smitten kitchen

When you hear pâte this and pâte that, do you just tune out? Don’t! It is quite simple: pâte brisée (butter and flour) is used for quiches and pies, pâte sablée and pâte sucree (butter, flour and sugar, enriched with a whole egg or just yolk) for dessert tarts and pâte feuilletee (puff pastry, created from a zillion butter-enclosed layers) for anything you can think of, savory (appetizers) or sweet (tarte Tatins).

After years of struggling to perfectly poach an egg (something I still only succeed in intermittently) I discovered I could get much of what I liked about them from soft-boiled eggs, with a zero percent failure rate to boot. My technique is just like that of my hard-boiled eggs, except I drop the boiling time down to 6 minutes. This assures a solid white and soft yolk, and the pinnacle of deliciousness spread over buttered toast and topped with a pinch of salt.

There are about as many techniques for hard-boiling eggs as there are eggs out there, but I use the method my mother showed me: submerge a large egg in enough cold water to cover it and bring the water to a boil over medium-high heat. Once it begins to boil, set the timer for 10 minutes. Plunge the egg into cold water to get it to stop cooking; plus, cold eggs are much easier to peel.

Now that we’re all caught up on Folding 101, here’s an alternative technique that caught my eye. In Christopher Kimball’s Dessert Bible, he tries several different folding techniques and tools and compared the resulting cake rises and decided that the standard spatula was best. But then, on a whim, he put everything together in his KitchenAid bowl with the whisk attachment and ran it for 10 seconds on the lowest setting and Bingo! This made the tallest cake. Let us know if you try it out!

Whether you’re making a chiffon cake or light, airy pancakes, folding, or mixing ingredients with two weights together (usually a batter and beaten egg whites or whipped cream) without deflating the lighter one, is the Technique to Know. The easiest way? Using a large rubber spatula, lift batter from the bottom of the bowl and pull it over the top, turning the bowl and repeating this until no foam remains visible.