54
It is less useful than what you think
Frame challenge incoming...
Cling film is very light and made especially for such purposes. The environmental damage is extremely low - which limits what alternatives you can choose. Most alternatives (including those already mentioned in the other answers) will be so much more resource demanding to make, dispose or ...
27
You'd end up with something somewhere between unleavened bread, pasta & laminate flooring, depending on what else you did with it.
The first two are what you'd get if that's how you treated them, the last is what you'd get if you thought you were going to get shortcrust pastry ;)
Late edit
This started out as one of my more flippant short answers, but ...
20
No. An edible organic liquid that does not dissolve in water, almost by definition, is an oil.
That's not the important thing, though. Substances like mineral oil are edible yet non-nutritive; they pass through the body unchanged and would be compatible with any dietary condition. The problem is that, because they are not digestible and not water-soluble, ...
18
Technically, this is not precisely buttermilk, but it's pretty close in both composition and usage.
The term "buttermilk" can actually refer to a wide range of fermented milk varieties. Traditionally, buttermilk was produced by allowing natural bacteria present in cream to ferment some of the sugar lactose into lactic acid. This made churning butter from ...
13
You have gotten a fundamental principle of the choux pastry wrong.
The rising and airiness is not caused by beating air bubbles into the batter, unlike with sponge cake and similar, but by trapping steam in the well formed network of gluten and egg in the batter.
The cooking step is not meant to just have the flour-water-fat mix come together, but to have ...
11
You don't have to use clingfilm (cling wrap, saran wrap depending where you are in the world), there are alternatives as long as the pastry is not sticky:
Plastic bags: I reuse zippable plastic bags as many times as I can, you can wash them by turning them inside out
Baking paper: baking paper can be re-used as long as it stays clean
Aluminum foil: again ...
9
While many bread and pastry products do depend critically on the formation and management of gluten from wheat flours, this is not universally true.
Some types of pastry have structure dependent more on the starch networks which is the other major component of wheat flours; the texture and properties of these pastries is often dependent on the gross ...
9
"Atomized glucose" seems to be primarily a French product, derived from spray-drying glucose syrup. Glucose syrup is best known in America as corn syrup (e.g. light Karo, not HFCS), and is mostly, but not entirely, glucose. Dextrose is pure crystalline glucose. They are not exactly the same ingredient, and probably not interchangeable in fussy recipes.
9
Dextrose is one of the two stereoisomers of glucose, also known as D-glucose. The other is L-glucose. The two isomers are exactly the same except for being mirror images of one another.
In cooking, all glucose you encounter is going to be dextrose as that's the form that terrestrial life is able to produce and metabolize. (A few unusual bacteria can ...
9
That is totally doable. Just print out an appropriately sized copy of the desired picture and put a piece of waxed paper over it. Using a piping bag, trace the picture with frosting, filling it in. Then freeze the frosting and waxed paper. Once it is frozen, peel away the waxed paper, and put the pieces on the cake.
Here is a great pictorial of the process.
9
Your title mentions oil but your question mentions shortening. Be aware that oil and shortening are not the same thing, and substituting one for the other will change the results. Oil is fat that is liquid at room temperature; shortening is fat that is solid at room temperature (but usually not butter; if a recipe wants butter it will call for it by name). ...
8
I respect Jolenealaska's creative thought, but nothing truly resembling pastry is going to be translucent or transparent unless it is exceedingly thin. The structure alone will refract light, making the product opaque in the same way snow is opaque even though individual water crystals are fairly transparent, if they don't have air inclusions.
This is ...
8
With great skill, a true artist could do what you describe with Thai/Vietnamese rice paper, the dinner plate sized, extra thin ones, like for Fresh Spring Rolls.
I will never apply for the job, I promise.
8
If your dough is very dry and crumbly, it needs more water.
Add a few mL to the dough when adding the beaten egg.
8
A choux is an interesting batter that is created in a way that maximizes gluten structure. It is essentially cooked twice. You combine and heat water and butter, then add flour and continue cooking the resulting paste. That paste forms a ball, and then several eggs are beaten in. This batter is then piped onto a sheet and baked. In addition to the gluten ...
