Author Archives: joepastry

This recipe has some unusual features: plenty of flour in the custard mix (presumably to inhibit curdling in the high heat) and a cooked syrup. I have yet to try it, so maybe hold off until I give it a go. Should be fun!

About 1 1/2 pounds puff pastry dough (home made is what you want)
2 cups whole milk
the peel from one lemon
1 cinnamon stick
1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 ounces (half cup minus 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon) flour
12 ounces (1 and 2/3 cups) sugar
2/3 cup water
7 egg yolks

Preheat your oven to 550 degrees Fahrenheit. Roll the puff pastry dough into a rectangle, about 18″ x 21″ then roll it up into an 18″-long tube. Cut it in half, wrap each half in plastic and place the pastry in the refrigerator for at least two hours.

Combine the flour and a few ounces of the milk in a small bowl and stir until it’s dissolved. Bring the remaining milk to a boil and add the cinnamon, lemon peel and vanilla. Add the flour mixture, whisk it all together and take the pan off the heat.

Next, combine the sugar and water in another saucepan and bring to the boil. Cook it to 220 degrees Fahrenheit. Add this syrup to the milk mixture and allow it to COOL COMPLETELY. Strain the mixture through a sieve to remove the solids. Lastly, whisk in the yolks.

Remove one pastry log from the fridge and roll it on a lightly floured surface until it’s a little more than an inch diameter. Cut the dough into 1 1/2 inch pieces. Place a piece cut-side down into muffin molds. Let the pieces sit until they warm up a bit and become pliable.

Prepare a small cup of water. Dip your index finger into the water, then plunge it directly into the middle of the center of the dough piece. Flatten the dough against the bottom of the cup to a thickness of about 1/8 inch, then, rotating the form, push the dough against the sides, creating an even crust. Fill each cup about 3/4 of the way with the custard mixture. Bake until the tarts sport brown spots in the surface, about 8 to 9 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack. Repeat the process with the remaining dough and custard mix. Serve the pastéis dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon.

Reader Staci comments:

My impression has always been that Europe and especially countries like Spain and Portugal were very Catholic and religious, so I was surprised to read what you said about a ‘great religious upheaval.’ Aren’t those countries today still quite Catholic? Please explain.

Staci, I would be absolutely delighted. The question isn’t really whether or not countries like Spain and Portugal are Catholic today, but to what degree they’re Catholic. Once, and we’re going back hundreds of years now, the Catholic Church was the richest, most powerful single institution in Europe. It was involved in every aspect of European society including politics and commerce, and held property of all sorts all around the Continent, including opulent structures and gigantic land estates.

All that wealth and power inevitably led to abuses of the kind Martin Luther so brilliantly detailed in his Ninety Five Theses in 1517. They kicked off the Protestant Reformation, which was the beginning of the end of Catholic political dominance in Europe. It was the start of the so-called “anti-clerical” movement that brewed in Europe for over 200 years until it finally reached a head in the French Revolution in 1789.

French revolutionaries invented what we might call “secular ideology”, which is to say a concept of politics entirely divorced from royalty and, especially, religion. Indeed some of the first actions the Jacobins took was to destroy and/or confiscate Church property, kill and exile priests and generally attempt to de-Christianize the country. They even got rid of the (Christian-based) calendar, for goodness sakes.

Obviously the Jacobins never succeeded in their de-Christianization project. The early intensity of the French Revolution eventually petered out. Still, many of its ideals were carried forward by Napoleon as he set out to conquer Europe, generally undermine the concept of monarchy and the Church and spread the Napoleonic Code. That code abolished hereditary privilege, permitted freedom of religion, established civic (citizen-run) institutions and set up systems of civil laws that applied to all persons. That made Napoleon a hero to many, though he kinda blew his whole liberator-of-the-people image when he went on to crown himself Emperor in 1804. But that’s another story.

