Waffles and Dinges

I've had my fill of waffles the past couple days because I've been following, by complete accident I assure you, the Waffles and Dinges food truck around New York City. Food trucks are a big food trend that is beginning to sweep the nation but is very popular right now in New York. There are ice cream trucks, taco trucks, cupcake trucks, Chinese dumpling trucks and of course, there is also a waffle truck. The truck parks at different locations throughout Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs during the day and appears to have more than one "truck" or cart as when I had my first waffle experience on Saturday evening an actual gas-powered truck was parked on 7th Avenue in the West Village and this morning a baby waffle cart was parked near the South Shore Seaport. Of course if you have trouble keeping track of Waffles and Dinges you can always follow the waffle truck on Twitter. Don't laugh but I'm actually thinking I might because them were some darn tasty waffles.

The dinges, basically different waffle toppings, are plentiful and for just $2 you can have as many as you like on your waffle of which there are two basic types: the liege which is a crispy on the outside and soft on the inside little tasty nugget and the Brussels waffle which is crisp and light. I'm a liege kind of girl who like a dinge of fresh strawberries and nutella but you can have your waffle however you like -- they even slap two waffles together with ice cream and make an ice cream waffle sandwich!


Collin Murray's strawberry and maple syrup liege waffle

As I said, the waffle truck is a fairly inexpensive breakfast or snack and it is super tasty. The gentlemen who make the waffles and take your orders are the good kind of sassy and let us try a couple of the toppings before making our choice. I think the world needs more waffle trucks, don't you?!


My nutella and strawberry liege heaven...and my dirty fork.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game...The Food Edition

We took in our first professional baseball game today at Yankee Stadium. Collin Murray's parents are visiting and very kindly treated us to the game and we all had a great time. Naturally we partook in traditional baseball game food, I had a hot dog, not the dirty water variety mind you but a delicious stick of meat(?) nonetheless. I also had Carvel ice cream for the first time and it was sinfully delicious. It was very soft serve-y and very chocolate-y and very tasty indeed. By the way, I say sinfully because the stadium has the calorie count of each and every item that the concession stands sell listed beside the item -- sometimes, like when you are at a baseball game, you don't want to know how many calories what you are stuffing your face with has. It makes you feel a little naughty.


Skinny yet tasty hot dog


Carvel deliciousness

The variety of vendors that came through the stands was amazing. Peanuts, crackerjacks, hot dogs, seventeen different kinds of beer...my favorite was the one pictured below. I hope he gets extra pay for the fancy agility he displays.


I mean really, that takes skill!

The game was a slice. Homeruns, a crowd wave that just kept going and another win for the Yankees made for a great day.

Galaktoboureko...Say What?

Galaktoboureko is the name of one of the desserts that I made today. The name is Greek and so hard to pronounce and smell that I was forced to copy and paste it into this blog every time you see it typed. It means milk pie in Greek but I like to call it pure delciousness. In terms of how you say it...in the kitchen today whenever someone, other than our chef who is Greek, said it, it came out like galabooourkiki-ekki-o. As far as I can tell you say it gala-ka-bourk-rio but don't quote me on it. It was a zen dessert to make and since I did it pretty much all by my lonesome, that's saying something.

To make it, you make a thick custard with vanilla, sugar, eggs, milk and semolina flour and then, using phyllo/filo dough, you place seven layers of the dough into the pan and then dump the custard in and then top with the rest of your package of phyllo/filo dough. You MUST cut it before it bakes or else the whole thing will crack if you try to cut it afterwards. Once it comes out of the oven, you pour a thick sugar syrup that has honey, cinnamon and lemon rind in it over the galaktoboureko and let it cool and let the syrup soak in before cutting it and tasting how wonderful it is.


Galaktoboureko fresh from the oven


Sugar soaked galaktoboureko waiting to be cut


Inside of the galaktoboureko -- see the layers of phyllo/filo and custard?!

We also used the puff pastry that we eluded to yesterday today. I have to say that it was a little bit of a downer for me because our group had to make a really easy and not that challenging of a task when others were making some pretty fun and tasty nibbles! The one fun thing that we did make with my puff dough was something called a palmier. The picture below will best describe it but basically, it is a type of cookie that is made by folding cinnamon-sugar coated puff pastry and then cutting it into 1-inch disks and baking it. Collin Murray found my palmier to be extremely tasty and I have agree with him that it was.


Pretty palmiers


Palmier beauty shot

So That's What Strudel Is...

