My adventures in a Beijing bakery…
The ceiling in the bakery kitchen is so low, I can’t stand up straight. First I will learn how they make Portuguese egg tarts. Then we will bake chocolate chip cookies.
They are explaining ratios to me, the recipe is based on 5 yolks, 1 whole egg. No problem. We are speaking a common language now.
They test me to see how well I can separate eggs. I messed up on one, but, in my defense, yolks break much easier here.
We scald the milk, cream, sugar mixture. Add in the eggs. We just add them in all at once, no tempering, no problem. And we use this wooden stick, no whisk. Pass through a sieve before filling the tart shells. The shells are sprinkled with some red bean today. We use premade shells. I’m a little sad because thats the component I most wanted to learn. But the shells are okay. These are Halal, so made with beef fat instead of lard. The first animal fat pastry I’ve ever tasted.
Later, they test me all by myself. We are running out of heavy cream, so I calculate new quantities based on the ratios. They seem impressed. Here are my tarts, almost done, just a minute more. Some have darker tiger stripes, but most are still “baby tigers”.
Now, my turn to show them cookies. (Can’t take pics until the end.)
I was surprised that from all 20 of my eaters, not one had even heard of chocolate chip cookies. I’ve seen them a couple places around town, like at Walmart.
The ingredients are different here. The cookies didn’t brown as much as I would’ve liked, but the flavor (although different) and texture were great. Brown sugar is browner here, that’s why they look so dark. One lady kept sampling the dough and saying 冰淇淋, and she was right. The flavor was a little like ice cream. How?! I didn’t even use vanilla!?
They were all gone in a few minutes. One person took 3 when they thought no one was looking. Kids couldn’t wait and were holding cookies in front of the AC to chill them down. I told the cookie dough sampler there are stores in America where you can go eat many different flavors of cookie dough, and her eyes lit up like a child’s. All in all, an absolute blast.
Edit: The egg tarts were dinner for me. I must have eaten at least 15.
