Flour. Butter. Water. Salt. No leavening. Or is there?
When these four ingredients are combined into a homogeneous dough, then rolled out and baked, you end up with a cracker or flatbread. Not much rise there.
Blend the same ingredients together but stop while the butter is still discernible-- about the size of peas. Now roll out and bake. You have a pate brisee or a short, flaky pie crust with unevenly puffed layers that may have doubled in height.
Now, take the same four ingredients, blend the flour, water and salt to make a dough. Evenly layer the butter throughout the dough through a series of rolling out and folding. Stop when you have made 6 "turns", resulting in 1459 alternating layers of fat and starch. After a final rolling and baking, you are left with pate feuilletee or puff pastry. This time, the finished pastry leaving the oven has risen up to 6 times in volume from the raw dough that went in.
Three products...sharing identical ingredients in similar proportions...with significantly different results. Do you know why?
Lacking chemical leavening, the release of gases is not responsible for the differences between the three pastry products. And with the absence of yeast, it cannot be attributed to fermentation.
What caused the puff pastry to rise to glorious heights and the pie crust to puff to a lesser degree is the steam created by the melted butter. As the butter melts and boils, the gluten matrix in the dough hardens, trapping the pockets of steam. The degree of rise in the three products varies with the distribution of fat and starch.
Understanding this was an epiphany. So was grasping the unfolding of egg proteins. And the destruction of sugar to make caramel. And so on.
These were my AH-HAA moments. They allowed me to analyse mistakes and to not only correct them, but to control the outcome. They liberated me from bondage to recipes, and with this freedom came a broader one: the freedom to create.
Modern cooking places an emphasis on science, when, in fact, chemistry has been at play throughout the history of food and cooking. Does a strong knowledge of food science make us good cooks? If that were true then scientists, by right, would all be chefs.
What about technique? Consider the baker who gets up at 3 AM every morning to bake bread. After some time, he can turn out hundreds of perfect loaves even while half-asleep. He may even have a grasp on the chemistry of his craft through extended observation of cause and effect. His talent and dedication may move him onto the saute line, where through repetition he learns to turn out a perfectly cooked piece of fish every time.
But would he know what to do with a salsify? Would he even know what to serve it with?
At ICC, Jordi Butron of Espai Sucre gave a presentation about the process of creating desserts. A lot of what he said resonated with me. In it, he stated (from my notes) "Pastry is techniques...but technique has to service flavor. Technique is easy--it only requires repetition, but a library of flavors takes many years to acquire."
As a baker, I have made puff pastry countless times. Through muscle memory, I could even make it while half-asleep. Because of my understanding of steam pockets and gluten matrixes, I was able to effectively teach it to my students, passing on the AH-HAA moments. My familiarity with this product allows me to play and ask questions:
Why butter? (because it is fat and for it's flavor)
What else is flavored fat? (oils..but they won't work, they're liquid and here, the fat needs to start as a solid)
What else is solid, flavored fat? (pork fat, bacon fat, foie, cheese...)
Cheese? Which cheese? (needs to be spreadable and have a high fat content...a triple cream)
Saint Andre? Boursault? Brillat-Savarin? (no...too subtle for the flavor to come through)
l'Explorateur? (a triple cream, assertive flavor...yes, it will work)
That is how I have come to make l'Explorateur puff pastry; a product that pleases me.
Will it please everyone? Is it ground-breaking? Life-altering? No. No. And no.
It is simply a token of where I'm at as a cook/baker at this moment in time and a synthesization of what I know about technique, food science and my own palate.
Do these things make me a better cook? I'd like to think so. What I do know for certain is that by relying on their guidance, I am free to contemplate and to think about food; what it is...what it can be.
And that, I believe, is the starting point for innovation.