The second is camp ‘lock in’, which involves using firmer butter and a traditional method similar to how you’d approach a croissant or making puff pastry.” On one side you’ve got camp ‘spread’, a traditional method which involves smearing soft butter on to the dough and then performing the folds. As pastry chef Nicola Lamb observes in her incredibly detailed exploration of the subject on her Substack, Kitchen Projects (which should be required reading for nata nerds), “There are two camps when it comes to getting your butter into the dough. Having mixed flour and water, kneaded it until it comes together into a smooth dough (though a certain amount of gluten is required to hold the leaves together, overworking the dough will make it tough) and left this base pastry to rest, it’s time to introduce the butter. Unlike shortcrust, this is a laminated pastry in which the fat acts as a sandwich filling between sheets of dough, separating them into the shatteringly crisp layers that are the hallmark of a proper pastel de nata. (Lard or vegetable fat, with their lower moisture content, may give a crisper result, but they don’t taste as good, and I don’t find any recipes suggesting them, though Mendes does tip me off that “a bit of pork fat in the moulds is nice”.) Where they differ is largely in how much butter they use and how they get it into the pastry. The pastries I make myself all have the same basic ingredients: plain flour, salt, butter and just enough water to bind everything together. If you really must have pastéis de nata and can’t be bothered with the effort of making your own pastry, make sure you get the all-butter sort of puff and roll it as thinly as possible before shaping as below, or layer up sheets of filo spread with soft butter instead. I try Mendes’ recipe using ready-made puff pastry, and it just doesn’t give the same crunchy effect as the real deal, which sits somewhere between puff and filo. All thumbnail pictures by Felicity Cloake. It has the same ingredients as the French one (flour, water, salt, and butter), but a completely different method for putting it together.Filo-like crunch: Rebecca Seal’s pastel de nata. The only thing that works for the pastel de nata is Portuguese puff. So I spent two weeks making tarts (my coworkers didn’t seem to mind very much), either with store-bought puff pastry, puff pastry shells, pie dough, rough puff… you get the point. Over in Portugal, bakeries there make a dough called massa folhada, Portugal’s equivalent to France’s puff pastry ( pâte feuilletée) and hand press them into individual pastel de nata pans that are baked in 800° ovens to get those flaky layers and the brûléed tops. When I started my quest to re-create this custardy treat, I wanted to make it as easy for the home cook as possible. (Macanese tarts look very similar to pastel de nata but are usually less sweet, more eggy, and often the crust is made with lard.) Portuguese colonists brought pastel de nata to Macau, and over the years it has evolved into its own particular tart influenced by the British custard tarts that were brought over to Hong Kong. But just to be clear, these aren’t the same Portuguese tarts you’d find in an Chinese bakery. Its creamy sweet custard is perfumed with cinnamon, vanilla, or lemon, baked in a shatteringly crisp pastry shell, and eaten by the dozen all over the world. One of the most beloved of the holy yolk-based Portuguese desserts (and there are many) is the pastel de nata. So they did what any sensible, waste-fearing people would do, they made desserts. In one chapter, Anna Ling Kaye traces their history (buy it! read it!), which begins with the 16th century Portuguese nuns who used egg whites to “starch” their habits and had, as you would imagine, a growing surplus of egg yolks. When I was tracing the origins of one of our favorite dim sum desserts-Portuguese egg tarts-I read Rachel Khong’s fascinating All About Eggs, which came out earlier this year. Sometimes my recipe research leads to nuns.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |