Results tagged “pastry”

This basic flaky pastry recipe can be used for all kinds of sweet and savoury dishes - quiches, tarts, pies and galettes of all kinds.  It should bake until golden brown, break into buttery flakes and taste delicious. 

The pastry will keep in the fridge wrapped in clingfilm overnight, or in the freezer for several months. 

Once you've made it a few times you'll realise it can be done quickly and easily and tastes so much better than store-bought.  Use good unsalted butter and plain (all purpose) white flour. 

This class is taught by professional pastry chef Jennifer Altman, who is flying over from California to deliver a series of special one-off Masterclasses with Culinary Anthropologist.  Don't miss out!

This is a full-day hands-on workshop limited to just 8 guests.  You will mix, roll, shape, bake and fill an astounding array of sweet and savoury pastries - some to enjoy for lunch with a glass of wine, and some to take home. 

Jennifer will cover the techniques and secrets of making perfectly flaky yet tender pie crusts, puff pastry, sweet short crust tarts and choux pastry (éclairs, gougères...).  You will never be intimidated by pastry again!

Dates:  Saturday 22nd repeated Sunday 23rd January, 2011

Time:  10am-4pm

Location:  London N5

Price:  £110

Multi-booking discount:  If you book 4 or more places at any of Jennifer's January 2011 masterclasses (Cookies, Pastry, Chocolate & Cakes), each place will be discounted by £10.  For example, you could attend all four masterclasses, or you plus a friend could come to two of them, or you plus three friends could come to one class. 

To book: email Anna  Please read the booking terms & conditions before booking your place.  Thank you.

Ever since he got to Morocco, Barnaby has been searching for warka.  He'd already learnt about yufka in Turkey and filo in Greece.  So he was excited to hear that in Morocco they also love incredibly thin pastry - but have a totally different way of making it!

But could he find it?  It kept turning up in food like the famous pastilla pie, and the little briwat pastries he saw all over the place.  But nobody seemed to sell it on its own, let alone actually make it themselves - so where did it come from?

Well, today he found out.  Hidden away in their homes down little alleyways in medinas all over the country, there are women like Khadija, sitting at big round hotplates, making warka to sell to restaurants and patisseries.

But rather than rolling the dough out like their Turkish cousins, they take handfuls of sloppy, sticky dough and smear it directly onto the hot metal.  Ouch! thought Barnaby - especially when he tried it himself.  It's not easy, particularly if your hands are furry.  Best leave it to the warka women ...

We came across warka being made the old-fashioned way by Khadija in her home in Essaouira.  Warka is the ultra-thin pastry used to make lots of classic Moroccan dishes, such as pastilla and briwat.  It looks a bit like the Turkish yufka and Greek filo, but is made completely differently: there's no rolling, just a lot of dangerous-looking hand-to-hotplate action. 

You might think this kind of manual cooking is the epitome of Slow Food, but it takes only seconds - at least, when you know how to do it.  Check out Khadija's technique, and just how fast she knocks them out, by clicking on the picture to watch the video:

While you may well find rice or potatoes as the starch on your dinner plate, and plenty of dried beans and pulses cooked up in your stews, and even desserts, it is wheat that has to be the principal starch-provider of Turkey.  After all, it was in ancient Mesopotamia, and probably around the modern-day town of Diyarbakır in eastern Turkey, that wheat was first domesticated by man more than 10 thousand years ago.