I thought I knew what strudel was. Really, I mean, doesn't everyone know what strudel is? Turns out I was wrong. I thought strudel was a pastry that had some jam-type filling in it and a lattice dough top...ahhh, no. We made strudel today and I can tell you that it is nothing like what I thought, not even a little.

We started by making a moist dough that kneaded for about seven minutes on the kitchen aid with a dough hook. Then we let it rest and worked on our fillings. Our group made a cheese and plum filling. The plums are really heavenly looking, smelling and tasting these days and I've been lucky to work with them twice this week; for their role in this dessert, I just washed, seeded and thinly sliced them. The cheese part of the filling was basically a mixture of farmer's cheese, cream cheese, sour cream, lemon juice, vanilla, eggs, milk-soaked bread (?) and butter beat in the kitchen aid till semi-smooth. After the dough had rested for a good long while, we clean our table and put a table cloth on top of it, floured it and set the dough in the middle. Now, you can imagine the look of shock on the faces of my fellow students and I when chef pulled out a table cloth but the logic behind its use for strudel is pretty neat. Due to the fact that the dough doesn`t stick to the table cloth, it made it a lot easier to stretch and also, when we eventually rolled the dough, the tablecloth helped us to maneuver the gigantic strudel with a little more skill.

When we began to roll out our dough, it was about two inches tall and six inches long. When we finished rolling and stretching, the strudel dough covered one-third of the table and was so thin we could have read a newspaper through it. We stretched it in pairs using the backs of our hands to lift the dough and gently pull and shake it enabling it to stretch. It was fun but a little tense because when you work with such thin doughs, the possibility of tearing is quite high. Once the strudel was stretched, we drizzled it with melted butter and bread crumbs and then placed our cheese filling at one end in three large, rectangular sections and then we topped the cheese with the plums. Then, very carefully, we used the table cloth to help us roll up the strudel. Once rolled we cut off the excess and portioned the big strudel into three smaller ones to bake.


Thinly rolled dough being filled before rolling


Rolling...


Finished product warm from the oven!

Now I can`t say that I was a big fan of the strudel. Our filling was really, really moist and that made it really hard to cut when it was so hot because the cheese and plums kind of oozed everywhere. The flavor was pretty good but for all the hassle that the dough was, I`m certainly not going to beg to make it again! However, that`s kind of a sad thing to say because strudel is not really made this way that often unless you are at an Austrian bakery and the tradition of making it in this way could easily die out in favor of methods of greater convenience.

We also made quick puff pastry today but I`m not going to tell you about it today because we are baking it into several things tomorrow and I don`t want to spoil the fun!

Teeny Tiny Tarlettes

Not a great day in the pastry school neighborhood today; perhaps we should blame it on the rain. Along with the teeny tiny tartlettes came tremendous team tension and so instead of frolicking through the day, I merely tried to survive along with 24 perfect wee tartlettes.

Prior to the tiny tarts we made something called a breton. Now I'm not sure where bretons are from, probably France, but they are not a picnic to put together. They use a dough that even at the best of times, with the best chef's hands (seriously, our chef was recently voted one of the ten best pastry chefs in the USA), they crumble. It was an incredibly soft dough that almost seemed to ooze butter and it was darn near unworkable -- instead of rolling it, ours had to be pressed into the pan. On the inside of the breton was a filling made of caramel and walnuts and then it was topped with yet another layer of unworkable dough. I must say that the end result was not very pretty. In fact, due to the grey hair that the breton gave me, I refused to photograph it out of spite. Don't be sad though, it really wasn't pretty.

Now for the tarts. Our team was assigned two flavors to make, raspberry and gianduja. In case you might not know, as I didn't, gianduja or as I spelt it in my notes, jon-do-ya, is basically a chocolate hazelnut mixture. It's kind of like a block of nutella and it is delicious. For the tarts we rolled or rather we pounded with our rolling pins, pate sablee dough out until it was see-through thin. Then we very carefully set out our wee tiny tart pans under the dough and gently nudged the dough into all the nooks and crannies of the pan. We baked the tarts just until they had a touch of color and then let them cool while we prepared our fillings. For the raspberry, we whipped some of our buttercream till it was soft then added some raspberry puree. We heated some raspberry jam to use as glaze and put it into a little cornet and then piped our buttercream into the tart shells and glazed them with the jam. For the gianduja, I made a ganache with the gianduja and a little cream and we piped that into the little shells and then topped them with a gold-powder dipped roasted hazelnut. It was a lot of work for a lot of little tarts but they were all quite lovely when we finished.


