The Not-So-Great Bake Along Week 5
Dauphinois Pithivier
It’s Pastry Week on Bake Off. Quietly, I’ve been looking forward to this one. I’m a big pastry fan. I love a tart (who doesn’t?), I'd never pass up a pie, and I’m capable of eating eclairs in quantities that would horrify most decent people. And Pastry Week on Bake Off always seems to bring out mildly insane levels of creativity. I’m gutted to see Rowan and Nicky go this week - not the best bakers but definitely two of the most entertaining - and Rowan’s Ab Fab pies might have been a disaster but I am a huge fan of anyone who opts to recreate Eddie and Patsy in the medium of shortcrust. To be honest, I considered binning off this week’s Pithivier and recreating the entire cast of Blackadder in choux pastry instead.
Which brings us to this week’s technical challenge. Watching the show was a rollercoaster of emotion for me this week. On the one hand, I’ve been hoping we’d eventually get a savoury challenge and dauphinois is very much My Thing. I make dauphinois to show off, I make it for fancy comfort food, and most importantly I tend to make it in gargantuan, Tudor-banquet-type quantities because the cold leftovers are the best bit. A dauphinois pithivier? No problem. I can even pronounce it. On the other hand, this challenge definitely puts “cooking” above “baking”, the timing means sacrificing my usual dauphinois recipe for an inferior version, and while I’m an immense fan of carbs-on-carbs (see: me eating chip butties with even more gay abandon than my éclair consumption) I firmly believe that the pastry and the potatoes are two components better off kept separate. Nonetheless, I bravely soldier on in pursuit of…something.
A reminder of the rules:
I have to recreate, to the best of my ability, the Technical Challenge.
I will not be looking at any kind of recipe. Each week, I have to do this purely with some context from the show and my own store of baking knowledge.
The time limit: The maximum amount of time I’ll be allowing myself is the time given to the bakers. However, as I don’t want to be wasting food and I don’t have a vast team of producers and camera operators to eat my bakes, I will sometimes be scaling my bakes down. When that happens, I’ll be reducing my total time accordingly. This week, I was fairly certain there’d be no wasted leftovers, so I’ve gone with the full time limit and a decent-sized pie.
The judging: I still have a distinct lack of gingham altar and (thankfully) Paul Hollywood in my life. This week, my partner absolutely did not mind being fed a vast amount of potatoes.
The equipment: I like to think I’ve got the sort of decently-stocked kitchen any skilled home baker would have. If a technical challenge requires specialist equipment I don’t have, I won’t be buying anything for the occasion. I will be MacGyvering it, and adjusting my handicaps accordingly. No special equipment required this week! Any additional suffering is purely at my own hand.
Week 5 - Dauphinois and Caramelised Onion Pithivier
With two hours on the clock, I begin by tackling the pastry. Now, rough puff pastry is not without the realms of possibility for me, but it’s been a bloody long time since I’ve made it. Shortcrust pastries and the enriched, sweet versions I’ll knock up for myself at the drop of a hat. I’ve been making choux pastry since I was a child, secretly taking over my mother’s éclair duties for family gatherings. But puff pastry? Honestly the shop-bought stuff is just as good, it’s vegan and I’m lazy. Still, shop-bought puff pastry is not in the spirit of the challenge, and so I am determined to laminate my own layers. (I’m short on time today so let’s take all potentially dirty jokes as read.)
A vague 400g of flour goes into a bowl (my scales have decided to join up with the oven and torture me with their fractured temperament). I firmly believe that you can go far in life without weighing your butter, and so slightly less than half of a 200g block gets cubed up and rubbed into the flour. I start adding cold water to bring it together into a haphazard dough. I add slightly too much water. I compensate with a bit more flour. I worry that this could get exponential, but happily the whole thing comes together. I chill the dough while I grate another 200g block of butter, this one frozen. I think I learned the frozen, grated butter trick from a New York Times recipe about seven years ago, and I forget that it’s an option almost every time it would come in handy. I thank the Bake Off gods for the handy demonstration in this weeks episode.
Half of the frozen butter goes into the rolled-out dough, and thus the laminating begins. Rough puff is, for me, always slightly hit and miss. Sometimes the layers just…don’t. I have a tendency to overthink, over-roll and over-attempt the perfect flake, and what I’m left with is a mess. I’m determined not to let my past failures put me off though.
Pastry chilling and fifteen minutes down, I turn to the potatoes. As I mentioned, I have a lot of strong feelings about dauphinois. The main one being that they should be baked, low and slow, until they’re perfectly golden and beautiful on the top and around the outside. Simmering the potatoes first is quicker, and necessary in the time limit, but it goes against everything I stand for. I set my principles to one side, along with my potato peeler. We’re going rustic. I don’t have a handy food processor, but my trusty mandolin provides me with beautiful, thin slices, and I manage to come out of the process with all of my fingers intact. The potatoes get covered in…mostly cream (we’re going for rich and fantastic here), some milk, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. I throw in a few cloves of garlic, set the lot to simmering and promptly forget about it.
After adding the rest of the butter to my pastry and folding it again, I tackle the onions. Here, thankfully, is something I trust myself not to cock up. One of my previous jobs required making vast amounts of caramelised onions daily, and I’ve learned the trick is a high heat, small saucepan, and plenty of butter. Unfortunately, since leaving restaurants, I’ve had my eyes lasered. Being able to wake up in the morning and see without applying tiny bits of plastic to my eyeballs is a wonderful thing, but those tiny bits of plastic were mightily handy against the eye-watering sting of the onion. Without them, I’m sobbing like a child with a lost balloon. It’s the most emotion I’ve shown in weeks.