Napoleon eventually fell, and the wild revolutionary period that lasted from 1789 to 1815 ended. However the old order was never to be the same. Never again would the Church in concert with a small set of noble families hold absolute power of the peoples of Europe. Certainly many ruling families would return to power, but usually at the heads of elected governments, as leaders of constitutional monarchies (Portugal would become one of these). As for the Church, well, civic governments proceeded to divest it of power, seizing its holdings and abolishing many orders of monks and nuns, who were the de-facto administrators of Church power at the local level.

But just because the peoples of Europe dispensed with the Church as a political force didn’t mean they wanted to dispose of the Catholic religion altogether. Indeed most European peoples continued to be deeply religious. They simply found a new balance, one in which the people themselves had authority over their day-to-lives and the Church had authority over their spiritual lives. That balance largely continues to this day.

Lest I forget. Indulge deeply in the doughnuts.

One thing I forgot to mention about the Hieronymites Monastery is that it somehow managed to survive the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, an event that ranks among the most devastating natural disasters in recorded history. The interesting thing about the Lisbon earthquake — though I’m certainly no seismologist — is the type of motion the city was subjected to. The way I understand it, most earthquakes are strong in just one type. The Lisbon earthquake was notable in that it started with jostling up-and-down primary waves which were then followed up by even stronger shimmying, side-to-side secondary waves. Again, as I understand it, many buildings, even those built in the 1700′s, could withstand one of those two forces. But the combination of the up-and-down and side-to-side knocked down virtually every building in Lisbon.

Now I don’t know about you, but starting in grade school I wondered why the Portuguese were so dominant during the Age of Discovery (Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama), but then seemed to drop off the face of the Earth, as it were, in the Colonial Era. There were several contributing factors. Competition from other nations, wars and a gold rush in Brazil that concentrated their energies. However if you could reduce their lack of competitiveness in the eighteenth century to just one event, it would be the Lisbon earthquake. That quake, combined with the ensuing tsunami and 3-day fire, killed upward of 60,000 people, many of them sailors, soldiers, merchants and administrators. In other words, a whole lot of the people Portugal needed to expand and maintain its empire.

I’m fascinated by natural disasters that have world-historical consequences like that. Oh, and if you’re curious which other ones beat out the Lisbon earthquake on the Joe Scale of Interestingness (JSOI), they are the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 and the eruption of Santorini.

Monks, it’s believed. Specifically those who lived at Hieronymites (Jerónimos) Monastery which is of course in the Belém neighborhood of Lisbon. So the story goes, the monks there invented pastéis de Belém sometime in the 1700′s, the point at which the monastery was at its richest and most influential. That could be accurate given the history of the building, which to this day remains one of the jewels of Portuguese architecture. The first structure on the site was put up by no lesser person than Henry the Navigator in 1459, which makes sense as Lisbon is located where the magnificent Tagus river meets the Atlantic. It’s one of the world’s great natural ports.

The monastery was vastly expanded by King Manuel I starting in 1501. It was he who installed monks of the Hieronymite order there, whom he tasked with the full-time job of praying for his immortal soul. I sure wish I could afford a spiritual support staff like that, ’cause I tell you bothers and sisters, my soul could use it. Anyway, after Manuel’s 100-year project was completed the monastery was so magnificent that the Royal family of Portugal co-opted it as their private mausoleum. For the next several hundred years, Portuguese royalty as well as other national notables were buried there. No one else (living or dead) was allowed in.

In the rare moments when they weren’t praying for Manuel, the monks tended to the spiritual needs of sailors and navigators who sailed from nearby ports. It was from these spiritually needy ne’er do wells that the monks are thought to have acquired the sugar and spices they put to work in their pastéis. However since the monastery was sealed to outsiders after it became a repository for royal remains, the question remains: how did those pastries come to be so well-known? One theory has it that the monks sold their wares off-premises to make extra money.

