for makers and consumers of idun's mascarpone pastry

[mint]

Hi, bakers, idun sends season's greetings to you all and has also asked me to describe my experiences with her pastry recipe.

Was it you, Catalpa, who asked about this recently?  I'm sorry I can't remember what that thread was called.

Well here goes, id's original "original" recipe was in American cups and she weighed up the flour, etc using her various size cups and converted the measurements to ounces.  Not surprisingly, she arrived at slightly different answers[:D]

Anyway, I have been making it for years now, using 6 ounces of plain flour, 3 of butter, pinch of salt and half of a 250 g tub of mascarpone.  Always lovely, buttery, melt-in-the-mouth.

Recently, when id gave the recipe on here, she wrote 8 oz flour.  In a panic, I thought I'd been making it wrongly and asked her to confirm the right amounts.  She no longer has the original recipe and has said we could do whatever we liked or preferred.

My experience is this:  the 6 oz is crumbly and harder to deal with in hot weather, the 8 oz loses the crumbly texture that I so love.  So, I tried with 7 ozs and that I think is a good compromise.  Using 7 oz enables you to make a pie with more and heavier fillings (eg potatoes, leeks, crème fraîche, a weighty pie) but the 6 oz is just yummy for mince pies.

What I shall do in future is possible use the 6 oz in winter and the 7 oz in summer when rolling out pastry is not the easiest task in the world when the temperature is in the 30s.

Id, have I got it right?  If you can't use your keyboard, just put a smiley or a wooty......

[Hoddy]

I found my original - you ave it right Mint -

Pre heat the oven to 200°C

6ozs of SR flour (you can get it here, it is clearly marked that it has the poudre levante in it)

3ozs of softened butter, make sure that it is soft.

using a 250 gram tub of mascapone cheese cut straight across and use half. a pinch of salt.

Right for those who can, rub in the butter. Then mix in the mascarpone and keep working it until it looks like a ball of pastry.

For those who can't stick the lot in the food processor and put it on slow at first and then work up to fast until it is all mixed together.

Make sure that there is plenty of flour on your board, I suggest that you do this in two or three times, so cut your mixture up into two or three. Then roll out to around slightly less than an eighth of an inch thick. You can make mince pies, remember to dab some milk on the lower pastry before putting the lid on. Sometimes I cut this into 2 inch squares and wet all the edges, I put the filling in the middle. Then pull opposite corners together and nip them, they look like little envelopes. In fact this is the traditional thing to do with this pastry.

Also the other fillings I put in are pureed prunes, lemon curd, apple and of course mincemeat.

....... I wonder hw any Christmas's ago that was ..............

[mint]

Hoddy, I use this pastry for all sorts of things: quiches, pies with different fillings, parcels with curried veg fillings (for vegetarians), sausage meat with fresh chopped sage, tinned tuna with grated cheese and crème fraîche, any leftover veg with grated cheese and cream and make a big pasty or a large round pie.  Endless variations on a theme, to use a musical term![:D]

[Loiseau]

Is there a difference in result using plain flour (mint) or SR (Hoddy)?

I am quarantining after my daughter tested positive yesterday, so need to do a bit of baking as a distraction. (DD is ok by the way, only lost senses of smell and taste.)

[mint]

Loiseau, idun has said in the past that you can use SR or plain.  I always use plain because I worry that the pastry might get too puffy with SR.  Having said that I have never tried with SR.

[idun]

i have a recalcitrant keyboard, so am having to put a keyboard at the bottom on the  page and use my mouse on it, sometimes that is, as sometimes it works.

Should work with plain flour. No water or other liquid just knead it together, bit like shortbread really. AND I would only use butter.

And that is me finished with typing like this. no idea why the vowels work sometimes and not others[8-)] Well the smileys work!

[woolybanana]

Not sure if I have ever tasted this slapapony of which you speak. Is it cold, damp stuff with cocoa powder?

[nomoss]

It's more carpone than ordinary pastry[:D]

[Loiseau]

Cold and damp all right, but no cocoa, WB. Should be in cheese section.

[woolybanana]

Didnt we have some once at our favourite restaurant, an age ago?

[idun]

Well a new keyboard, which seems to be working.

I had really thought it was when I had updates that I had problems, and at one time, getting rid of 'orca' resolved' it. But not for the last few weeks.

I am going to make this pastry tomorrow, and use the last of the sweet mince. I love mince pie parcels with this pastry, just love them. And with a little clotted cream on top, well, absolutely delicious.

 

[woolybanana]

What mince do you use? I bought some Robertson’s and it was far too sweet to eat. Had to rinse off the sugar but still couldnt eat it.

[idun]

 I like asda's, but when I lived in France I made it. Easy and if I had not got any suet, just made sure that a pack of butter was VERY cold and grated it into the mix.

Peeled cored and finely chopped 1lb of  apples  and cooked them gently in a little butter until they were soft and then left until cold.

In a bowl :

2lbs of dried fruit, and if I couldn't get it, bought it all separately  and mixed together. I could always manage to get sultanas, raisins and currents and I would chop up glace peel to be included in that weight, although I am not bothered about that.

My recipe states 8oz of brown sugar, but frankly you could put something called half sugar or even sweetner in it.

Grated rind and juice of a lemon

6ozs of suet or grated butter. If butter I would probably use a little less, 4 or 5 ozs

I teaspoon of cinnamon  and  1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg  But I tended to use less cinnamon and some mixed spice if I had any in.

4 tablespoons of rum.

Mix it all with the apple and leave for 24hours . And then I would place it in jars and fridge it as it would go quickly.  Make loads of mince pies and freeze them.

A recipe that is very easy to reduce quantities and we used to enjoy it.

[idun]

I have just made 20 mince pies, made a double quantity and used 14ozs of flour half and half plain and SR. 6ozs butter, a little salt and a tub of mascapone.

It is about the only pastry that one kneads a little to get it mixed.

Mince pies are lovely, pastry cooked and golden, baked at 200c.

I hate an oven on for just one thing, so baked 7 flutes and two small batards, half wholemeal and half plain flour. 

Everything to be frozen now. Flutes and batards cut into useable pieces to be eaten au fur et  a mesure. I hate day old bread. And like this, it is as near as it can be  when  it has first cooled.

[Catalpa]

How did I miss this thread when it was started?!

Using 6 oz of flour (of whatever sort) makes sense - I found 8 oz + the other ingredients was too dry (compared to how I remembered it) so I kneaded more mascarpone into it - another quarter of a tub. That meant I'd worked it a bit longer than it probably liked but it still worked extremely well and the mince pies vanished over the course of 2 evenings.

I made some lemon curd yesterday so I may make another batch of pastry... [8-|]

[idun]

My French friends loved it when I gave them jars of homemade lemon curd.

Must admit I usually buy it these days, paresseuse moi!!!!

[mint]

One question, id, do you make the mince pies and freeze them uncooked and cook them when you get them out the freezer?

[idun]

I bake and freeze mince pies. They don't take that long to defrost and I have been known to zap them in the micro wave, this pastry for me at least doesn't seem to go soggy when I do that.

So I will say get a couple out at lunch time to have with afternoon tea around four'ish, always defrosted by then.

The other thing I do, if say, I have left over pastry, is bake a pastry bottom on a pie dish and freeze it. I leave it in the tin when I freeze as it is too fragile to just be left, could easily break. I make a lemon merangue pie when I want. Makes a lot less work when I get around to doing it.