Eater NY: All Posts by Marguerite PrestonThe New York City Restaurant, Bar, and Nightlife Bloghttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52682/favicon-32x32.png2018-04-05T17:22:55-04:00https://ny.eater.com/authors/marguerite-preston/rss2018-04-05T17:22:55-04:002018-04-05T17:22:55-04:00How Flora Coffee Transforms Zucchini and Cheese Scraps Into a Satisfying Scone
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<p>Pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz shows how she makes the simple, cheesy snack</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="kyoPLd"><strong>Natasha </strong><strong>Pickowicz</strong> splits her time between Cafe Altro Paradiso in Soho and Flora Bar on the Upper East Side, and between the two restaurants, she and a small team of pastry cooks put out the equivalent of three different dessert menus. There are the Italian desserts at Cafe Altro Paradiso (think gelati, panna cotta), the more eclectic desserts at Flora Bar<strong> </strong>(Jerusalem artichoke and chocolate parfait), and a selection of cookies, cakes, and other grab-and-go pastries at Flora Bar’s adjoining cafe, Flora Coffee.</p>
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<figcaption>Natasha Pickowicz</figcaption>
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<p id="qVESqg">The job is a constant juggling act — Pickowicz often seems to have a side project going on and is currently planning a bake sale for Planned Parenthood, which will be held at Cafe Altro Paradiso this Sunday — but she has a pared down style that makes it all work. Rather than try to dazzle with multiple components and complex flavor configurations, she puts her energy into making simple things the best they can be. It’s a subdued style that makes some of her pastries unassuming and easy to overlook. Case in point: the savory zucchini and gruyere studded scone at <strong>Flora Coffee</strong>. It’s a craggy, rather homely looking pastry (as most scones are), with spurts of cheese spilling out around the base. But those untidy cheese bits, which turn frizzled and golden in the oven, are the best part. For all its homespun appearance, Flora Coffee’s savory scone shows off all of Pickowicz’s unflagging attention to detail. </p>
<p id="oz0nJP">At first, it was a way to use up some odds and ends. Faced with a surplus of zucchini and a bunch of cheese scraps to use up for a staff meal at Cafe Altro Paradiso the summer before Flora Bar opened, she decided to make scones. “So often scones are stodgy and dry,” Pickowicz says. “I wanted to make something more healthful, with a lighter crumb.” Throwing in a heap of grated zucchini did just that. But it was only the start of the tinkering Pickowicz has done to make this a scone that’s actually exciting to eat. </p>
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<p id="usfYue">The recipe starts with a blend of dry ingredients — all-purpose flour, a little sugar, salt, pepper, “lots of baking powder” — and a heap of cold, cubed butter. “The key is keeping all your ingredients super cold,” Pickowicz says as she tosses everything into an enormous mixer. The butter should stay in small chunks, rather than melting into the dry ingredients. That way, when the scone bakes, the chunks melt, creating little pockets of steam. The scone puffs up, and comes out light and flakey rather than greasy and leaden. </p>
<p id="LeyCIa">Pickowicz starts the mixer, and the paddle slowly squashes the cubed butter into smaller pieces, working it into the dry ingredients. After a short while she stops the machine and reaches down into the bowl to check the texture of the mixture. She wants it to be cold and crumbly, and still have some good-sized bits of butter. Deciding that it’s about right, she turns the machine back on, and pours in a steady stream of buttermilk. It’s best to keep the mixture moving while pouring the buttermilk, she says, otherwise gummy, wet spots emerge where the buttermilk was.</p>
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<figcaption>Pickowicz adds the buttermilk by feel</figcaption>
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<p id="YhDpRz">While most pastry recipes involve measuring every ingredient precisely, Pickowicz adds the buttermilk by feel. “It’s always good to have a recipe,” she says, “but I try to empower my cooks to use their senses, o pay attention to how something feels, how it tastes, not simply go through the motions.” Here, that means watching closely as she adds the buttermilk, waiting for the dough to just start clumping around the paddle. It also means listening for a subtle change in pitch and rhythm as mixing paddle catches on dough rather than clanking against the sides of the bowl. </p>
<p id="CBCbl2">When the dough has just started to clump but is still crumbly, Pickowicz stops the machine and heaves the bowl up to the counter. She’ll finish mixing and shaping the dough by hand, using a more delicate and precise touch than she can get with the beast of a mixer. “I want it to turn out super dry from the bowl,” she explains, spilling the sandy mixture out across most of her workspace. That’s because zucchini is mostly water. And even though Pickowicz has diligently drained the shredded vegetable, first by pressing it overnight in a perforated pan lined with cheesecloth, then by spreading it out on a layer of towels, it’s still damp enough to bind the dough together. </p>
<p id="WFQDQK">Before adding the zucchini, Pickowicz sorts through the dry mix on the counter, “assessing the problem areas.” With her fingertips, she breaks up wet patches and evens out dry spots. Then she spreads the grated squash over the mixture like she’s laying down a soft bed of grass for the pile of cubed gruyere to nestle in. The zucchini, she says, immediately starts hydrating the dough, helping pull it together “without me doing anything”. </p>
<p id="KOsJRQ">With all the ingredients laid out across the counter, Pickowicz begins tossing the mixture together with her hands. “You want to fluff it like you would with salad tongs,” she says, “Lightly. You don’t want to mush the liquid out, so you don’t press or apply pressure.” Doing so would develop the gluten in the flour, making the scones tough and gummy. </p>
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<p id="gKHh6X">As Pickowicz mixes, she begins to gently press clumps together, distributing dry bits until the mixture just starts to stick to itself. “My old pastry chef when I worked at Marlow & Daughters told me that you’re looking for the feel of a damp wool sweater,” she says. When the dough reaches that point, it still looks — to the untrained eye — like it couldn’t possibly hold together into a solid scone. But Pickowicz grabs a bench scraper and deftly pulls it into a rough rectangle. “It’s important to be decisive with your movements,” she says, “because every time you touch it you’re adding heat, and developing the gluten.”</p>
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<p id="gUkcci">Next, grabbing a rolling pin, she gently flattens the dough. On the first pass she simply presses on the dough with the pin: The mixture is still so fragile and crumbly that to roll it would cause it to collapse. But pressing compacts the dough just enough to stick it all together, and on the second pass, Pickowicz rolls the surface even with a few long, steady strokes. The surface, speckled with flecks of zucchini and chunks of cheese, looks like a terrazzo floor. </p>
<p id="f2tSdX">Pickowicz measures the height of the flattened dough against the height of her biscuit cutter, to make sure it’s not too thick. Then she plunges the cutter down into a corner of the slab. Pulling it back out, she uses her fingertips to push out the brick of an unbaked scone now lodged inside. She places the scone on a baking sheet and repeats the process, steadily working her way across the expanse of dough on the counter. When she’s done, she gently pushes the scraps together and forms a second rectangle, to coax a few more scones out of this batch of dough. “You can usually reroll once,” Pickowicz says, as long as it’s gentle. Try to reroll more than once and the scones can come out tough; same if one manhandles the dough. “Sometimes I’ll even go through the mix and pick out the gummy bits before rerolling,” she says. </p>
<p id="qEot9b">At this stage the scones usually go to the freezer. It saves time to have a big batch ready to bake off each morning, plus Pickowicz thinks they bake up better when they’re frozen. It keeps all the butter from melting out too fast, she explains.</p>
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<figcaption>An egg wash goes on the scone</figcaption>
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<p id="v0i6BT">When the scones are ready to bake, Pickowicz brushes their tops with egg wash. The wash “deepens their color,” she says, and “glosses them out.” She also adds a pinch of gray salt and a sprinkle of coarse cracked pepper as a garnish. The scones go in the oven for 20 minutes and come out burnished and nubby. The tops are crisp and buttery, the bottoms hemmed with lacey browned cheese, and the insides tender as a piece of cake, if cake had hidden pockets of melted gruyere. The size of a large fist and $6 apiece, these savory scones can make an ideal breakfast or a hefty afternoon snack. </p>
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https://ny.eater.com/2018/4/5/17140682/flora-coffee-scone-natasha-pickowiczMarguerite Preston2018-01-31T13:35:16-05:002018-01-31T13:35:16-05:00How the Apple Cider Doughnuts at Hearth Get Their Thrilling Rustic Edge
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<p>Pastry chef Karen DeMasco breaks down how she makes one of NYC’s most distinctive desserts</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="DjSCJx">The apple cider doughnuts that chef <strong>Karen DeMasco</strong> makes for <strong>Hearth</strong> look and sound simple enough. They’re a chubby, petit version of the farm stand classic: nut brown, cinnamon-scented, and either tossed in sugar or dipped in glaze. They come to the table in a pair, warm from the fryer, resting on a few spoonfuls of creme fraiche and a plop of golden apple butter. It’s nothing fancy, but these doughnuts are what most apple cider doughnuts only promise to be: moist, tender, and actually apple-flavored. And for most, that should be reason enough to order them.</p>
<p id="TxG3oF">But for the New York pastry obsessive, there’s also a thrill in recognizing these particular doughnuts on the menu at Hearth. DeMasco is one of New York’s great pastry chefs, who made a name for herself overseeing the pastry department at Tom Colicchio’s Craft in the early aughts, and then at Andrew Carmellini’s eternally popular Locanda Verde. She excels at homey-yet-elegant desserts, the kind that are so simple and free of distraction they’re actually hard to pull off. Apple cider doughnuts are what you might call one of her greatest hits. </p>
<p id="4bszPp">DeMasco developed the recipe back when she was at Locanda Verde and in charge of launching the restaurant’s all-day pastry counter. Among the cakes, cookies, muffins, and scones she piled on the counter, she also wanted to offer doughnuts, but needed a type of doughnut “that could sit out” without going stale. These apple cider doughnuts, moistened with a generous serving of grated apples, fit the bill. </p>
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<p id="x94VfY">Five or so years ago, fans could pretty regularly find DeMasco’s apple cider doughnuts at the counter at Locanda Verde (and to this day the restaurant is one of the city’s most under-appreciated destinations for doughnuts of all flavors). But in 2013, DeMasco left both Locanda Verde and restaurants in general in order to spend more time with her two daughters. So at the time it was unclear if or when she would ever come back to restaurants — hence the thrill in finding her apple cider doughnuts on the menu at Hearth, where, after a three-and-a-half year hiatus, she did in fact return to restaurant pastry last year.</p>
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<figcaption>The ingredients for the doughnuts</figcaption>
