Blog Number 5: French Cousine and Desserts

Apparently, the concept of the tart began in the middle ages in the form of meat tarts. Tarte Tatin is a form of flipped tart with crust on the top. This particular dish allegedly was born in France in 1898, and although the details are disputed, it is universally accepted that the dish was made on accident. Tart dough is made using the rubbed dough method which entails delicate finger work to massage small amounts of fat into flour to make a nice crumble. Choux paste is a light dough used to make puffy pastries, such as eclairs and puff pastries.
Like usual, when making this dish I diligently gathered ingredients, and mixed dry ingredients, while Connor whipped up pastry cream. After putting it all together, I cleaned up and did not get to taste the finished product, although it did not look bad.

Check out the recipe
In addition, we made croissants, although these ended absolutely miserably. Connor insisted that he knew the "real way" to roll croissants and the directions we had explicitly given were wrong. In any case, the "cutting in" method that we used to provide delicious flaky texture was completely nullified, and the finished product was simply a homogeneous melted mass, and a picture would be an embarrassment to post. Real croissants look like this:

Check out the recipe for this picture

French Sauces

Roux: A mixture of flour and fat used to thicken sauces.

Dechamel: Commonly known as white sauce, it often mixes with Roux to form sauce bases.

Demi-Glace: A rich brown sauce made by mixing equal parts veal stock with sauce espagnole.

Hollandaise Sauce: An emulsion of egg yolk and butter, often containing citrus seasoning. It is creamy and smooth.

Vinaigrette: An emulsion of olive oil and vinegar, which can be seasoned in a grand variety of ways.

*vocab word; Emulsion, a mixture

Information conveniently compiled here