Basic skills

You might have noticed that we shared two videos this week so you could make shortcrust pastry and use it for a savoury flan. There was just too much content for a single video so we had to decide where to make the split. I’m sure many of us had a whole morning or afternoon at school for lengthy tasks like this, which were classified as “basic skills”, but the young people of today have less time to spend on such activities. All this leads me to think that whilst it’s a skill, it certainly isn’t basic. It may also be the case that being able to reach down a pack of ready-made pastry from the supermarket shelf is good enough – but it isn’t. Commercial shortcrust is rarely good enough, in my experience. Hence the video. Quite often I will use a pack of ready-made puff pastry and only last week a friend asked me to explain the differences between puff, rough puff and flaky. It’s all about how the large proportion of fat is incorporated into the dough. Puff has frozen butter flattened between 2 sheets of greaseproof paper, rough puff has all the chunks added at once and flaky has it added gradually making it the easiest to handle. Another skill that isn’t basic. So we made another video to show you how to make flaky pastry. Choose a day when you’ve asked yourself “What shall I do next?”, then make and freeze your pastry to chill it and improve the texture so that the next time you make a sausage plait or pesto puffs you can use your home-made block of pastry. Remember to thaw it overnight in the fridge and layer the scraps (if you have any) to re-roll and make some cheese whirls. x