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<p id="FEChL8">“I really missed baking and getting my hands in there,” DeMasco says. So when chef Marco Canora (a friend from her days at Craft, where he was the chef de cuisine) was looking to hire a pastry chef for Hearth last year, she volunteered herself. It was the ideal position for her. She works during the day, when there’s space for her in the restaurant’s cramped kitchen. Her simple desserts are easy to prepare mostly in advance, and easy for Hearth’s cooks to finish making and plating at night without her. And Canora’s revamped menu had a focus on more nutritious ingredients, like alternative sugars and freshly milled flours, which intrigued her. “I realized that in restaurants, you eat so much sugar,” she says. “For a while it didn’t bother me, but when you do it every day, you do not feel well.”</p>
<p id="RnOGEF">The apple cider doughnuts, like most of DeMasco’s desserts for Hearth, begin in the basement, at a hulking grain mill wedged in under the stairs. The chance to mill your own flour is a rare one for pastry chefs, and it’s one of the big reasons why DeMasco took the job at Hearth. “It was a chance for me to work on a whole new repertoire,” she says. </p>
<p id="ooB1nk">The restaurant uses only heirloom grains grown in New York, and figuring out how to use them was exciting but also a “pretty daunting” process for DeMasco that involved a lot of trial and error. “There’s not a lot of specific information on any of these grains,” she says. For a while she made all her recipes with a mix of half freshly milled flour, half regular AP flour. But by now, she’s gotten the hang of it, and though you could hardly tell unless you were looking for the subtly rustic texture, all her pastries use only fresh-ground wheat.</p>
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<p id="COYm4I">In the basement, DeMasco pulls a bin of Frederick wheat out of the freezer. It’s a soft white wheat, and has become her go-to for pastry flour. She dumps a few scoops of the whole wheat berries into the mill’s hopper and turns on the machine. It rattles and hums and starts spitting a plume of flour into a plastic bin underneath. The flour comes out coarse at first, the texture of cornmeal, so DeMasco adjusts a couple of knobs until the flour coming out is soft and fine. She judges the texture by sticking her hand under the machine and catching a palmful of flour.</p>
<p id="4vxlaV">When the last wheat berries run through the burrs of the grinder, DeMasco takes the flour upstairs to the kitchen and sifts out the flakey wheat husks. She grinds a new batch of flour every few days, because “everything deteriorates the longer it sits.” The oils in the wheat go rancid, and the straw-colored flour goes from tasting sweet to tasting like sawdust. </p>
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<p id="7xZYlS">Now DeMasco turns to making the actual doughnuts. The process is simple enough that she can do it all by hand (though when making big batches for the restaurant, she usually relies on the stand mixer to save her some time). She starts by melting a fist-sized lump of grass-fed butter — which is more nutritious and arguably better tasting than regular butter — over the stove. “I don’t know of any other restaurant baking with grass-fed butter,” DeMasco says, but it’s the only butter Canora uses at Hearth. </p>
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<p id="uVvyzd">As the butter liquifies, DeMasco whisks together white sugar and dark brown sugar. Both are organic, which means they’re slightly less refined than the standard Domino stuff. The white sugar has an ivory tint, and the brown sugar has a richer, brighter molasses scent. DeMasco has been trying to use more alternative sugars — maple syrup, honey, date syrup — but those can be tricky to work with, and the organic sugar is a good in-between. </p>
<p id="uAybH4">After stirring the butter into the sugars, DeMasco adds four eggs and whisks the mixture into a thick sludge. Setting that aside, she briskly grates a whole nutmeg over her bowl of measured flour, then adds salt, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon. After a few strokes to combine the dry ingredients, she grabs another bowl to combine the remaining wet ingredients: milk, apple cider, apple cider vinegar, and vanilla paste.</p>
<p id="VBydqz">“Apple cider doughnuts always drove me crazy because they didn’t taste like apple or cider” says DeMasco, “So I figured out a few tricks to fix that.” One of those tricks is adding as much apple cider vinegar as she does apple cider: “It really brightens the flavor up.” </p>
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<p id="YdZUx5">Another trick is adding “tons” of fresh apple, which DeMasco grates by hand. After gradually adding the dry ingredients and the liquids to the sugar mixture, she folds in an enormous mound of shredded apple, gently working the dough until it’s laced with fruit. The she scoops half the dough out onto a piece of parchment paper, and lays another piece on top. With a few gentle strokes of the rolling pin, she flattens the dough into a rough oval, smooshing it level between the pieces of paper. She repeats the process with the other half of the dough, then puts both in the fridge to rest. </p>
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<p id="NGqrt0">Resting is a crucial step for pastries made with freshly-milled flour. AP flour is dry and thirsty, but fresh flour takes longer to absorb moisture. The doughnut dough needs several hours to fully hydrate and become soft and supple rather than crumbly, so DeMasco waits. </p>
<p id="rfZd9M">When the dough is ready, DeMasco uses circular cutters to cut out miniature doughnut shapes. Usually these would go back in the fridge, but only because they’re fried to order during dinner at the restaurant. They’re ready to go at this point, and DeMasco has a pot of oil heating on the stove. </p>
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<p id="dX60Pu">When the oil reaches about 360F, DeMasco gently lowers the doughnuts in one by one, fingers precariously close to the shimmering surface. As they gradually turn golden, she turns the doughnuts a couple times with a spoon, watching and waiting until they’re the color of chestnuts. </p>
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<p class="caption">The frying of the doughnuts</p>
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<p class="c-end-para" id="r1KltC">After pulling the doughnuts out and setting them down to drain on paper towels, DeMasco mixes up a batch of cinnamon sugar. The organic white sugar is a bit too coarse to stick to the doughnuts, so she whizzes it with the cinnamon and a hefty pinch of salt in a Vitamix until it’s as fine as sand. Then she tosses the still-warm doughnuts in the sugar and places them carefully in a bed of creme fraiche and apple butter on her favorite vintage plate. They arrive at the table like this, sweet and unassuming, one of the city’s most distinctive doughnuts hidden under a cinnamon sugar coating. </p>
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<p class="caption">The finished apple cider doughnuts</p>
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<aside id="BKZxj2"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ny-eater"}'></div></aside>
https://ny.eater.com/2018/1/31/16954980/apple-cider-doughnuts-hearth-karen-demascoMarguerite Preston2017-06-13T13:43:54-04:002017-06-13T13:43:54-04:00Le Coucou Wants to Reintroduce You to the Baked Alaska
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<p>It goes by the name omelette Norvegienne</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="1c2xs1">From the menu description alone, it’s not obvious what’s in store when you order the <strong>omelette Norvegienne</strong> for dessert at <strong>Le Coucou</strong>, <strong>Stephen Starr </strong>and chef <strong>Daniel Rose</strong>’s luxuriously old-school-yet-stylish French restaurant on the edge of Soho. “Pistachio ice cream, cherries, kirsch,” are only half of what goes into this little showstopper, which arrives at the table in the shape of a miniature cake covered in spikes of toasted meringue and a little pile of roasted cherries. After setting it down, a server flicks a match, touches it to the portion of kirsch he holds in a tiny copper pot, and pours the flaming liqueur over your dessert. The quivering blue flame envelops the meringue for a few seconds and then goes out, leaving behind the scent of toasted marshmallows. </p>
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<p id="DPuvPx">In other words, the omelette Norvegienne is basically a baked Alaska. Beneath that toasty coat of meringue is what looks like an ice cream sandwich — made with pistachio and vanilla ice creams between disks of pistachio cake — which stays frozen even after being doused in burning kirsch. As <strong>Daniel Skurnick</strong>, Le Coucou’s pastry chef, explains, omelette Norvegienne (literally “Norwegian omelette”) really is just the French name for the baked Alaska, Norway having all the same frigid connotations for the French that Alaska does for Americans. The “omelette” part comes from the fact that, traditionally, the French version of this flaming-yet-frozen dessert is made in an oval shape similar to an omelette. </p>
<p id="k8KPAE">At Le Coucou, says Skurnick, “I try to do a lot of classic French desserts,” by which he means the kind of retro traditional desserts you barely see anymore except at certain restaurant dinosaurs — things like chiboust, crepes souffle, and baba rhum. His versions, of course, are tweaked and modernized, but he often starts developing a dessert by combing the stacks at Bonnie Slotnick or Kitchen Arts & Letters, looking for French books with copyright dates from the 1960s or earlier. For the omelette Norvegienne, he looked back as far as Escoffier’s iconic turn of the century tome, <em>Le Guide Culinaire</em>, which includes multiple recipes for what was then also known as an “omelette surprise.” And though he tinkered with the shape (a single serving cakelet is easier to light on fire at the table than an omelette-sized dessert that needs to be sliced) he stuck to a traditional flavor scheme of pistachio, cherry, and vanilla — at least for now. Here’s how he does it:</p>
<p id="8ClEIH">Skurnick starts with the pistachio ice cream. To make the custardy base, he begins heating a mixture of milk and cream on the induction burner, adding sugar, a glob of glucose, and another glob of trimoline. The latter two are both liquid sugars, the glucose with a texture like corn syrup, trimoline with the creamy, crystalline texture of raw honey. They help add body to the ice cream, and keep it more supple than plain sugar would. Both are thick enough, Skurnick says, that picking up a blob with his fingers is actually less messy than trying to pour from the big plastic tubs they come in. </p>
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<p id="C3eoit">In an enormous bowl, Skurnick whisks a little more sugar into 22 egg yolks — this recipe will yield six quarts of ice cream, enough to last the restaurant a couple days —beating until the mixture is light and creamy. Both the sugar and the aeration, he explains, helps protect the yolks from heat, so they don’t curdle when he pours boiling milk over them, as he’s about to do. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="zsGw2U"><q>Then he adds a healthy dose of pure pistachio paste, which is satiny smooth and thick enough to glue your tongue to the roof of your mouth</q></aside></div>
<p id="3QUZeO">Skurnick pours the hot milk and cream into the yolks slowly, whisking steadily, to avoid cooking the eggs too fast. When everything is mixed, he pours the custard back into the pot, which has enough residual heat to finish cooking it off the burner. Then he adds a healthy dose of pure pistachio paste, which is satiny smooth and thick enough to glue your tongue to the roof of your mouth. As Skurnick immersion blends the paste into the custard, the mixture swirls into the color of pea soup and the heady, almost savory scent of pistachio fills his corner of the kitchen. </p>
