On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 07:27:39PM +1300, David Mann wrote: > > > [. . .] yes, pastry should definitely be eaten in moderation. > > A good way to do this is to make it yourself. It's just labour- > intensive enough to make you think twice about having it. It also > teaches you what goes into it, and thus how bad it really is for you. But it beats the store-bought stuff hands down.
My wife is a first-rate pastry cook, so she makes almost everything herself. The one exception is puff pastry; there are a couple of commercial brands that are as good as anything she can guarantee to turn out. (The brand we can get most easily nowadays is Dufour). As my wife puts it - if she made puff pastry once a week, she would get to the point where she could do a better job on a consistent basis. But if she only made it three or four times a year, it's also quite likely that she wouldn't do as good a job as using Dufour provides. The pastries we use for just about verything else (mince pies, pork pies, steak and kidney pies, ...) are made from scratch. That also gives us control of the fat used (not just a choice between butter or lard, but also the salt and water content of the butter; there's a huge difference between typical European and American butters). In fact we make most of what we eat from scratch, rather than from a packet. That's the best way to control what goes into the recipe. I want to choose the piece of meat that goes into anything I cook, and I don't want too much fat or salt, or any artificial flavour enhancers or colouring agents. Nor do we want too much sugar; as we are both diet-controlled diabetics, that's an important issue. But substituting sucralose (Splenda) for up to 50% of the sugar works in many recipes (such as, for example, the tangerine lime curd that I made just before Christmas, and the cranberry/raisin galette my wife made a week ago). -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
