, it is essentially impossible to overwork the dough by hand, and takes a serious effort to do in a mixer. So for bread, you use high-protein flours and work at the gluten formation (caveats apply for artisinal bread).
Have I mentioned how freaking SMART Brian is?
So, with that knowledge in hand, I knew I wanted to begin working my way into pastries that are dough-based, and the cinnamon bun recipe seemed to be the perfect fit. Ray and I had a lot of fun with it, and though the dough at first didn’t quite cooperate, Ray knew enough about dealing with gluten that he could wrangle it.
I was surprised at the ease of working with the dough after its first rise, and though the buns didn’t seem like the proofed a lot after forming, they baked up magnificently in the oven. Oh, and the flavor? Mind-blowing. And the texture was perfect. Ray and I may have high-fived at least 10 times.
So, as 2013 rolls in, I’m going to find new challenges to tackle with my cupcake baking, while expanding my skills with other baked goods. I have a rough plan for how I’m going to accomplish this, and I’m excited.
Categories: miscellaneous baked goods, thoughts
Brian IS smart, and one of my best friends. Also: a decent pie baker. Ahem. VERY nice cinnamon buns — one of my favorite items to bake.
by Marijean on Jan 11, 2013 at 11:27 am
[…] the cinnamon bun recipe from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I’ve made the recipe before, but this time I doubled my yield, used blood orange zest, and tweaked the filling so that my […]
by » Chinese 5 spice cinnamon buns Cupcake Friday Project on Nov 7, 2013 at 9:43 am