<p id="GioSLK">The custard now goes into the fridge overnight to thoroughly chill down, so that it freezes quickly and smoothly in the ice cream machine. The vanilla custard, which was made the same way as the pistachio, is already chilling. </p>
<p id="LvYARo">When the custard base is cool, Skurnick pours it into the ice cream machine to churn. After a few minutes, he opens the mouth of the machine and ribbons of ice cream the texture of soft serve ripple out into Skurnick’s waiting pastry bag. When the bag is full, it goes into the freezer to firm up a little more. </p>
<p id="I7qYgh">Meanwhile, he makes the pistachio sponge cake that will sandwich the two flavors of ice cream. “I tried a ton of different cake recipes,” says Skurnick, but most involved too many steps — too much whipping, and sifting, and folding. “I’m not interested in difficulty for the sake of difficulty,” he explains, plus he wanted the cake to be “fairly dense,” to provide a sturdy base for the ice cream. So he settled on this relatively basic recipe, which begins with simply whisking a mixture of pistachio paste, egg yolks, and water into a dry blend of flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt until it forms a thick, green batter. </p>
<p id="FvOHBI">Next Skurnick begins beating egg whites, which he’ll fold into the batter once they’re light and fluffy. As they begin to froth, he starts to slowly add sugar, the mixer still running. “Sugar is like glass,” Skurnick explains. “It cuts through proteins, so if you dump it all in at once you’re in trouble.” But added gradually, it helps aerate the whites, so that before long the bowl is full of thick, soft drifts of meringue. </p>
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<p id="xg8SnJ">With a spatula, Skurnick drops a couple big dollops of the beaten egg whites into the bowl of batter. These are what he calls the “sacrificial third” of the meringue: It deflates quite a bit as Skurnick folds it into the batter. But it also helps lighten the mixture, so that when Skurnick gently folds in the other two-thirds of the whites, they keep a more lofty structure. When everything has been thoroughly mixed, the batter is billowy and pale green.</p>
<p id="uhnzMQ">Skurnick spreads the batter evenly across two greased sheet trays, and puts them in the oven for about 12 minutes. To test their doneness, he prods each gently with a finger, looking for the moment when the cake springs back gently to his touch. A finished cake has the frothy look and feel of a sponge, and the deep fragrance of pistachio. </p>
<p id="ZMldzJ">After flipping the cake out of the pan and letting it cool a little, Skurnick cuts it into circles about the size of a coaster. Then he presses each disk of cake down into a ring mold, squishing it gently. Pulling the pastry bags full of each ice cream from the freezer, he first pipes a ring of vanilla ice cream around the inner edge of the ring molds, then fills the center with a blob of pistachio ice cream. After pressing another circle of cake on top of the ice cream in each mold, he puts them all back in the freezer to firm up. </p>
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<p id="koKS8Q">In the meantime, he whips up the meringue topping. Unlike the meringue he folded into the sponge cake batter, this one is made with a cooked sugar syrup, which gives it more stability and a thicker, glossier texture. After partially beating the whites, Skurnick starts boiling a mixture of sugar and water to make the syrup, which has to hit a particular temperature — the softball stage in candy making terms — before being added to the whites. But rather than use a thermometer, Skurnick has an old-school trick he uses to know when the syrup is done. When it starts to get close, he dips one end of a piping tip into the syrup and blows through the other end. If a bubble forms and drifts off into space, it’s ready.</p>
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<p id="0I5zLh">With the mixer whirring, Skurnick pours the hot syrup into the whites in a steady stream. The meringue slowly develops, thickening and expanding into ripples and peaks of marshmallow-like fluff. When it’s cool to the touch and stiff enough to hold its shape, Skurnick stops the machine and spoons the meringue into a pastry bag fitted with a small round tip. </p>
<p id="DRCyqo">Pulling the ring molds back out of the freezer, he pops out what is basically an ice cream sandwich, sets it gently on a plate, and begins piping spikes of meringue in concentric rings over the top. Only a small patch of cake in the center remains bare; later, Skurnick will fill it with a spoonful of roasted sour cherries. First, he lifts the cake and carefully sets it on an overturned plastic quart container — his miniature, makeshift cake stand — and begins piping ridges of meringue up the sides. </p>
<p id="BGltyY">When the entire cake is covered, it will go back in the freezer until dinner service, so that it’s good and cold when it’s time to light it on fire. When that time comes, Skurnick centers the frozen cake carefully on a plate, then grazes the peaks of meringue with a torch until they darken to a toasty brown. He adds a little pile of roasted cherries to the top, then passes the plate off to a server with a matchbook and a copper pot of kirsch, who whisks it off to the table. </p>
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<p id="3Tg9gs">Once lit and poured, the kirsch burns blue-hot for only a few seconds – long enough for the spectacle, but not so long the meringue comes out blackened. And anyway, it’s better off eaten than watched, preferably while the ice cream is still cold. </p>
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<aside id="dOM6fV"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ny-eater"}'></div></aside><p id="DTvbaR"></p>
<p id="gm9XqI"> </p>
https://ny.eater.com/2017/6/13/15792752/le-coucou-baked-alaska-omelette-norvegienneMarguerite Preston2017-04-18T17:46:47-04:002017-04-18T17:46:47-04:00How the Cronut Opened the Door to Better Desserts
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<p>No longer boring, pastry is back</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="GeKKfU"><strong>In late spring of 2013</strong>, a rather ingenious piece of viennoiserie called <a href="http://ny.eater.com/2013/8/2/6391869/this-mornings-cronut-line-was-one-for-the-record-books">the Cronut</a> rocked the world of pastry in a way that no one could have predicted. New York had seen its fair share of fads before — <a href="http://ny.eater.com/2016/7/14/12189132/magnolia-and-me">the era of the cupcake</a> was only barely over when the Cronut hit the scene — but the fanaticism sparked by a doughnut-croissant hybrid felt somehow more extreme. Many even saw it as vaguely apocalyptic, as if some piece of serious dining culture, and pastry culture in particular, had just died.</p>
<p id="02hykj">They were right in some ways. The Cronut’s debut did start an escalating game of hybrid rainbow pastry one-upmanship. But the Cronut also helped revive an interest in serious pastry, which now is working its way into both bakeries and restaurant pastry programs.</p>
<p id="2QZjwo">A classically trained French pastry chef, Dominique Ansel — the Cronut’s creator —excels at viennoiserie and petit fours, the kinds of things that, pre-Cronut, had been pushed out of the spotlight by cupcakes and ice cream. “When we first opened,” he says, “people told me that French pastries wouldn't sell in New York — that I would need to do cupcakes or cheesecake.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="1f9aqX"><q>The general consensus is that pastry was down and now it’s coming back</q></aside></div>
<p id="Db9Td7">Four years later, it’s a different dessert landscape. Now, he says, “there's so much more open-mindedness and delight in all different types of pastries. The pastry scene has gotten much more eclectic, and inclusive of other cultures and flavors. It's no longer just chocolate and vanilla, if you know what I mean.”</p>
<p id="iKMF4H">This change is not lost on fellow pastry chefs. “In recent years we’ve seen people becoming more interested in pastry,” says Miro Uskokovic, the longtime pastry chef at <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/gramercy-tavern">Gramercy Tavern</a>. “And I think you can credit Dominique Ansel a lot for that. He was the first pastry chef in many years to achieve stardom.” </p>
<p id="cZPS52">Interest in the Cronut has translated to Ansel’s pastry work — not just his novelties but also his kouign-amann and his Paris-Brest. We suddenly saw new possibilities in a well-made croissant.</p>
<p id="GAFw2T">Just about every pastry chef I’ve talked to agrees that pastry is on the way out of a slump. It can’t be entirely due to Ansel — it also has to do with economics, developments in social media, and larger dining trends. But I start with the Cronut because it demonstrates, in one neat little cream-filled package, all the ways in which the New York pastry scene is growing and changing: with a renewed appreciation for technique, an eye toward Instagram, and an appetite for nostalgia.</p>
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<p id="gfcXrU"><strong>If you didn’t even realize pastry</strong> was in a slump, the story goes like this: In the early aughts, pastry chefs did achieve stardom, and greats like Claudia Fleming at Gramercy Tavern and Johnny Iuzzini at <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/jean-georges">Jean-Georges</a> had name recognition even among special-occasion diners. But following the 2008 financial crisis, pastry programs found themselves with low funding and high rates of attrition, as even stars jumped ship. </p>
<p id="0OXOBx">Daniel Skurnick, the pastry chef at Le Coucou, has been in the New York pastry scene for 15 years and remembers the shift. “It was 2010, and both Michael Laiskonis” — then the lauded pastry chef at <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/le-bernardin">Le Bernardin</a> — “and Johnny Iuzzini quit restaurants on the same day: New Year’s Eve,” Skurnick says. <em>(Editor’s Note: It was a day apart, with Laiskonis quitting on the Dec. 30 and Iuzzini on Dec. 31)</em> Other pastry chefs were shifting gears too. That same year, Alex Stupak left his pastry position at wd-50 to open <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/empellon-cocina">Empellon Cocina </a>and eventually launch a Mexican restaurant empire. In 2013, Karen DeMasco, another talented pastry chef, announced her departure from <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/locanda-verde">Locanda Verde</a>.</p>
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<p id="pknK6l">In those recession years, says Skurnick, “Pastry would be first thing to go. Pastry is a luxury.” Instead, chefs took over making the desserts, and as a result, says Uskokovic, “you saw a lack of creativity.” The difference was pronounced enough that two years ago, Adam Platt of <em>New York Magazine</em><a href="http://www.grubstreet.com/2014/03/adam-platt-on-the-dark-age-of-dessert.html"> declared</a> it the “dark age of desserts.” Blaming tight budgets and “a generation of no-frills cooks (and eaters), who prefer a midnight tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to a well-fashioned éclair,” he lamented that too many new restaurants were forgoing pastry departments for pre-made cakes and crowd-pleasing churros.</p>
<p id="MpXrHf">Of course, that was a generalization. Fine-dining establishments like <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/daniel">Daniel</a> will always have a pastry department, as will the larger restaurant groups — Andrew Carmellini and Danny Meyer consistently hire skilled pastry chefs. And not every restaurateur will take a hard economic line. When that Platt article came out, Marco Canora, the chef-owner of the East Village institution<a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/hearth"> Hearth</a>, wrote<a href="http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a29828/defense-of-dessert/"> a response for <em>Esquire</em></a> arguing that, despite the extra cost, he would keep a pastry chef in order to “create a culture in my restaurant where we act according to a belief system rather than fulfilling the basic demands of a demographic.” Notably, Canora has since convinced Karen DeMasco to return to restaurant pastry by offering her daytime hours in return for desserts that can be finished and plated by cooks at dinner.</p>
