WHAT IS PASTRYOLOGY?

Here's the thing about this blog: I'm not a trained baker. I'm a surprisingly well-versed self-educated baker (surprising to me, that is). I don't work in a fancy urban patisserie, although I'd love to someday. I bake in a retirement home, 25 hours a week. And I thought that anybody who's passionate about baking at home might be interested to read my journey of the little discoveries I make every week as I learn how to bake commercially.

That's what PASTRYOLOGY is all about, and the posts that follow will be less info than you will get from any cookbook or instructional baking site and rather more about the actual process of being a baker and the techniques and tips that might help you be a better baker at home.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a writer. Have been for over 25 years, and for most of them, I made a living in one form or another writing articles for magazines about food, wine, travel, personalities and sports, and books that ranged from guidebooks to the Pacific NW, where I live, to readers for middle-school kids and a sweet memoir about teaching baseball to my son. I've been to over 35 countries on assignment and have swooned over the baked goods at the finest patisseries in Paris to the sweet shops of Scotland and Tokyo.

In recent years, I've also become a crazed baker, as passionate and committed to learning about it as I've ever been about anything in my life. Pies, breads, cakes, tarts, souffles...I read about them, studied techniques, and practiced them at home until my family threw up their chubby hands and cried out, "No mas! Not even one single more Gateau St. Honore! We mean it."

So this year, with a lot less money coming in from writing than I had hoped for, and no end in sight for this obsession I had begun with baking, I decided to turn pro. I thought about opening my own bakery in the little Oregon town where I live, and even went so far as to rent a commercial kitchen for one grueling, slap-upside-the-head, 18-hour day of baking for a Farmer's Market (in which I netted $30 after costs). Damn near killed me, and was utterly discouraging, although the lemon tarts, chocolate cupcakes and coconut-cream pies I made were things of rare beauty.

And then I got lucky: I was hired to be the part-time, assistant baker for a retirement home that serves three meals a day to about 185 seniors, and in the interview they said the magic words: "We bake from scratch." This meant hundreds of cookies, dozens of bowls of puddings and cobblers and crisps, about 15 cakes or pies for any given meal, as well as 3-5 loaves of fresh bread for lunch and dinner, and specialty breads like scones, muffins or banana bread for breakfasts.

And with every single dish that goes into those commercial convection ovens, and every pound of batter that is blended in the big, industrial mixers, comes a myriad of questions. How long do I knead this? How much butter goes into it? How would I glaze this? Can I make a gluten-free and sugar-free version? Will I get this done in time for the 4 p.m. deadline to have everything plated and ready to serve in the dining rooms? How do you make a fig bread, a Hawaiian haupia, a dozen banana cream pies?

These are things we'll mull over in PASTRYOLOGY, and I'll share the answers I find. Hope you enjoy the ride.

THE PROBLEM WITH FLOSSING YOUR CHEESECAKE

Dammit, I've been flossing my cheesecakes again. And I have the battle scars to prove it. The lovely, creamy confection you see above -- just released from its springform pan with the help of a #10 can of sliced pears acting as a pedestal -- extracted its little bit of blood and flesh, proving once again that baking is not for babies or whiners.

Although highly pleasurable, I'm here to tell you that flossing your cheesecake HURTS! Note as Exhibit A the angry red gashes, symmetrically carved into the first joint of each index finger, below. With burns and blisters and sore knees from standing up for eight straight hours, these are the little war wounds of baking: Subtle, painful, oddly satisfying.

I can explain. This started about a week ago, when pumpkin cheesecake was listed as the Sunday lunch dessert at the retirement home -- the grandest meal of the week at a place that serves three meals a day to 185 seniors. At first they were going to bring in pre-baked and portioned cakes from Mega Food Sourcing Vendor, which made me curse softly under my breath. I've only made a couple of cheesecakes in my life, and wanted to try them on this scale.

And then on Thursday, somebody changed their minds and the orders came down: Make 15 pumpkin cheesecakes by Saturday afternoon. I grabbed a copy of "The Joy of Cheesecake" and got to work, covering the outsides of 10-inch springform cake pans with plastic wrap and then tin foil in order to seal them from the water baths that we'd need to use. On Friday I made a huge batch of graham cracker crust (crackers whizzed to crumbs in the food processor, sugar, melted butter) and pressed a 1/2-inch bottom crust layer into each pan. Baked them for 10 minutes each so the crusts would be even and firm.