See how tiny!


Gianduja tartlette


Raspberry buttercream tartlette


The whole lot of 'em

Scones And Tortes And Biscuits, OH MY!

It was an intensely busy day today at school. We made chocolate scones, flaky biscuits, a linzer torte or tart, whichever you prefer. We made Swiss buttercream and pate sablee and we also had a marzipan demo. Like I said, intense.

The chocolate scones were really, really good. They have a wonderfully tender texture because we used buttermilk in them and since buttermilk contains acid it acts as a tenderizer -- the exact scientific reason as to why this is the way it is I canna remember to save my skin, but nevertheless, know that if a recipe uses buttermilk it is not only adding a little flavor, but it is also adding texture. Plus, they have chocolate in them and I'm a fan of anything with chocolate in it...


Please note the oozing chocolate

I have not tried the linzer tart yet but it is the darn prettiest little torte/tart. We made it by making a very moist pie-type dough that has cloves and almonds in it. Then we patted half the dough into a cake pan, slathered some raspberry jam onto the dough and then piped (and I wish I could express to you just how hard it was to pipe the dough -- far worse than trying to put a dress on a donkey I'm sure) the rest of the dough into a lattice design and then around the edge of the pan. The tart was finished with a quick egg wash of the dough and then a little sprinkling of almonds. Collin Murray says it tastes very good, so as per usual, I'm taking his word on it.


Pretty Little Linzer

The biscuits were made kind of like how some of our pie doughs were made. We broke the butter up into little pea-sized pieces within the flour, added a liquid (again, we used buttermilk for flavor and texture) and mixed the dough just until it all came together; this is to say, hardly at all. Like pie-doughs, biscuits are often over-mixed and turn out hard. You have to be careful to "just" mix them but when you figure out just how long that is, the biscuits turn out to be so flaky and tasty. I may share the biscuits with y'all on here too, there were a lot of variations that I wanted to try like cheese or cheddar and chive so as always, stay tuned.


Buttery, flaky biscuits

The buttercream and marzipan, while tasty, are not especially blog-worthy as they are were made to prepare for tomorrow's class when we are making TINY TARTS!!! At least I think that's what we are doing. If it is tiny tarts, I may be so excited I have to sit down because tiny things delight me and tiny sweet things delight me more than words can say.

Pies, Pies, And More Pies

Pies were the theme of our class today and man-alive were there a lot of pies made. Our team made chocolate walnut pie, plum ginger galette and an apple cranberry pie --I have not tasted them yet, not really a big pie girl, but they smell and look delicious.

I've never been a person who bakes pies but with the dough that we made today, a sour cream dough, I could probably get on board with pies. The dough was very easy to make and rolled very smoothly and easily. Though our chef said that it wasn't a very forgiving dough in terms of patching and being able to reuse scraps, I found that those shortcoming were not a problem because the dough was very soft and supple and easy to roll out. Pretty soon strawberries will make an appearance at the farmer's market and I just may use this dough to make a strawberry pie that I will be sure to share with y'all.


Apple Cranberry Pie with Sour Cream Crust -- sorry I couldn't get a better photo

We used the sour cream dough for the apple cranberry pie but we used a different dough, galette dough, for the galettes -- duh. Galettes are a pies that are even more free form than the typical pies. You don't use a dish to form them and just place the filling (in our case it was a plums that we had roasted for about 15 minutes with ginger, sugar, lemon, and a little rum...) into the center of the rolled out circle and fold the dough in to make little round bundles. What makes galettes so pretty is the exposed filling in the center because it gives you just a little pop of color and texture.


Ready to roast plums


Finished galette


Close up of the beautiful filling

We also made the chocolate walnut pie that was made in a way that is similar to the way you make pecan pie. If you buy your pecan pie and have no idea what I'm talking about, you basically bring sugar and dark corn syrup to a boil then add butter to cool the mixture and stir it into a few whisked up eggs and then pour everything into a pie shell that has pecans scattered in it -- pretty easy actually though not as easy as making a trip to the store to pick one up... The chocolate walnut smells like a very tasty variation and just required switching out the nuts and adding a couple ounces of chocolate to the syrup mixture when the butter was added.


Chocolate Walnut Pie

Tomorrow I'm sure that we will be doing something fun with doughs though I'm not sure what -- stay tuned for more dough excitement!