Re: [london.food] Mince Pies

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From: Martin Frost
Subject: Re: [london.food] Mince Pies
Date: 12:38 on 10 Jan 2005
Bob Walker wrote:

> tomoroow im going to try making the pastry with vegetable lard. I will 
> see how that turns out.

In my experience vegetable shortening makes adequate pastry, but all fats
impart different structural and textural qualities to the resulting pastry,
so if you're trying to recreate the exact pastry you'd get with lard then
you'll be disappointed.

Maybe I should dig out the very long discussion about pastry and different
types of fats that we had on the randomness list a few years ago and put
it up on a web page. ;)

I was terrible at making pastry until I had a revelation that the desired
result was a paste of flour and water with small blobs of solid fat evenly
distributed throughout. Once I realised that, pastry became an engineering
problem rather than some sort of voodoo art (...and then take a knife that
has been chilled for no less than FOUR HOURS and use this to combine the
fat with the flour...work for no more than THREE MINUTES then chill the whole
lot before putting in ICED WATER at a temperature of precisely 3 degrees
Celsius...allow the blood of ONE BLACK COCKEREL to fall on the surface where
the pastry is to be worked...only then will your pastry work: deviate from
these instructions in ANY WAY and you will end up with only a pile of
crumbs OR WORSE...)

--m


There's stuff above here

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