Since this is a retirement home with lots of special dietary needs, I also made one gluten-free and three sugar-free crusts, the latter using the 8-inch cake ring that I brought from home, laying it down directly onto a parchment lined baking sheet and spraying everything with a thick layer of industrial quality PAM cooking spray.

Cheesecake really isn't that hard to make. Saturday morning found me smushing up several pounds of cream cheese in the monster mixer with the paddle attachment (below). Add sugar and beat it in, and then eggs and egg yolks. Use a separate bowl for a few tablespoons of flour (or cornstarch for the gluten free version) with teaspoons of pumpkin pie spices (cinnamon, ginger, cloves, a little salt), which I swirled with my hand to make it all blended and uniform, and then beat it into the cream cheese mixture. Add a cup or two of whipping cream laced with a slug of vanilla. And then, finally, I beat in a few cups of Libby's pumpkin, being careful to not overbeat any of this, mixing it just until the ingredients were uniform and I had a huge pot of batter.



The technique and skill for this, I quickly found out, lies in the actual baking. Bake it too much and the top turns dark brown (ie burns) and cracks like an Arizona state highway. Bake it too little and you have cheesecake mush. A water bath, or bain marie, is the way to go, so after placing my filled pans into a deep hotel pan and placing them in the oven, I then poured enough water into each hotel pan to reach about a third of the way up the cheesecake pan. Baked them about 45 minutes at 325 with a turn at the halfway mark (at which time I finally remembered to turn the convection fan down to low, where it should have been at the beginning).

You can also skip the water bath, turn the oven down to 275, bake for twenty minutes, turn it down to 225 and leave the cheesecakes in for an hour or more, turning once, and still praying that they won't crack or burn. I did this method with the gluten free and sugar free cakes that I made, and they worked out fine.

In either case, you bake the cheesecakes until all but the centers are firm and there is just the slightest jiggle in the middle, with a lovely amber sheen to the top of the cake. Take them out and let them cool to room temperature for hours, still in the pans, then cover them and refrigerate overnight, also still in the pans.

And then it's time to cut and serve your cheesecakes, and if, say, you work at a retirement home, you want to get 20 clean slices from each cake, with no pieces wrecked by the knife. Now the epic struggle between Man and Cheesecake begins, because the cake wants nothing more than to gob onto whatever touches its precious, creamy guts and turn each slice into a sloppy, cheesy mess that looks like it was carved by a chainsaw.

So you pull out your (preferably unflavored) dental floss, or maybe you rummage through the garage and find some leftover nylon fishing line. The fine, thin filament, wrapped around your fingers, shocks and saddens the cheesecake by cutting a perfect, fine line all the way down to its crust. And instead of pulling the floss back up through the cut, as you would have to do with a knife, you simply unwrap it from one hand and pull it through the cheesecake. Rewrap on your fingers and make the next cut. I was able to make 10 perfect cuts on each cake to get my 20 slices, without any gobs of cheesecake between the cuts.

But here's the painful part: Even though I wore gloves, after flossing a half-dozen cheesecakes I had managed to carve painful, little smiles into the places on my fingers where the floss was wrapped. These lacerations would remind me of my cheesecake-making day for over a week.

I still needed a knife to cut through the crusts, but the slices came out with clean edges, firm and lovely. And then there was great joy among the land, and the people had their pumpkin cheesecake, and ate it, too.

And so, you ask, did I save the used floss to give my teeth a nice, cheesecake-tinged swabbing that night before bed? Do jack-o-lanterns have candles inside?

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU APPLES THAT FALL IN YOUR YARD BY THE DOZEN

My apple tree had a bumper crop this year. We're up to our necks in applesauce, apple butter, apples for the kids to take to school. And this, a nice, simple apple tart with a bit of a hazelnut crunch base on a barely sweetened pastry-crust (pate brisee) base. Leave me a comment if you'd like a recipe, but this is about as simple and easy as it gets.