<p id="SJOXNk">But the general consensus is that pastry was down and now it’s coming back. You see it in a crop of new-ish restaurants equipped with daytime pastry counters or cafes: <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/Lilia">Lilia</a>, <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/Italienne">Italienne</a>, <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/pondicheri-nyc">Pondicheri</a>, and Flora Bar to name a few. Even two-year-old <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/Rebelle">Rebelle</a>, the kind of hip wine bar that never seems to have a need for dessert, now has Melissa Weller — whose best-known work includes the sticky buns at Roberta’s and the babka at Sadelle’s — offering inventive but familiar daytime pastries like a cherry-pistachio croissant.</p>
<p id="BbuL6M">Desserts are also a priority at refined French and Italian restaurants like <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/le-coucou">Le Coucou</a>, <a href="http://ny.eater.com/2017/1/3/14147828/augustine-review-keith-mcnally">Augustine</a>, <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/le-coq-rico">Le Coq Rico</a>, and <a href="http://www.altroparadiso.com">Cafe Altro Paradiso,</a> where dessert feels more essential to the experience. A dreamy French meal isn’t complete without a slice of tarte tatin or an ethereal ile flottante. Le Coucou “is big on making the whole thing an experience, a cohesive event,” Skurnick told me — which means prioritizing dessert at the end of the meal as much as wine at the beginning of it. “I would say 60 percent of our guests are eating their own dessert,” Skurnick says, which is at least double the restaurant norm. For comparison, chefs <a href="http://www.grubstreet.com/2014/03/chefs-discuss-state-of-restaurant-desserts.html">responding</a> to Platt’s piece three years ago considered it good when they were selling dessert to 30 percent of their guests.</p>
<p id="FypWHi">According to Natasha Pickowicz, that start-to-finish cohesion is one of the reasons that chef Ignacio Mattos — who had been<a href="http://www.grubstreet.com/2014/03/chefs-discuss-state-of-restaurant-desserts.html"> expressly against</a> having a pastry chef at <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/estela">Estela</a> — hired her to manage the pastry program at first Altro Paradiso then also Flora Bar, his restaurant at the Met Breuer. “At Altro,” she says, “he needed someone whose style was very traditional Italian. A savory kitchen can’t do pastries like that.” </p>
<p id="t55dCl">The pastries Pickowicz references are classics — like tiramisu, biscotti, and panna cotta. None are wildly complicated, but every pastry chef I’ve talked to agrees they’re the hardest to make well. If the menus at her employers’ restaurants seem simple and trim, it’s not for lack of expertise. “Ignacio and I have spent 10 months trying to figure out an olive oil cake,” Pickowicz told me, and “it still isn’t there yet.” </p>
<p id="am1Mvk">As Brooks Headley explains, “If you’re serving a super rustic slice of something, your flavors and your textures and the quality of ingredients have to be laser like, especially if you’re charging more than $6.”</p>
<p id="Zjl3s7">Headley is one of those celebrated pastry chefs of the early aughts. He <a href="http://ny.eater.com/2015/6/26/8849599/brooks-del-posto-superiority-burger">left behind a fine dining career</a> at Del Posto to open <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/Superiority%20Burger">Superiority Burger</a>: his tiny, affordable vegetarian restaurant in the East Village. That move was not so much a reaction to a decline in pastry as it was a reaction against the excesses of fine dining. </p>
<p id="Dn3GFO">“The thing that bummed me out about desserts in general was that they were always the same: something learned from bouncing around to different high-end restaurants, and often more about structure than about the unctuousness of flavor,” he says. So at Superiority, alongside veggie burgers in paper boats, Headley offers his alternative: one flavor of gelato and one flavor of sorbet a day, made perfectly.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="tyuNoP">Superiority Burger is an extreme example, but what all those bakery counters and French and Italian restaurants have in common is a trend towards simplicity — fresh but classic desserts like Skurnick’s chiboust at Le Coucou, or the gâteau au citron at Italienne. Simple classics are a reaction to the same trends that Headley balked at, be it modernist showpieces or new Nordic bowls. </p>
<p id="LdbKWJ">“In fine dining,” says Rebecca Isbell, now the pastry chef at Italienne, “it was always these fancy desserts with 27 components on a plate.” Working at Eleven Madison Park, she recalls, “I was using like seven different fluid gels.” New Nordic style, says Skurnick, was “not exactly dessert. It’s stuff in a bowl with more stuff.”</p>
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<p id="cZJkkR"><strong>We can’t talk about showy desserts</strong> without returning to the Cronut, which undoubtedly helped inspire the ballooning field of rainbow Franken-desserts clamoring for viral fame. It’s hard to reconcile those Instagram creations with the work of pastry chefs who are pushing toward elegant simplicity — and who couldn’t care less about going viral. You couldn’t call over-the-top milkshakes and doughnuts simple in the way Pickowicz’s tiramisu is simple. But you can call them familiar. And it’s here that these two seemingly at-odds pastry trends find common ground. </p>
<p id="nbu8RX">“People are looking for something nostalgic in dessert more than in savory courses,”says Isbell. Whether it’s an artisan Twinkie at a festival or a really good chocolate chip cookie at a restaurant, Uskokovic thinks these desserts are appealing because “in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, that’s the processed food people grew up eating. There was not much in modernist cuisine that would remind you of childhood.” Nostalgia is as much to blame for the resurgence of bakery counters and the reintroduction of restaurant pastry chefs, as it is for the prevalence of doughnuts and ice cream cones on Instagram.</p>
<p id="317U4L">Split as the current dessert scene is, the new wave of restaurant pastry highlights more significant hurdles. In<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/business/economy/pastry-workers-restaurant-job-training.html?_r=0"> an article last year</a>, the <em>Times</em> noted that while pastry chefs are in demand again, salaries have stagnated. Many restaurateurs learned in those recession years that they could get a pastry chef with less experience or no formal training for a lot less and adjusted their budgets accordingly. Today, it may be obvious to pastry chefs that simple things can be hardest to make, but to some restaurateurs the trend towards simplicity comes with the assumption that simple is easy. </p>
<p id="FRud2G">Another question is whether the focus on Instagrammable desserts arrives at the expense of less photogenic or more complex desserts and the people who make them. Think of the corn husk meringue at Cosme: It’s a wonderful, appealingly simple dessert, and was one of the most talked-about and photographed dishes of the restaurant’s buzzy first year. Yet as Skurnick pointed out, no one seems to know that it was created by pastry chef Jesus Perea, or that he is no longer at Cosme, having left the meringue recipe in the capable hands of the new pastry chef, Italivi Reboreda.</p>
<p id="uRFx3N">In the same vein, one of Uskokovic’s best-known desserts is the chocolate chip cookie he created for Untitled, Gramercy Tavern’s sibling restaurant at the Whitney. It’s delicious and appeals to both nostalgia and Instagram — thanks to the cute accompanying milk bottle — not to mention media outlets like Grub Street, which<a href="http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/06/untitled-whitney-chocolate-chip-cookie.html"> devoted a whole story</a> to “New York’s finest chocolate chip cookie.” But Uskokovic is a talented pastry chef, and has created many more exciting desserts. “I love that cookie, don’t get me wrong,” he told me, “but I always think, ‘Damn, we’re working so hard creating all these dishes and then all people talk about is the cookie.’”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="9R7blf"><q>“The thing that bummed me out about desserts in general was that they were always the same”</q></aside></div>
<p id="Vl3ctj">More recently, he says, his colleague Daniel Alvarez, the pastry chef at both <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/union-square-cafe">Union Square Cafe</a> and Danny Meyer’s new daytime cafe, <a href="http://ny.eater.com/2017/4/10/15245496/daily-provisions-dishes-ranked">Daily Provisions</a>, has experienced some of the same conflicting feelings over the wildly popular crullers he makes for Daily Provisions. It can be frustrating to find the public focused so narrowly on just one pastry, especially one that’s a relatively simple feat for a chef trained in high-end French kitchens. “But it’s not about that anymore,” says Uskokovic, “it’s about comforting. And we need to embrace that. We should take it as a compliment.”</p>
<p id="HoikLG">Ansel, with his Cronut, is arguably the victim of the same kind of social media tunnel vision. But he’s also one of the first chefs to rise above it to achieve fame in his own right, and in doing so bring more attention to pastry in general. He’s managed to walk the line between the increasingly ravenous public desire for novelty desserts and the pastry chef’s commitment to technical excellence, getting people almost as excited about croissants as they are about cookie shots. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="276upc">These are two sides of the same coin, as the Cronut taught him: “It certainly inspired a lot of bakers and pastry chefs to go out there and test new techniques,” he told me. “It also inspired a lot of people to chase a monetary opportunity, and what resulted wasn't always tasteful and made with care and reason. But what it did do was give a little spotlight to pastries. That's always a good thing.”</p>
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https://ny.eater.com/2017/4/18/15190822/best-pastry-in-new-yorkMarguerite Preston2017-03-15T11:17:22-04:002017-03-15T11:17:22-04:00This Dessert Is the Butter Cake-Pie Mashup of Your Dreams
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<p>Italienne’s gateau au citron is a must-try dish</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="DGQNSP">Pastry chef <strong>Rebecca Isbell</strong> does double duty at <a href="http://ny.eater.com/venue/Italienne"><strong>Italienne</strong></a>, the French-Italian Flatiron restaurant helmed by chef <strong>Jared Sippel.</strong> At night, she works behind a pristine marble pastry counter at the back of the dining room, plating elegant riffs on classic desserts for the fourth course of the restaurant’s $98 prix fixe menu. (Currently: a wild strawberry charlotte, a <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/01/456796760/cascara-tea-a-tasty-infusion-made-from-coffee-waste">cascara</a> tiramisu, and others.)</p>
<p id="qfFScb">During the day, her prep work also includes production of simpler — though no less elegant — pastries for the more casual taverna, which occupies the front half of the restaurant. </p>
<p id="AmoYcb">Among these taverna pastries, which Italienne recently started offering not just as after-dinner desserts but also as anytime snacks from a takeout pastry counter, is the <strong>gateau au citron</strong>. Based on the gateau Basque, a rustic French cake baked with a filling of either custard or cherry jam, Isbell’s gateau looks a little plain. It’s a squat cake, two inches tall at most, coated in a basic glaze and served by the wedge without flourish. </p>
