I’ve been very much enjoying the PBS showing of the Great British Baking show. Lots and lots of new to me things, including elaborate 3-D cookie panoramas!
The latest episode was on pies and tarts. During it the contestants used three types of pie crust: flaky (which I’m guessing is what we Americans do for apple pies and such), hot water crust (which I’d never heard of, but was able to look up on the web – it sounds very hard, apparently used for meat pies and such), and a third type whose name I didn’t catch.
Anyone remember what it was, so I can look it up, too?
(No graham cracker crusts, btw. Not done in England, or just too easy to bother with in a cooking competition?)
Rough puff? It’s basically a simplified version of puff pastry, a laminated dough which is seldom nowadays made by home cooks.
FYI, the real title is The Great British Bake-Off. I don’t like that they changed it, and don’t understand the decision at all. This is the 5th season, so you have plenty to catch up on, if you feel the urge.
I’m wondering if the British use vegetable shortening or lard in making flaky crusts? Or is butter used instead?
I haven’t done a lot of grocery shopping in Western Europe, but my impression is that neither shortening nor lard is as readily available as in North America.
Lard is readily available in the UK, at least. Pastry for meat pies actually often uses suet - and indeed suet is used in making some sweet dishes too.
We don’t have graham crackers – we use digestive biscuits, which have the same effect. But, yeah – too easy.
Hot water crust pastry isn’t what I would call really hard (or, at least, it’s not meant to be). It has more structural integrity (I suppose you’d call it) than other pastries, so you can mould it into shape, but you can bite through it easily enough.
I caught this episode purely by chance. IIRC they were given basic recipes for each o the crusts: hot water, shortcrust, and puff.
I’ve made hot water pastry a few times. It’s probably the easiest to master. It’s sturdier than the other two, but as someone upthread said, you can certainly cut into it and eat it with no problem. It just doesn’t have that buttery/flaky quality most of us associate with pastry.
Shortcrust is your basic pie crust dough, the one that uses a ton of butter and/or lard and/or suet that makes with flaky.
Puff pastry also uses a ton of butter. It’s fiddly in that after adding X amount of butter, rolling and turning it in one direction, it has to be refrigerated before adding the next X amount of butter. It’s very delicate compared to the other two doughs and requires a certain finesse to use IMO.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I’ve never liked eating pie crust. The filling, OTOH…
Interesting replies! I managed to catch a repeat of the episode, and in the segment where they were doing the stack’o’pies (is that a really done thing? Or just a stunt for the show?) the three types of crust were indeed named as short crust, hot water, and rough puff.
So a new question: at other points they referred to ‘cheater’s puff’ – alternate name for rough puff? – and ‘flakey’, and in context, used as the name of a type of pastry rather than as a complimentary adjective for a particular crust turning out well. So is ‘flaky’ used as an alternate name for short crust? Or another type altogether?
I think “cheater’s” refers to it having been bought frozen in a supermarket, rather than made at home. Nowadays, no one goes to the trouble of making puff pastry from scratch, except in restaurants and bakeries.
Rough puff = quick and dirty puff pastry. IIRC not as much butter and not as many turns with the rolling pin ()haven’t made it since culinary school). It’s not as flaky nor as buttery as regular puff pastry, hence the “rough”.
Have fun experimenting! I bake for a living, so it’s generally the last thing I want to do when I’m home unless it’s something simple like brownies.
Shortcrust pastry isn’t really flaky at all, it’s more crumbly. In British baking, there are seven (what you might call) “classic” types of pastry:
[ul]
[li]Shortcrust[/li][li]Puff[/li][li]Rough Puff (simpler version of Puff)[/li][li]Flaky (another simpler alternative to Puff[/li][li]Choux[/li][li]Suet[/li][li]Hot water crust[/li][/ul]
And no, making towers of pies isn’t something people do very much (or at all, outside televised baking competitions).
I highly doubt it given the context- it’s a baking competition; bringing in ready made pastry, especially in the ‘Pastry Challenge’ would pretty much result in them being laughed out of the contest.
I regret not taping an episode of Take Home Chef. Curtis made pot pies for a housewife and her kids. I’d love to do that too. I recall he rolled out a simple dough for the crust.
Slight hijack: what is considered a sponge pastry? Is that regular cake like Americans are used to? It seems like most of the cakes they bake are sponges. P.S. I’m hooked on this show!
Sponge cake is traditionally made without any shortening (so just flour, sugar and eggs). But in general usage it will often refer to any generic cake - so strawberry sponge, chocolate sponge etc (analogous to strawberry cake, chocolate cake etc) - although cake purists may disagree… and I’m sure in reference to GBBO, they’re referring to real sponge cakes.