Onions on, potatoes simmering and the first round of washing up tackled, I have just over two hours left. My pastry gets another few folds, which occupies far too few minutes. I attempt to start writing this piece and get bored after the first paragraph. (If you’ve made it this far, gold star for you.) I give myself a good fifteen minutes of contemplating my life choices and reliving every mildly embarrassing thing I’ve ever done, in great detail.
In my contemplation I’ve done the inevitable - the potatoes are overcooked. This is why I hate this method. Stirring risks breaking up the delicate slices. Not stirring means the slices on the bottom rapidly become mush. Or burn on to the pan. Or both, in my case.
The onions are almost there, and get a splash of white wine for good behaviour. As I pull the potatoes off the heat, I vaguely remember that, on the show, the contestants had ample amounts of that milk and cream mixture leftover, which became part of the sauce. The fact that I’ve used mostly cream means the slightly-overdone potatoes are covered in rich, creamy goodness (get your mind out of the gutter) that absolutely cannot be strained off. Such is life. I tell them to cool down quickly, consider that maybe I should speak to more human beings and less inanimate potatoes, and turn back to the perfectly caramelised onions. I add a spoonful of wholegrain mustard, just for fun. I have a very small life.
The pastry gets another set of folds, the fillings are chilling and there’s very little left to do. I’m slightly concerned I’ll have to be alone with my thoughts again, until I realise there’s a horribly burnt potato pan demanding my attention. I also realise I need to adjust my sauce-related plans, so I start some milk infusing with rosemary and garlic. My kitchen smells wonderful.
With an hour and 15 minutes to go, it’s time to shape the beast. I roll out the pastry and freehand an almost-circle - I don’t have perfectly sized plates. Another firm opinion I have on dauphinois is that it absolutely should not contain onions, so I ignore the layering instructions on Bake Off. I spread a layer of onions on the pastry, haphazardly top them with the potatoes (layering them prettily seems utterly pointless), add another layer of onions and top the whole thing off with the rest of the pastry. I appear to have assembled a mildly ominous dome.
Said dome goes in the fridge, and I have an hour and 5 minutes left. After ten minutes, I remember I still have to egg-wash the bastard and score it with a pretty pattern. I try, at least. It’s all slightly wonky and in the wrong direction, but so am I. Finally, with just 50 minutes left, my ominous wonky dome goes in the oven.
The blue cheese sauce is spectacularly simple, and definitely overkill. I’m using stilton in place of roquefort. This isn’t out of some sad patriotic urge to use something British, I just had a bad experience with some very well-aged roquefort and a bottle of port a few christmases ago. Also that shit’s expensive and my budget for this is…limited. I make a quick roux, whisk in the infused milk and follow it up with about half a block of stilton. Somehow I also manage to eat quite a lot of stilton. It’s a happy day for me. The sauce is delicious, obviously. I might be prone to baking cock-ups, but I can be trusted with a sauce.
It occurs to me, as I whisk, that the sauce is…pointless. It doesn’t add all that much to the dish, and it’s not a particularly traditional way of serving a savoury pithivier. It doesn’t demonstrate any baking skill. It’s just there. It’s a sauce that only becomes necessary by dint of this being a recipe on a TV show - the cameras and contestants need something to do while these giant pies sit in the oven, and there’s only so many shots of bakers staring hopefully through the glass of their ovens for a single episode. There’s only so many ad breaks to cut to, although Bake Off has absolutely been pushing the limit on that one. I feel slightly bad for my afterthought sauce, and promise to love it no matter what. Again, my world is very small.
With just six minutes to go, I remove my pithivier from the oven and it is glorious. The pastry has flaked, the dome has stayed domed, and nothing is on fire. It transfers to a cooling rack without mishaps and I think everything might be right in the world. I let it stand, and cool, and realise with just ten seconds to go that part of the challenge is obviously getting it on to a plate. I just, just manage it as the timer goes off. I have, apparently, succeeded.
The Judging:
For fairness, I show my partner a picture of a “proper” pithivier, so that he can judge it fairly. He thinks it’s a picture I’ve just taken of mine. He’s not the most observant fellow, but I’ll take the compliment. I ask him to judge specifically the quality of the pastry, and the overall flavour.
His thoughts:
“That’s fucking good. It’s really good.”
Pastry: At first he gives me a 9/10. I demand to know what’s taken away the final point. He concedes that actually there’s nothing wrong, and gives me 10/10.
Flavour: 10/10. (I do wonder if that score was given partly out of fear.)
My thoughts:
Pastry: 10/10
Flavour: 9/10
Honestly, there’s not much I could have done to improve this. I’m only marking down on flavour because the sauce felt like overkill and I know full well that I can make a nicer version of the potatoes without the pastry.
Do I think this one’s a fair challenge? Sort-of. As far as the time limit goes - it’s fair. It’s enough time to make, chill and bake rough puff pastry. As a test of baking skills goes - it’s fair. Rough puff can be tricky, and it’s something a decent baker should know. As an overall challenge though…Look, as I said, making something savoury was a nice change. But that filling, that sauce, they aren’t demonstrations of baking skill. They’re barely demonstrations of cooking skill. They’re (literally) filler - something to keep the contestants amused. I’d rather see a test of some patisserie skills - a frangipane, a custard - rather than something just simple enough to be fair but just tricky enough to trip up a baker that’s not familiar with this kind of cooking. It was a fine challenge. It was just fine.
Next week - Botanicals! If the technical challenge is a perfect G&T then I’m definitely ready. I might practise a bit this weekend though, just to be on the safe side.
