Over the past several months, I have helped my brother at his pastry shop on weekends. Experiencing new things is enjoyable, especially when creating something.
Today, I will introduce two pieces of trivial knowledge I recently learned at the pastry shop.
Sprinkling powdered sugar over the cream puffs
The first trivial fact I recently learned was about dusting powdered sugar over the cream puffs. It has a large impact on sales.
Although there are various types of cream puffs, there is one with a hard shell whose outside crust is crispy and inside is creamy. We can enjoy the contrast. My brother’s shop bakes that type of cream puff, whose crust color is darker than usual.
In his shop, dusting with powdered sugar brings out the beauty. It looks like snow.
My brother told me that it was better to sprinkle that powdered sugar generously. That affected the sales deeply.
In a pastry shop, the beauty of its appearance impacts sales significantly. A delicious taste alone is not enough to satisfy customers.
Come to think of it, a rock-like dark appearance will not look tasty. On the other hand, if covered by powdered sugar, it looks soft and sweet. It is an interesting phenomenon, although I cannot verbalize well why it makes us feel like that.
Since pastries are luxury items, their appearance may be important as well.
A part that is not mixed well
The second trivial fact I recently learned was the necessity of mixing well. It also affects beauty.
The prime example is the chocolate cake. The one coated with ganache appears elegant. The outside coating is like a mirror.
However, if you don’t mix the butter enough, white parts will appear, as shown in the following photo.
It is the part where the chocolate didn’t mix with the flour.
By the way, it seemed that adding chocolate requires skill. Although I have helped add flour and sugar to the butter, whenever it came to the process of adding chocolate to the butter, the pastry chef I usually help always called my brother, and the two of them mixed it.
In addition, they always mixed the chocolate by hand without using a mixer. That may be due to the mixer’s steel arm, which unintentionally cools the melted chocolate and solidifies it, making it hard to mix evenly.
The handling of chocolate seemed delicate and profound. That may be why there was sometimes such a white spot. Since they mix by hand, cutting corners leads to a loss of beauty.
Conclusion
They were the two pieces of trivial knowledge I recently learned at my brother’s pastry shop.
Anyway, I will enjoy learning to bake today.
Thank you for reading this article. I hope to see you in the next one.
