Recipe Failures

I've delved into the world of pastry in search of a good ensaymada recipe.  Looked online, looked in books.  Found online recipes that I later found in books.  It's pretty funny, the internet.  Someone says "This is the real homemade recipe from my grandmother." And then you find it in on the back of a box or somewhere on the net where someone else swears it's their aunt's recipe and no one else makes it like her.  What's also amazing, is the variety for one small sweet bun recipe.  Some take two days to make, some take three hours.  Some were a two step method, others were twelve.  I went for something in between.  Found myself an old recipe (because I like old recipes) out of a book with which to play.



Cute, but wrong



So what is ensaymada?  Derived from the Spanish ensaimada, it's a fluffy (though some will argue) twisted bun, topped with cheese, sugar and butter.  The bun is basically a brioche, enriched with eggs and butter.  It has a marked difference from it's Spanish predecessor which are traditionally made with pork lard.  It's eaten for breakfast or merienda (snacks in between meals), and is also popular for special occasions and gatherings like Christmas.

As for the recipe I found.  It was a failure.  I could actually see it right away.  Certain things didn't ring true to me.  But I liked the method so I thought I'd try it out.  The method for making the dough turned out really well.  Was happy with the results.  To make the dough, it's done in three parts.  First is the making of a sponge, giving that time for the yeast to develop.  Then there's adding half the dry ingredients and eggs and letting that rise.  And then there's adding the other hald of dry ingredients and eggs and butter, kneading that until you get a smooth, elastic dough and then letting that rise.  Once that's risen, you punch it down, portion it out, roll them, twist them and get them ready to bake.

The big problem with the recipe.  The ingredients.  Two things looked funny.  One was the yeast amount.  I've made doughs in the past, so when I saw 1 teaspoon of yeast for 5 cups of flour, it made me wonder if that was enough yeast.  And it wasn't just that amount that made me wonder, it was the flour itself.  Recipe called for bread flour.

Now if you don't know the difference between flours, here's the brief.  Flour has a protein in it called gluten.  Gluten is the thing which gives doughs their elasticity, allows them to hold their shape, and helps create a product's chewy texture.  It's ability to hold the shape of a dough is strengthened when you knead and work the dough.  That develops the gluten into longer strings.  So if you want 'tougher' bread that will hold it's shape, you knead or mix doughs and batters longer.  If you don't want it to be tough, then you do less kneading.  All-purpose flour has what we'll call an average amount of gluten.  It's called all-pupose because it can be used to make all sorts of bread, pastries, pie doughs, cakes, etc.  'Harder' breads, like the more rustic kind with the nice crust on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside, are made with bread flour which has more gluten than all-purpose.  And then on the other side, cakes and soft pastries can be made with cake or pastry flour which has the least amount of gluten and so you get fluffy, soft cakes.

So, here I am, wanting to make a fluffy, sweet bun and the recipe is asking for bread flour.  Alarm bells.  I chose to go half and half and see what happens.  Half bread flour and half all-purpose.   It wasn't working out.  The dough didn't rise as quickly as the recipe said it would.  It gave everything about 4 hours to go from start to finish.  But it took almost 16 hours before I could put it in the oven.

This is after 2 hours waiting for them to double in size.
They didn't.  But once again, still looks cute.

After the first rise I knew it wasn't going to work.  But you know what?  I'd put the ingredients together.  The dough wasn't disgusting.  It wasn't like I couldn't make bread out of it.  It just wouldn't be what I wanted.  So I finished them off.  Portioned, shaped and set them to bake.  Ended up with some cute little buns that were just way too firm and compact for what I wanted.  Tasted fine.  Texture, oh so very wrong.  Oh, and also, I didn't have enough cheese to put into the buns.  Shame on me!

On to round 2!