Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [27]
In the kitchen, she relished the industrial-scale engineering challenge, like canning 100 pounds of organic apricots or juicing five lugs of tomatoes and grinding wheat to bake fourteen loaves of Laurel’s Kitchen hippie bread. But she had no interest in everyday cooking whatsoever. No interest at all in pots de crème or meatballs, or cookies or Welsh rabbit or anything you might find in Ladies’ Home Journal.
Starting very young, I staked out the kitchen as my territory, a place where I could develop my own expertise. My mother bought me cookbooks and ingredients and complimented me profusely. She thought almost anything home-cooked tasted “divine,” provided she did not have to cook it herself and could therefore spend more time rewiring a lamp while drinking black coffee, reading the Wall Street Journal, and talking on the phone to one of her several hundred friends.
In the living room, she kept a display set of the Time-Life Foods of the World, right up there next to Edward Steichen’s Family of Man. Display, that is, until I discovered them. (Ubiquitous at garage sales, these books belong in every cook’s library.) In The Cooking of Scandinavia, next to the recipe for Danish pastries, is a comment in my twelve-year-old’s print: “Difficult but worth the effort—SUPERB!”
“Superb”—along with “divine”—was one of my mother’s adjectives. I hadn’t yet discovered my own. I wince to imagine what the kitchen looked like after an unsupervised twelve-year-old got through making superb Danish pastries, especially because I know who that twelve-year-old was. My mother couldn’t teach me to sew, but she opened the door to the kitchen and let me make a mess and discover on my own one of the great joys of my life, which is pretty much the nicest thing a parent can do.
Recently, I tried that Danish recipe again and it was as “superb” and “worth the effort” as I remembered—like a cross between a croissant and a butter cake. But it was also very, very “difficult,” requiring the rolling and chilling and rerolling and chilling of the dough over several hours and then the shaping of that dough into strange, ornate forms. In hopes of shaving some time off the process, I turned to a recipe that Beatrice Ojakangas contributed to Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, in which you throw the ingredients into a food processor: “Don’t think you’re cheating by taking the fast track—this is the way it’s done these days all over Denmark, where they know great Danish when they taste it.”
Obviously, all that social welfare has been making those Danes soft. Though I’m not Danish, I think the old-fashioned Danishes are better. Harder—and better. If you’re going to the trouble to make something as fattening as a Danish, you may as well go whole hog. So to speak. You can make the dough the night before, and then shape and bake the pastries in the morning. The biggest problem you’re likely to face is if the butter leaks out of the Danishes, floods the pan and drips onto the oven floor. It’s not the end of the world—the pastries will still be delicious—but it’s messy and less than ideal. To avoid that, put the pastries in the freezer for 10 minutes before baking.
Are these better, you might wonder, than Entenmann’s? Yes, they are better. Much, much better. But whether or not they are better enough to warrant the ordeal of making them is up for debate.
Make it or buy it? Make it—at least (and probably only) once.
Hassle: You will want to bludgeon yourself with your rolling pin about halfway through this project.
Cost comparison: These cost about $0.45 per 3-ounce pastry. Entenmann’s products, made with high-fructose corn syrup and palm oil, cost more than twice as much.