8
You still need some gluten, otherwise the cake will crumble. Any recipe that is gluten free has to use a number of different additives to mimic the structure provided by the gluten. If you just replaced the flour with cornstarch, your cake or pastry would not be able to rise (it would lack the internal structure to "inflate") and likely crumble as ...
7
Yeah, how about biscuit dough? That's a common way to do a quick and easy chicken pot pie. It might be a little tricky to actually enclose the curry in the biscuit dough, but it should be doable.
For reference, here are a couple of "pot pie" recipes that use biscuit dough on top of the filling:
Add a Pinch (from scratch)
Bisquick (Using Bisquick brand) ...
7
Many filled doughs don't require long resting times (maybe 30min to an hour), but they generally do require a little bit if kneading to make sure they're sturdy enough to hold a filling. If you have a stand mixer or a food processor, you likely won't need to do any hand-kneading.
I'd recommend looking at recipes for either empenadas or samosas. (Look for ...
7
Flour (+ water, either directly or from other ingredients such as egg white) gives the pastry structure. As you knead the flour, the gluten network develops and results in elasticity. When cooked, water evaporates from the dough leaving a rigid gluten skeleton.
Fat does not mix with water and thus stay in blobs in between the gluten network. This weakens ...
7
Absolutely not. As the other poster said but I will say with no "I think", I will say I know it will ruin the pastry. You will end up with a gummy crust that will never give you the flaky texture that pie doughs are famous for. It would probably also leave you with a somewhat dry filling as much of the liquid would then be in the crust.
6
If you are only proofing your shaped croissants for 40mins, that could be your problem. Proofing croissants takes a lot longer than proofing bread.
you should be proofing the shaped croissants at 78degreesF/25~26degreesC for 2-2.5hours at HIGH humidity. If you don't have a high humid environment, then put one coat of egg wash on right away before you ...
6
Those are Pan Pistacchio - this blog entry (not mine) has a picture of a sign in a shop window identifying them. It goes on to say that the general category of these buns is Fishermans Buns or Pan del Pescatore and that the green ones specifically are pistachio, which matches what I saw in Venice myself - the pistachio ones were always green and there were ...
6
A few points to consider...
Try docking the pastry.
Docking means to pierce lightly with a fork, or a docker (looks like a spiked paint roller), to make small holes in dough that will let steam escape during baking. This helps the dough to remain flat and even.
ref: http://powerhungry.com/2009/02/puff-pastry-docking/
In general, to cook food more evenly,...
6
If you want the least obtrusive flavor, the best you can go with is thickened water.
While you can probably prepare sheets with the right hydrocolloid and lots of care and plastic foil, I would suggest choosing a thickener which thickens on cooling, and pouring the warm mixture over the pie. Arrowroot starch is frequently used in this role on fruit pies, I ...
6
The answer to this question is essentially the same as the question "how do you make croissants".
If you are making croissants du boulanger, the dough has yeast in it; if you are making croissants du pattissier, the dough does not have yeast in it.
The fact that croissants can be made without yeast shows that the yeast itself is not essential to the oven ...
6
I really don't think it's necessary for this application, Didgeridrew's advice regarding the pastry seems spot-on to me. However, if you really want an instantaneous temperature change for any reason and you're stuck with a problematic stove, you can make that change if you can control individual burners separately.
Keep another burner set to "high" while ...
6
Based on you mentioning curry and bread, have you thought about either chapatti or roti? Asides from them being Indian bread and so complementing your curry completely, they are quick and easy to make a little kneading but will take less time than making pastry or biscuit dough.
Just make the dough, roll out into a few rounds, fill one half, then fold the ...
6
What you are looking for is typically considered a kitchen mistake:
Overkneading.
Not-so gentle handling of the dough and some kneading plus a bit more eggs or a dash of milk will add density.
There is actually one special use case where bakers go for that more elastic and less crumbly dough: Cornish Pasties
Straight from the Cornish Pasty Association, ...
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