But then extra money wouldn’t have been needed by such a wealthy monastery. At least not until the early 1800′s, the years of Europe’s great anti-religious upheaval. Those were the days when Catholic clerical properties (abbeys, lands and artworks) were being seized all over the Continent. That very thing happened to the Hieronymites Monastery in 1833. It’s said that in the years leading up to the, er, “acquisition” of the monastery by the Portuguese state, the monks were quite poor indeed. Some sources say they made and sold their creamy pastéis to make money. Others claim that out of desperation they sold the famous recipe to a local baker. Whatever the case, it is known that pastéis de Belém went up for sale to the general public starting in 1837. They’ve been a local tradition ever since.

Reader Lee alerts me to the initial reactions to the new Pierre Hermé Pastries, which technically isn’t out yet but which is available on Amazon. Apparently the book, while visually stunning, is rife with recipe and language errors. Of course errors are nothing terribly new in the realm of celebrity cookbooks, nor among cookbooks translated from other languages. I guess in this particular instance the combination is pretty devastating. It would be a shame for an average cookbook author, but it’s inexcusable for a pastry chef of Hermé’s renown. That’s gonna hit him where it hurts the most — right in the brand!

Of course most home ovens don’t go above 550 or so degrees Fahrenheit. That’s because for most people even 500 is more than enough. It isn’t for me, which is why I built a brick oven in my back yard. That thing can sustain a heat of over 850 if need be. If worse comes to worst I’ll go that route, but it’s no fun for me when I’m making something that no one else out there can do. And anyway I’ve seen some very good looking pastéis de Bélelm/nata that were baked at 550.

The only real wrinkle for those of you out there wanting to do these is the forms. First there’s the size issue. Pastéis actually look like mini pies, not square-sided tarts. But even those popular little “mini pie” pans are a bit too big for a pastel. Muffins pans on the other hand are a little too small. But jumbo muffin pans, now those things are just about perfect…at least to my eyes.

The problem is that most muffin pans these days have nonstick coatings on them. Those coatings start to break down much above 450 degrees Fahrenheit, making them unsafe to use for something like pasteis de Bélem. The good news is that unlike individual tart or pie pans, muffin pans are readily available, and in lots of different configurations. The ones I have are anodized aluminum, but you can also find plain stainless versions at kitchen supply shops. Either one of those will work, though I noticed that Lodge has some cast iron jumbo muffin pans too. They might be a little heavy, but still a decent solution. Who knew Lodge was so hip?

They’re actually pastéis de nata, which is to say, custard tarts. The “Bélem” comes from the name of the neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon where they were first made. “Cream pastries” is the literal translation, but outside the Portuguese-speaking world they also go by the name of “cream tart” “egg pastry” or “egg tart.” They are the de-facto national pastry of Portugal, though in recent years they’re become hugely popular in parts of Southeast Asia.

But what exactly are they? The answer is they’re quite small, three-or-so-inch-across tarts. They have a puff pastry base and they’re filled with a cinnamon- and lemon-scented custard. What’s so tough about that? you might ask. Nothing, except a big part of the aesthetic of these pastéis is their blistered and blackened exterior which can only be created with a very high-heat bake…up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit, or so claim the owners of the Antiga Confeitaria de Belém — the bakery that owns the trademark on “Pastéis de Belém” (this is why they’re known as “pastéis de nata” more generally).

It seems that good results can he achieved at 550 degrees, in fact 750 seems way too hot even for a tiny tart, but we’ll see about that, won’t we?

We made a couple of technical adjustments over the weekend here at Joe Pastry World Headquarters. Nothing most of you will notice, save for the fact that we fixed a little bug that’s kept you folks on mobile devices from accessing the site. I still don’t have a mobile-specific site up (what do you think, I’m made of money?), but those of you who want pastry updates regardless of your location can now see me on your smart phones.

I’ve been baking over my head the last several weeks, taking on recipes I know nothing about and succeeding about as much as you’d expect. The smart thing at this point is to retreat into something comfortable and familiar. But then why do the smart thing? Why not tempt fate even further, try to climb one of the Everests of pastry wearing nothing but sneakers, and risk total disaster and humiliation? Is that even a question? Let’s go!

I’m in Portuguese-speaking territory already, so let’s hop from Brazil over to Portugal and try something that’s supposed to be impossible: pastel de Belém. Boo-yah!