<p id="pdMfNr">But it is wonderful. It’s like a butter cake and a pie merged, creating, depending on how you look at it, either a dense cake with an exceptionally bountiful filling or a tart with an exceptionally thick, tender crust. Isbell adds poppy seeds to the cake, giving it the pleasant crackle of a lemon poppy seed loaf, and swaps out mild custard for a tart citrus curd, using whatever citrus is available — lemons, grapefruits, oranges, even pomelos — to lend a depth of flavor and fragrance beyond a standard lemon meringue. The result is surprisingly delicate, bright, and juicy for such a sturdy-looking slice. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="n07Dyq"><q>The result is surprisingly delicate, bright, and juicy for such a sturdy-looking slice. </q></aside></div>
<p id="nttSrT">Isbell plans to change gateau flavors with the season, so citrus and poppy seed may soon give way to rhubarb, but the formula — the ratio of thick fruit filling to buttery, cake-y crust — will never change. Read on to learn how Isbell makes her gateau au citron.</p>
<p id="PLH49H">She starts by making the crust — with a recipe that yields something more like cookie dough than like cake batter or pie crust. After beating butter and sugar into a soft, creamy paste, Isbell adds a combination of whole eggs and egg yolks. “It’s a rich dough,” she explains as the mixer works the eggs into the butter and the extra yolks add, “a fattiness that counters the tart curd.” </p>
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<p id="NhxXP2">When the mixture in the bowl is smooth, Isbell adds a blend of flour, baking powder, and salt, tapping in a little at a time and giving the beater a few turns around the bowl in between. When the last of the flour is in, she mixes just until the whole thing comes together into a soft, buttercup yellow dough.</p>
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<p id="K4mTaF">Finally, Isbell adds the flavorings: seeds scraped from a vanilla bean, a hodgepodge of citrus zests, and enough poppy seeds to make you flunk a drug test. When these have been thoroughly blended in, she scoops the dough from the bowl, divides it into several pieces, and wraps each in plastic. It’s too sticky and malleable to roll out immediately, so she’ll put it in the fridge to firm up for at least an hour. </p>
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<p id="Eadpsz">In the meantime, Isbell starts the curd. The exact blend of citrus changes from batch to batch, but this time she’s using a combination of orange, lemon, and a little grapefruit. In a wide bowl set over a pot of water simmering gently on the induction burner, Isbell mixes eggs, sugar, and both juice and zest from the citrus blend of the day. After giving the whole thing a good whisk, she’ll leave it alone for a while to cook over the gentle, steady heat of the double boiler. </p>
<p id="KCPRxS">It’s a slow process to make curd this way: It takes about 20 minutes for the curd to reach 82º C, which is when, Isbell sees that the egg is perfectly cooked. During that time, Isbell only needs to stir once or twice to make sure the edges aren’t overheating. There are faster ways to make curd — in a pot directly over the burner, for example — but Isbell says that low heat is better for the eggs. Egg proteins tighten and clump in higher heat (think scrambled eggs), so cooking low and slow keeps curd silkier and lump-free. </p>
<p id="irZDZN">When the curd finally reaches temperature, Isbell adds butter for creaminess, gelatin for body, and citric acid for extra sour punch (since this curd is made with sweeter citrus fruits as well as lemon, it needs it). Then she immersion-blends the whole thing until it’s smooth and puts it in the fridge to cool and thicken. </p>
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<p id="7faxkc">Meanwhile, the dough is ready to roll out. Isbell positions a poppy-flecked disk between two pieces of parchment paper and begins gently rolling it out into a wide circle. A ring traced in Sharpie on the underside of the parchment provides a guideline for size. As it’s rolled, the dough warms up and softens again, so when she’s finished flattening both top and bottom crust, Isbell slides both disks into the freezer to firm up again. </p>
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<p id="kZc7O2">Half an hour later or so, when the dough is sturdy but still supple and not completely frozen, Isbell assembles the cake. She lowers one disk into a greased, parchment-lined, cake pan, gently pressing it down and into the corners. She pinches and molds the sides of the crust so that they’re thicker near the top and sturdy enough to hold the top crust. </p>
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<p id="pdSEgy">With the edges roughly shaped, Isbell grabs a pastry bag full of curd from the fridge and pipes a spiral of thick curd over the base of the cake. The bag is for speed and consistency: Isbell portions out the exact amount of curd needed for one cake into pastry bags in advance, so it’s easy to make every cake the same without stopping to measure out its contents. </p>
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<p id="UpacTV">After carefully setting the top crust down over the curd, Isbell presses down around the sides to make sure top and bottom are sealed tight. Then she slices the extra dough away from the edges, setting it aside for another cake. “Most doughs you can re-roll once,” she says. More than that, and they’ll be tough and chewy. But since the trimmings from three cakes usually yield enough to make a fourth, once is worthwhile. </p>
<p id="CHiBxE">The cake usually goes into the freezer again before being baked, since the slower bake gives it a better consistency. It comes out of the oven brown and crisp around the edges, and once it’s had some time to cool, Isbell flips it on onto a rack set over a sheet pan. The bottom now becomes the top, since its smooth surface and sharp edges look cleaner, and will better show off the sheen of the glaze Isbell now pours generously over the cake. </p>
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<p id="TsmTbQ">It’s a simple glaze, just a mixture of powdered sugar and grapefruit juice, which Isbell likes because it adds a faint blush to the icing. The light rosy hue, she says, matches the restaurant’s pink ceramic cake stand. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="yJBChl">When Isbell cuts a fresh slice of the gateau au citron, the fresh glaze runs and drapes over its sides, pooling on the plate. It is all the adornment this bright, humble little cake needs. </p>
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https://ny.eater.com/2017/3/15/14931002/italienne-desserts-gateau-au-citronMarguerite Preston2016-12-28T13:36:55-05:002016-12-28T13:36:55-05:00How Chef Thomas Padovani Makes Benoit’s Sensational Lemon Curd Dessert
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<p>In September, Alain Ducasse’s Midtown bistro <a href="http://www.benoitny.com/">Benoit </a>reopened after a short summer revamp, refreshed, as if back from vacation in the south of France. Both the space and menu retained their cozy bistro hallmarks – the red banquettes, the pate en croute — emerging lighter, brighter, less stodgy. </p> <p id="IaEtvq">On the dessert menu, that sprucing is the work of Benoit’s new head pastry chef, <strong>Thomas Padovani</strong>, who joined the restaurant in April. Padovani, who is just 26, originally hails from the island of Corsica, France’s most Mediterranean region. Before coming to Benoit, he worked at Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée, an opulent hotel restaurant in Paris where Ducasse <a style="background-color: #ffffff;" href="https://www.alainducasse-plazaathenee.com/en/naturalness">focuses on "naturalness</a>," which is to say healthful dishes centered around vegetables, whole grains, and seafood. All of that background shines through in the desserts Padovani has been adding to the menu, and nowhere more clearly than in the dessert simply titled "lemon curd."</p>
<p id="lfKX3Z">Benoit’s classic desserts (designated by a circle next to them on the menu) are the pleasurably simple and rich staples of French pastry: millefeuille, tarte tatin, baba au rhum, all in shades of cream and caramel. The lemon curd, as you might guess when you read on the menu that it comes with cucumber, is something else entirely. It’s a sunburst of a dessert, a cushion of unusually creamy curd bedazzled with diced cucumber, cucumber jelly, candied lemon peel, and tart lemon segments, then topped with a hypnotic spiral of lemon thyme ice cream. A whiff of mint in the curd makes it taste fresh and summery, but this is a great dessert for the colder months too, since citrus, after all, is a winter fruit. It is, in fact, the perfect dessert for the end of any meal at Benoit where one has already indulged in foie gras and escargot and is in need of a sweet palate cleanser. Here’s how it’s made.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="Sua3Zj">This dessert is an assemblage of simple components — all but two involve three ingredients or fewer. But each adds a different flavor or texture: crisp or silky, tart or creamy, bitter or sweet. And each must be crafted and added to the balance with care.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="j2kJZ8">Padovani begins with the heart of the dish, the lemon curd, which, if we’re being specific about it, is actually lemon-lime-mint curd. Lemon is the dominant of the two flavors, but lime, Padovani explains, adds fragrance. Fresh mint leaves also add fragrance, not just to the dessert but to the entire kitchen, as the chef submerges them in the juice and heats it to a gentle simmer. When the leaves have just begun to wilt, he strains them out and returns the juice to the pot.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="sKWlnj">Next he whisks together whole eggs and sugar, and pours this mixture into the pot. He stirs everything together and then begins whisking as the pot warms to a very low heat. He whisks continuously as the mixture climbs to a simmer, occasionally pulling the whisk from the pot to watch the thickening curd drip off. He is watching for the moment it takes on a certain "creamy" look, at which point he knows it’s done.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="zdIWdp">Pulling the pot of curd from the burner, Padovani then tosses in a handful of cubed butter. While many lemon curd recipes would simply have you whisk this butter into the warm curd, Padovani prefers to use an immersion blender, because it "makes it really silky smooth." The curd then goes into the fridge to chill and thicken further before plating.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="uKBdRv">Next Padovani makes the base for the lemon thyme ice cream (which is flavored with the herb lemon thyme, not with lemon <em>and</em> thyme). He gently heats whole milk with butter and whole sprigs of lemon thyme until the butter has melted. Many ice cream recipes would call for cream here, but Padovani says he prefers the combination of butter and milk because it makes for a smoother, "sleeker" product. Next he adds milk powder, for extra body, and glucose powder, which has a more concentrated sweetness than sugar, so he can use less of it — again for the sake of texture.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="ls73lJ">Whisking while the mixture continues to heat, Padovani then adds egg yolks. Then, while he continues to stir, he watches carefully for the custard to reach 80º C. Then he pulls it from the heat and puts it in the fridge to let the thyme steep and the mixture cool. After two hours, he’ll strain out the herbs and run it through the ice cream machine.