I attended another cooking class tonight, given by the pastry chef of a rather good restaurant (Laloux). He was teaching us three basic doughs…and to demonstrate their use, he was making three different desserts. He started with a basic pie dough and made an apple pie from it, adding some kind of custard to the apples to thicken the mix and a crumble on top that had cardamom in it. It was very sweet and tasty…but a bit tough under the fork.
Next he made a chocolate shortbread dough, and served it with a caramel flavoured crème chantilly (whipped cream)…The chocolate part was dry…the cream was nice…
And the trickiest of the three, was a brioche dough…I love that buttery bread when it is baked in small individual molds. I remember having eggs benedict served on it rather than an english muffin….with smoked salmon rather than ham… And following that with bananas foster instead of fruit salad…but that’s another (expensive, New Orleans) story…yet somehow related to this one as this time the chef used the brioche to make bread pudding….and bread pudding is something I learned to make in the south…So I was curious to see what was his take on it…welllll……
HERESY! He baked it on a cookie sheet so that it looked like one large omelet when it came out of the oven… He then cut it in squares and served it with honey flavoured yogurt and rhubarb compote…. There was no sweetness….and no liquor….
Definitely no competition to the southern recipe I was given that remains unequaled. (cf the December 30th 2006 entry)