What could be better than Napoleon cake on New Year's Eve?
Only Napoleon cake in double size!
2 kg of flour, 800 ml of water, 4 eggs, 4 tablespoons of 5% vinegar, 2 teaspoons of salt and many, many, many very cold, straight from the freezer of good, very good butter.
How many? 1.2 kg - 1.4 kg is the minimum. And the taste of Napoleon depends only on its taste and quality, because everything else is very simple.
Now you need the same grater with which you rub the carrots for pilaf.
Place it on a pile of flour and dip a piece of frozen butter in the flour.
The oil should be so cold that it will rub, not spread on the grater.
You also need to constantly throw flour on the grater and constantly turn the piece of butter in your hands, and as it seems open butter, roll it in flour.
At the exit, you should get butter shavings, deboned in flour.
Rake a slide, make a hole in it and pour in the liquid part of the dough in portions.
Poured in, mixed, mixed aside and pour in more.
Look carefully, we mix the liquid part with the oil shavings, but do not knead it by hand.
Oh, I forgot to tell you! The table must certainly be cold! And not just cold, in the sense of room temperature, but very cold - +5, well, + 7C - in a word, it should have a temperature at which the butter does not melt. I didn’t say in vain that the butter should also be cold, didn’t I? Right out of the freezer!
Lord, but what do you do with the table, huh? I have a special refrigerator table, its countertop cools down - such tables are used in good professional kitchens in confectionery shops, in meat and fish cutting shops, but once upon a time, when everything in the world was more correct than now, the kitchen had marble or granite boards. Not even boards, but slabs 3-4 centimeters thick. Before confectioners began work where a cold table might be needed, these plates were taken out in the cold. And if there was no cold, then this kind of dough was not prepared! Therefore, Napoleon, like the real Ganja baklava, is a seasonal, winter dish. Listen, do you have an unheated veranda? Is there no table there? After all, you can go and collect this dough there? I almost wrote "knead", but you can't knead it! Or, if you are at the dacha, can you dress warmer and go outside for ten minutes? It won't take more time!
It is better to immediately divide this lump of dough into blanks for cakes. Our baking sheets are huge - 50 by 30 cm, so they were divided into eight cakes. If you cook on a smaller baking sheet, you must reduce the dough ingredients proportionally.
This is not how we prepare custard. First of all, you need to take good milk. You will need 2 liters, so look carefully at the packaging - milk producers began to cheat. They now sell milk not by liter, but at 950 ml or even 900 ml, but for the same price. Moreover, the packaging indicates how much milk there is - everything is "honestly"! You just read in the recipe "4 glasses of milk", pop a pack of milk into a bowl, and there are not 4, but 3.5 glasses. Do you understand what an ambush?
In general, the easier the culinary processing of the products is to be, the more the taste of the finished product depends on the taste of the products themselves. For example, the taste of sugar is more or less the same, in contrast to the taste of eggs, the tastier which are, the tastier the cream will be. Eight eggs and with sugar, also be careful - it is also packaged in 900 grams. This is just as much as needed.
4 tablespoons flour.
Mash eggs with sugar using a mixer, add flour gradually, continuing to work with a mixer.
Pour in milk gradually and stir until a homogeneous mixture is obtained.
We boiled some of the milk with natural vanilla pods and let it cool down. My God, how different the smell of vanilla is from vanilla! We have this vanilla in ice cream and in similar creams, but each time the smell is so subtle, pleasant - there is little that beats the attractiveness of such a smell! Add vanillin for now, but very little.
Put the cream on the stove, stirring constantly with a whisk. Here is a cook making cream in Paul Bocuse's restaurant. A copper saucepan is optional, but standing with a whisk and stirring constantly is a must.
But not very long - until the cream thickens. And then cream in the cold - in the snow, for example. And stir regularly so that it cools down evenly, and does not freeze to the walls. Do you have an ice cream maker? That would be useful! Okay, I intimidated you - just cool him down, and that's all!
Continued here: stalic.livejournal.com/579771...
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