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="NwYlsk">Meanwhile, he makes the cucumber jelly, which involves cucumber juice and gelatin. Padovani uses sheet gelatin, which he plunges into ice water, where they can soften without dissolving. Then he heats the fresh cucumber juice (no sugar added) just until it’s warm enough to dissolve the gelatin. Spa-like waves of cucumber steam waft across the kitchen. Padovani pulls the soft, gleaming gelatin from its ice bath and stirs it into the cucumber juice until it’s dissolved. Then he strains the liquid to get rid of any stray cucumber roughage, and puts it in the fridge to firm up.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="AjSdiV">Next up, lemon two ways: confited and poached. For both preparations, Padovani uses a combination of regular lemons and Meyer lemons. The flavor of each is "completely different," he says, and he likes the two together. For the lemon confit, he heats sugar with water until it’s dissolved into a syrup. Then he quarters his lemons and drops them into the syrup where they’ll cook at a low temperature for three hours. They come out like supple, translucent candies, with only a hint of bitterness and all sourness erased.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="vquloL">For the poached lemons, Padovani again prepares a sugar syrup, but this time he supremes the lemons, removing peel and pith. And rather than cook the segments, he places them in a container and pours the hot syrup over them. After an hour, when the syrup has cooled, the segments emerge still juicy and bracingly sour, but just sweet enough to eat on their own.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="m7JFFD">Finally, the elements are ready for plating. Padovani peels half a cucumber and dices it into tiny cubes. He slices the pith and flesh off the confit lemon quarters, then cuts the remaining petals of candied peel into thin triangles. He carefully lays out the poached lemon segments on a paper towel-lined tray, to drain off any extra juices, which would make the dessert sloppy. Then he scoops a dollop of lemon curd onto the center of the plate, using the back of the spoon to swirl it outwards. Alternating between Meyer lemon and regular lemon (the Meyer lemons are a slightly darker yellow), Padovani gently arranges poached segments in a ring around the curd, like petals on a sunflower. He piles diced cucumber in the center, then sticks slivers of candied peel into the curd between the lemon segments. They poke up like blades of grass. Last, he spoons out small, rough chunks of cucumber jelly, setting them around the edges of the dessert like pale emeralds.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p id="XQYBiH">Before adding the ice cream, the plate gets a final decorative touch: a dusting of lemon and lime zest, and a scattering of the glittering nodules of pulp from a purple finger lime. Finally, Padovani drags his spoon across the surface of a new pan of ice cream, scooping out a soft spiral that he rests on top of the diced cucumber. The end result is cool and creamy, fresh and bright, and probably unlike any other lemon curd dessert you’ve had.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p><a href="http://ny.eater.com/2016/10/24/13374686/il-flottante-le-coq-rico">How Matthieu Simon Makes the Ile Flottante at Le Coq Rico</a> [ENY]</p>
<p><a href="http://ny.eater.com/2016/6/27/12046074/burrow-cheesecake">How Chef Ayako Kurokawa Makes Burrow's Sensational Cheesecake</a>[ENY]</p>
<p><a href="http://ny.eater.com/2016/5/4/11592326/claire-well-tilda-all-day">How Claire Welle Makes Tilda All Day's Petit Pistachio Loaf</a> [ENY]</p>
<p><a href="http://ny.eater.com/2016/3/14/11202942/underwest-doughnuts">How Scott Levine Makes Underwest's Brown Butter Doughnuts</a> [ENY]</p>
<p><a href="http://ny.eater.com/2016/1/25/10828536/jen-yee-lafayette">How Jen Yee Makes Lafayette's Linzer Newtons</a> [ENY]</p>
https://ny.eater.com/2016/12/28/14100496/thomas-padovani-lemon-cakeMarguerite Preston2016-10-24T16:00:50-04:002016-10-24T16:00:50-04:00How Matthieu Simon Makes the Ile Flottante at Le Coq Rico
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<p>Welcome to <a href="http://ny.eater.com/tags/pastry-cases">Upper Crust</a>, a series that shines the spotlight on New York's most exciting pastries and the chefs who make them</p> <p>Two things define the menu at Le Coq Rico, the elegant Flatiron restaurant by respected French chef Antoine Westermann. If you know anything about the restaurant at all, you know that the first of these two is the endless parade of poultry products, from boutique chickens to duck foie gras to what the menu, in an odd flash of whimsy, refers to as "eggz." The second defining feature is a spirit of simplicity.</p>
<p><br>Of course, simplicity is relative at a restaurant where you order your chicken by breed, and whole birds cost upwards of $95. But Westermann famously asked the Michelin Guide to retract the three stars it bestowed on his first restaurant, Le Buerehiesel in France. His follow-up restaurants, including this one and the original Le Coq Rico in Paris, favor hearty, traditional (if still elegant) dishes over fussy tasting menu fare. When it comes down to it, a meal a Le Coq Rico usually consists of rotisserie chicken and potatoes, maybe a salad or some mac and cheese on the side. Simple.</p>
<p><br>And this is why the ile flottante (in English, "floating island") is the perfect dessert for Le Coq Rico. Not only does it rely heavily on eggs – yolks for the thick puddle of creme anglaise lining the bowl, whites for the delicate island of poached meringue set adrift in the center – it actually looks like an egg. Unlike the average ile flottante, which involves a craggy blob of meringue, this one features a perfect sphere of whipped egg whites. A dusting of finely crushed hard caramel gives it the look of a speckled shell. But beyond appearances, says pastry chef Matthieu Simon, the ile flottante follows the principal Westermann has set for the rest of the menu: "It’s the best version," he says, of a "simple, really French dessert." It’s the sort of thing his mom might make, dressed up in a little extra luxury. Here’s how that’s done.</p>
<p id="gm4Ovl">Simon starts with the creme anglaise. Normally he makes six liters at a time, but here he sticks to a smaller, more manageable batch. A creme anglaise is a thin custard, with a consistency more like a sauce than a pudding. Usually it’s made with milk, but Simon uses heavy cream instead for a richer, thicker result. He also adds extra egg yolks for a similar effect, though he notes it’s important not to add too many or "you’ll feel the egg" in the finished sauce. Simon whisks those yolks with some sugar. He whisks vigorously for a good minute or so: the goal here is not just to blend to two together but to whip them into a pale, satiny mixture.</p>
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<p id="zVD0HQ">Next he splits open a plump vanilla bean, and scrapes the fragrant seeds into a pot of cream. He heats the cream just until it starts to simmer, so it’s hot but not boiling, then pours half of it into the bowl of yolks and sugar. While he pours, he whisks: to keep the yolks from cooking too fast and curdling, it helps to keep things moving. It also helps not to dump in all the hot cream at once. Half the pot is just enough to warm up the yolks without cooking them immediately.</p>
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<p>Once the cream, yolks, and sugar are thoroughly blended, Simon pours the mixture back into the pot with the rest of the cream and turns the burner back on. He stirs continuously, watching carefully to make sure it cooks slowly and evenly — again, he doesn’t want those yolks to curdle. This goes on until the creme anglaise has thickened enough to pass the back-of-the-spoon test: When Simon holds up the custard-coated spoon and runs a finger across its back, no creme anglaise flows down to fill the trail he left behind.</p>
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<p>Setting aside the creme anglaise to cool, Simon turns to the pink praline almonds and caramel sugar, the crunchy accoutrements that will top the ile flottante. While the pink pralines are a classic French treat, and the sort of thing a pastry chef could reasonably buy premade, Simon makes his. And it’s more complicated than you’d think to make pink, sugared almonds. First, Simon prepares a simple syrup, cooking sugar in water until it’s dissolved. He tosses raw almonds in this syrup and pours the mixture out over a Silpat lined baking sheet. Then he "confits" the almonds, as he puts it, by baking them at just 150 degrees for four hours. When that’s done, Simon tosses the almonds with a little more syrup dyed red with a hefty dose of food coloring. Then they go back in the oven until they’re dry, not sticky. Finally, they’ll be meticulously sliced lengthwise before being scattered over the ile flottante.</p>
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<p>But we’re not there yet. Next Simon makes the hard caramel, which he’ll pulverize into a fine, sugary dust. This is the simplest sort of caramel there is: it starts with nothing but white sugar in a pot. Simon turns on the burner and waits, watching carefully but not stirring, which might form lumps and crystals. Soon the sugar starts to melt. It dissolves into a pool of clear syrup in the bottom of the pot, then begins to color. A golden hue appears around the edges, then creeps towards the center. It darkens and browns, going from amber to chestnut. And just before it crosses the line to burnt, Simon pours it out onto a non-stick Silpat where it immediately begins to cool. Soon it will firm up into a crystalline sheet of caramel as hard as a lollipop. Simon will break up this caramel and run it through a food processor, turning it into a caramel dust just a little finer and much more flavorful than the sugar he started with.</p>
<p id="B0z22v">Finally it’s time to make the centerpiece of this dessert, the ile itself. There’s nothing complex about this, it’s just egg whites and sugar whipped into a cloud. This is a small batch, so Simon, classically-trained French pastry chef that he is, decides to beat the whites by hand. For a bigger restaurant-sized batch, he’d use a machine. But even on a small scale, whipping egg whites is not easy. Simon’s whisk flashes back and forth across the bowl in a figure-eight pattern; occasionally he switches whisking hands. Slowly the whites work into a lather, then a loose foam. Minutes pass and finally the meringue is the consistency Simon wants: glossy and thick enough to form soft, droopy peaks. He’ll pipe this into a silicone mold, but refuses to show exactly what that mold looks like — he’s afraid of other copying his perfect sphere.</p>
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<p>In any case, the meringue is steamed until it can be unmolded intact. Then Simon pours a little creme anglaise into a bowl and gently sets the meringue down in the center of it. He scatters slivered almonds around the base and sifts a fine dusting of caramel sugar over the top. The resulting dessert is much more than the sum of its parts: the meringue alone would be blandly sweet, but it adds lightness and texture to the rich creme anglaise, which would be like liquidy pudding on its own. The caramel sugar has all the flavor of a crackly creme brulee top, and the almonds and crunch and color to an otherwise beige dessert. It is exactly what you want after a restaurant feast, something creamy and sweet and light, and a little bit more elegant than it needs to be.</p>
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<p><a href="http://ny.eater.com/tags/pastry-cases">All Editions of Upper Crust</a> [ ENY]</p>
https://ny.eater.com/2016/10/24/13374686/il-flottante-le-coq-ricoMarguerite Preston2016-06-27T17:23:55-04:002016-06-27T17:23:55-04:00How Chef Ayako Kurokawa Makes Burrow's Sensational Cheesecake
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<p>Welcome to Upper Crust, a series that shines the spotlight on New York's most exciting pastries and the chefs who make them</p> <p>Burrow, a tiny little pastry shop in the middle of Dumbo, could be called the Arcade Bakery of Brooklyn. Just like that acclaimed <a href="http://ny.eater.com/2014/11/14/7186693/arcade-bakery-roger-gural-tribeca-bread-pastries">destination</a> for viennoiseries, pizza, and very good bread, Burrow is tucked away in the lobby of an office building and so easy to miss from the street, you may find yourself double-checking your Google Maps directions. But forge on through the ancient tiled entryway of 68 Jay Street and there it is at the back, behind glass walls. Like Arcade, Burrow shows some classic French influences, in pastries like crisp sables; custardy, caramel-edged mini far Bretons; and buttery wedges of gateau Basque. But Burrow has plenty of qualities that set it apart from Arcade, too: It serves cookies and cakes, not breads, and it has a distinctly Japanese bent, visible in items like its sliced sponge cake roll filled with coffee cream, or black sesame and roasted green tea flavored cookies. It also has an aesthetic unlike Arcade or any other bakery, for that matter.</p>
<p>Burrow’s chef and co-owner, <strong>Ayako Kurokawa</strong>, moved to New York from Japan to work as a pastry chef first at Danny Meyer’s MoMA restaurant, The Modern, then at the Plaza Hotel before branching out on her own. She originally only made special-order cakes and cookies while hopping from one borrowed kitchen space to another, but eventually she and her husband, Wataru Iwata, landed the kitchen space on Jay Street. For the first year they only used it for production, but then, Iwata says, "Ayako’s best friend started telling her what a great space this is." She suggested turning the front into a cafe and even offered to help. And so, about two and half years ago, Burrow was born.</p>
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<p><span>Kurokawa’s talent for made-to-order sweets is obvious, even in Burrow’s day-to-day items. She has a distinct aesthetic style, which is at times charming, at times beautiful, and always innovative, if only in small ways. It, along with her baking talent, is visible in everything from her cute </span><a style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BBB6SMMIfWO/?taken-by=burr0w">puff pastry cookies braided into pigtails</a><span> to her stunningly lifelike butter cookie </span><a style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BDwwHxZIfSZ/?taken-by=burr0w">portraits</a><span> and elegant </span><a style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: #ffffff;" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BABpNsAIfUL/?taken-by=burr0w">mousse cakes</a><span>. And it’s apparent in her cheesecake, which stays far away from the heavy, plain-vanilla dessert you might expect. While eating certain cheesecakes can feel like plowing through a brick of sugary cream cheese, slices of Kurokawa’s diminutive version are light and not too sweet, balanced by a nutty, still-crisp cookie base and a smear of orange marmalade hidden beneath a layer of whipped cream. And though the cheesecake has been a staple of Burrow’s menu since the beginning, each one has been decorated with an attentive, delicate hand, as if it were a special order for some fairy birthday party. Here’s how she does it.</span></p>
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<p>Kurokawa begins with large chunks of cream cheese and butter, both at room temperature so that they will mix together evenly. She lets the cream cheese churn in the mixer for a few seconds on its own, smoothing it out, then adds the butter. This mixes on high speed long enough to completely blend the two ingredients, but no longer. "You don’t want to whip it too much," explains Kurokawa, because incorporating too much air will mess with the texture of the finished cake. Next she adds a little sugar, again mixing thoroughly but not too much. The mixture is now smooth and soft, like buttercream frosting.</p>
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<p>Then come three egg yolks, and again a brief and furious beating – with a pause to scrape down the bowl – to make sure no cream cheese chunks remain. Next Kurokawa pours in lemon juice and milk, blending until the mixture is smooth and soupy like crepe batter, then splays open half a vanilla bean, scrapes out the fragrant seeds with a paring knife, and drops them in the bowl. Here is where the recipe starts to veer away from standard American cheesecake recipes: Some American recipes will also call for a little lemon juice, for flavor, but few incorporate milk. Japanese recipes, which yield a fluffier cheesecake often described as "cotton soft," do.</p>
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<p>But the main difference between a Japanese cheesecake and an American one is that a Japanese cheesecake incorporates meringue, which gives it that airy texture – think of it as cheesecake souffle. Kurokawa does this, and she also takes it one step further: She adds whipped cream. In a fresh bowl she measures out heavy cream, sugar, and a splash of rum. She whisks these until the cream turns billowy but still liquid and pourable, so that it mixes smoothly into the batter. In another clean bowl, Kurokawa does the same with egg whites, sugar, and a little cornstarch for strength. She beats until the whites are thick and opaque but still fluid, not yet able to hold a peak.</p>
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<p>The whipped cream goes into the cream cheese batter first, but Kurokawa doesn’t quite pour all of it in. She puts the bowl of leftovers in the fridge, "so I can whip it later for the topping," she explains. With a few deft strokes of the spatula, Kurokawa blends the whipped cream into the batter, then dumps in all of the meringue. This she folds in gently but quickly, spinning the bowl while pulling the batter in from the sides. The result is soft and smooth but not deflated.</p>
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<p>Kurokawa splits the batter between two six-inch pans with removable bottoms. She wraps them in foil to seal them, then places them on a sheet pan in the oven and pours an inch or so of hot water around them. The water heats more slowly than a metal pan in the oven, so it will bake the cakes more gently and keep them from cracking or slumping. The steam generated will also keep their tops from drying out. When the cakes come out, they look like a toasted marshmallow, slightly puffy and golden brown on top.</p>
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<p>Now the cakes – still crustless – have to be chilled or even frozen before the next step, otherwise they’ll fall apart. But once Kurokawa has a cold, firm cake, she can pry it from the metal cake bottom and match it with its cookie base. The crust, which has already been baked and cooled, is a relatively basic shortbread, buttery and crumbly and laced with bits of walnut. It gets its ruddy brown color not from brown sugar but from red beet sugar, which Kurokawa prefers because "you process it more slowly." It is, in other words, at least a little bit better for you than cane sugar. The cookie has been pressed into a six-inch ring mold then baked, so that when the cheesecake is placed on top, the two fit seamlessly. It’s a rather French approach to assemble the components this way after they’ve all been baked, and an ingenious way to make sure the crust is never soggy.</p>
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<p>To finish assembling the cake, Kurokawa first spreads the surface with the thinnest possible layer of a chunky orange jam she made herself. Pulling the whipped cream out of the fridge, she beats it until it’s thick and firm, then spreads it over the surface of the cake. With practiced strokes of the offset spatula, she evens out the edges and smooths the surface until it resembles a half-inch of freshly fallen snow. Then, one by one, she drops decorations onto the plane. First, perfect squares of candied orange peel, like luminous, cubic gems. Then raisin-y, scarlet goji berries, and finally a few fennel fronds, delicately plucked with tweezers. There wasn’t too much rhyme or reason to these toppings, Kurokawa says: "The first time I made this, I just used whatever I had in the fridge." And, she adds, "you can’t really taste them." Instead, pretty yet spare, they signal that this is something lighter and fresher than your average cheesecake, bright with citrus and grounded with nutty cookie. It’s elegant enough for a party, but luckily it’s sold by the slice.</p>
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https://ny.eater.com/2016/6/27/12046074/burrow-cheesecakeMarguerite Preston2016-05-04T17:22:52-04:002016-05-04T17:22:52-04:00How Claire Welle Makes Tilda All Day's Petit Pistachio Loaf
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<p>Welcome to <a href="http://ny.eater.com/tags/upper-crust">Upper Crust</a>, a series that shines the spotlight on New York's most exciting pastries and the chefs who make them</p> <p>The pastry counter at Tilda All Day, a sunny, stylish daytime cafe in Clinton Hill, never has croissants. Nor does it have doughnuts, or any of the other wholesale pastries most small coffee shops have to rely on given the limitations of kitchen space and time. Instead, Tilda offers pastries like sticky, buttery morning buns, fudgy chocolate cookies studded with oil-cured black olives, and chubby, miniature loaves of brioche crusted with pistachios, all made in its basement kitchen. The quality of these pastries, their breadth, and the lack of anything made elsewhere is impressive, and all the more so considering they’re all made by chef and co-owner Claire Welle, who’s also in charge of Tilda’s small but refined menu of breakfast and lunch dishes.</p>
<p>Welle has almost always worked on the savory side of high end kitchens like Gwynnett St. and Picholine. Baking is "not something I love" she says; "I would never consider myself a pastry chef." She does it anyway (and for the first eight weeks of Tilda’s life, she did it alone) out of a ferocious belief in quality and originality. Trying to stick by those standards with such a tiny fledgling business, her only option – she thinks – was to do it all herself. To crank out pastries in the wee hours of every morning, seven days a week, then hop on the line and cook until closing.</p>
<p>The expertise apparent in her pastries somewhat betrays Welle’s modesty. Clearly, she did not dive into this a total amateur. In fact, she once worked for eight months under the croissant master at San Francisco’s famed Tartine Bakery, and that experience is evident in many of Tilda’s staples. Besides the flakey morning bun, which will leave the menu when the weather gets too hot to fold and roll layers of yeasted dough and butter by hand, one of the most obvious products of that San Francisco training is the petit pistachio loaf. Beneath a coating of crushed pistachios so thick and bright it looks like spring moss, the brioche is tender, and kept moist by a fluffy, sweet almond filling running through the center. In a way, it’s like a cute, squishy alternative to the standard almond croissant. Here’s how it’s made.</p>
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<p>Welle starts with the yeasted dough. It’s based on a simple brioche recipe, but "I amped it up," Welle says, "I tried to add as much butter and egg as possible." The extra richness not only makes the bread more delicious, it also gives it a longer shelf life, so that a loaf baked in the morning still tastes soft and fresh at the end of the day.</p>
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<p>Welle uses active dry yeast, which she thinks "has the best flavor." She stirs it into warm water until the liquid is milky and frothy, then dumps in all the other ingredients. First sugar, though not too much. "Sugar is not a flavor for me," says Welles, "I don’t like using it," but a little is necessary to get the yeast going. Then all purpose flour, a good dose of salt, soft chunks of butter, and several eggs. Everything must be at room temperature, not only to keep the yeast active but also, Welle says, because "it helps with emulsification for everything to be at the same temperature. You get a better mouthfeel."</p>
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<p>With everything in the bowl, Welle sets the mixer on low and lets it work. She’ll mix the dough for around five minutes, until it’s smooth and taut. Now it goes into the fridge, where it will sit, slowly rising, for 48 hours. "Everything we make sits for a while," Welle says. Sitting helps flavors develop, and it allows the flour to fully absorb the liquids, yielding a moister, more texturally appealing pastry. This holds true not just for yeasted doughs but for things like cookie dough, which rests for a full three days in Tilda’s walk-in before being baked.</p>
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<p>Welle has an already-risen batch of dough on hand, but first she has to make the almond filling that will be swirled inside each loaf. "There’s nothing special about this filling," she insists, "I was trying to perfect a classic." Beginning with a tried and true recipe for almond cream – the same stuff that goes in an almond croissant – from her Tartine days, Welles made just a few tweaks here and there. She upped the salt, and figured out "how many egg yolks we could add before it split," turning curdled instead of creamy.</p>
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<p>The recipe starts with powdered sugar and softened butter. Welle explains that, somewhat insanely, she usually makes the powdered sugar herself, just like she makes her own vanilla and her own baking powder, but the quantities needed for this recipe were just too high, so now she settles for store-bought. She beats the butter and sugar just until the mixture is smooth, then begins adding eggs one at a time. Each time, she waits for the mixture to smooth out before adding the next.</p>
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<p>After the last egg, Welle adds the almond flour and salt and beats until the mixture is fluffy and creamy. Finally, she pours in a small dose of flour and mixes just until everything is evenly combined. The flour, she says, helps keep the filling from spilling out while the loaves bake, but it’s important to add it last. If it went in along with the almond flour, the vigorous beating would develop the gluten too much, yielding a filling that was gummy instead of fluffy.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p>With the filling made, Welle pulls her batch of risen dough from the fridge and dusts the counter with flour. When cold, the dough is pliable but not too soft or sticky, and easy to roll out. Welle quickly rolls it into a rough rectangle, judging by sight how thick and wide it should be. She trims the edges, then divides it into 12 smaller rectangles.</p>
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<p>With her silicone mini loaf pan at hand, Welle spoons a blob of almond cream into the center of one rectangle, then gently and somewhat loosely rolls the dough around it. The process is not particularly precise: there’s no smoothing of the filling, and Welle doesn’t even pinch the ends closed before placing each roll – seam side down – in the pan. And yet, during its final two-hour rise, the dough swells into perfect, mushroom-topped little loaves.</p>
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<p>The loaves come out of the oven with smooth, honey-brown tops and golden sides. Once they’re cool, Welle dips them into a liquid fondant. Where home bakers might use a simpler glaze made of powdered sugar mixed with water or milk, Welle prefers this store bought fondant – which is essentially a cooked sugar syrup that’s been whipped until opaque – because "when it dries you get that shatter, like biting into a glazed doughnut." The simpler glaze doesn’t do that.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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<p>Shaking off the excess fondant, Welle then rolls the sticky surface in a bowl of pistachio bits tossed with enough sea salt that flecks of it are visible throughout. This, it turns out, is just enough to counter the sugary fondant and enrich the flavor of the pistachios. "I don’t want the first thing people taste to be sugar," Welle explains. The buns, now top-heavy with nuts, sit on a rack just long enough for the fondant to firm up, then travel up to the pastry counter, to be tucked in somewhere between the cheese gougeres and the chocolate cookies.</p>
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<cite>Nick Solares</cite>
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https://ny.eater.com/2016/5/4/11592326/claire-well-tilda-all-dayMarguerite Preston2016-03-14T13:20:20-04:002016-03-14T13:20:20-04:00How Scott Levine Makes Underwest's Brown Butter Doughnuts
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<p>Welcome to Upper Crust, a series that shines the spotlight on New York's most exciting pastries and the chefs that make them</p> <p>For someone who never set out to make doughnuts until he found himself with a tiny kitchen inside a car wash, Scott Levine makes very good ones. He’s the owner of Underwest Donuts, which from its improbable home on the West Side Highway, in the far reaches of Hell’s Kitchen, turns out some of finest cake doughnuts in the city. They’re lightly crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, and closer to the texture of birthday cake than the denser specimens of their kind found elsewhere. It took Levine about five months to perfect the recipe, but that was partly because he’d never made a doughnut before in his life.After a career on the savory side of the kitchen, as a sous chef at Chanterelle and later a teacher and consultant, Levine wanted to open his own place. Originally he thought bagel shop. But when one deal fell through, Levine’s father-in-law offered him a space in the Westside Highway Car Wash, which he’s owned since the ‘70s. “Once I knew I was going be in a car wash, I knew the concept had to change,” he says. Trying to map out what he could cram into the narrow entryway space he’d been given, Levine realized he’d have to focus on one thing. He also knew he wouldn’t get much foot traffic (besides the occasional visitor to the Intrepid across the street), but could do a brisk morning business with the cab and limo drivers who line up down the block to start their days with a spray-down. Without enough room to even make an egg sandwich, Levine decided the next best option was to buy himself a Belshaw Adamatic Donut Robot and learn how to make great doughnuts. </p>
<p>Some options at Underwest are fried fresh to order, then served plain or rolled in one of three flavored sugars. But if you can manage to turn down hot fried dough, some of the most interesting doughnuts are the glazed options. These are made in advance in the wee hours of the morning, and they're flavored inside and out, each a different cake matched with a different glaze. Among the rotating choices, the almond-topped brown butter doughnut looks a little humbler than the vanilla-lavender “carwash” doughnut (striped with the same colors as the soap squirted onto passing cars), or the famous halva doughnut, but it’s just as unique and just as worth ordering. Here’s how it’s made.</p>
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<p>All of Underwest’s doughnuts originate in the same basic recipe, which is then tweaked for different flavors and scaled up depending on the needs of the day. The brown butter doughnuts start with a simple mix of dry ingredients: flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder. This gets a spin in the mixer.</p>
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<p>Then Levine adds the wet ingredients, which are always premixed and ready to go (to make things fast and easy for the early morning doughnut makers). He’s already taken the chill off this mixture by setting it in a warm water bath because "the ideal batter is room temperature." Too cold, and it won’t fry right, soaking up extra oil while staying gummy in the middle.</p>
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<p>All of Underwest’s doughnuts include a blend of milk, eggs, sour cream, and vanilla, but the brown butter recipe also gets a dose of pure brown butter solids. Levine keeps an enormous tub of these in the fridge, and every so often, he replenishes it by cooking "a ton" of butter until the milk solids turn the color of coffee grounds. He strains these solids out, saving the clear fat for other things, and is left with the undiluted nutty flavor of brown butter.</p>
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<p>Levine mixes the golden batter for a good minute, until it’s totally smooth. Now he punches some buttons on a timer: the batter will have to rest for 15 minutes. This gives the flour time to soak up the liquids and the chewy gluten time to relax, for a softer, moister doughnut. Meanwhile, the oil in the Donut Robot heats up.</p>
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<p>When the timer beeps, the batter is noticeably thicker and fluffier from the baking powder at work. Levine scrapes it into the funnel-shaped hopper, which will pump out perfect little rings of batter right into the hot oil. He holds his spatula flat beneath the mouth of the hopper, using it to catch a single test doughnut. "You have to prime the machine," Levine explains, "otherwise the first couple would come out misshapen." After letting one more ring dollop onto the spatula, he swipes the batter back into the hopper and swings it into place over the Donut Robot’s channel of hot oil.</p>
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<p>At the flip of a switch, a ring of batter gently plops into the channel. A conveyer belt beneath the golden surface inches it forward at a sedate pace, and soon, another doughnut lands, and another. The doughnuts bobble along two by two until they come to a metal flap that rotates like a water wheel to flip them over. Then they creep along the rest of the way to the end, where a the conveyer belt carries them up and over the edge of the machine, dumping them out onto a sheet tray.</p>
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<p>The finished doughnuts are a dark golden brown, darker than their vanilla counterparts because of all the brown butter solids. They would be delicious right now, still hot, but they’ll have to cool before they can be glazed. The glaze would melt right off a hot doughnut, and that’s fine if you want a thin, shiny coating, but Levine likes something a little thicker.</p>
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<p>When the doughnuts are just cool to the touch, Levine starts dropping them three at a time into a tub of glaze, which he’s made from powdered sugar, milk, vanilla, salt, and more brown butter solids. The glaze is kept warm in a water bath, because just as hot glaze would be too thin, cold glaze would be too thick – about the consistency of toothpaste. Levine gives the doughnuts a good dunking, jumbling them around until no spot is bare. Then he pulls them out and lines them up on a rack to let the extra glaze drip off.</p>
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<p>Finally, after every doughnut has been dunked, Levine adds a finishing sprinkle of toasted slivered almonds, which will add texture and a little extra nuttiness to the toasty, buttery flavor of the doughnut itself.</p>
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<cite><a href="http://www.instagram.com/nicksolares">Nick Solares</a></cite>
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<p>All this mixing, frying, and dunking used to be done right behind the counter at Underwest, on the same machine that fries up those fresh sugared doughnuts to order. But now, luckily, Levine has a bigger kitchen space in a former storeroom overlooking the car line from above. This – and a second Donut Robot – gives him the space and the time to wholesale to coffee shops like Oren’s Daily Roast and Everyman Espresso. So you don’t actually have to trek to the far reaches of 46th Street to get a brown butter doughnut, but doughnuts are still often best from the source – especially when the source is the only place in town to watch a car wash and a Donut Robot in action side by side.</p>
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https://ny.eater.com/2016/3/14/11202942/underwest-doughnutsMarguerite Preston