Have you ever watched "The Great British Baking Show," seen something that looked good and said to yourself, "I have got to try to make that"?
And then you never did, right?
I watched an episode recently (I'm about a year or two behind), told myself "I have got to try to make that" _ and then I actually made it.
It was wonderfully, spectacularly, magnificently amazing.
The bakers on the show had to make a Portuguese custard tart called pasteis de nata. The contestants were baffled, because they had never even heard of them before. I had certainly never heard of them. Co-host Prue Leith apparently had not heard of them, either.
I'm not even sure that a lot of people in Portugal have heard of them.
Pasteis de nata, according to "The Great British Baking Show" and a number of online sources, was created sometime in the 1600s or before at a monastery in Lisbon. The story is that monasteries at the time used egg whites to starch their clothes, which left a lot of yolks.
The monks figured out a great way to use those yolks: Make a sweet custard with which to fill small tarts with a puff-pastry crust.
The tarts are pretty, too, a bright yellow center inside a flaky, golden brown crust. The cheerful yellow custard is traditionally mottled with small brown spots. To me, brown spots mean the custard was burned _ but apparently, it's the way they sell them in Portugal.
And as it turns out, the mottling helps. Without it, the tarts are just a little too sweet. The browning adds just enough depth to offset some of that rich sweetness and introduces an intriguing new level of complexity.
Unfortunately, the recipe is also a bit complex. This is not a dish for the beginning cook. It takes time to put it all together, the filling requires more steps (and more pots) than a typical custard and the crust is traditionally made with puff pastry _ which needs knowledge, patience and skill.
That is why I choose to make a simplified version of puff pastry that the Brits, in that clever way of theirs, call rough puff pastry. It's easier to make than the real thing but is almost as good.
If even rough puff is too daunting, you could buy your own puff pastry dough at the grocery store. It won't taste as good as the rough puff you'd make yourself, but the results are certainly better than acceptable.
Puff pastry works by separating hundreds of layers of thin dough by an equal number of thin layers of butter. As the dough cooks, the butter turns to steam, and the pressure of the steam forces the layers of dough ever so delicately apart.
You get a light, shatteringly flaky crust that floods your mouth with buttery leaves of pastry.
The secret to making it is to keep the butter cold _ if the butter is too soft, it will blend with the dough and not turn to steam. So, while you're folding the dough to create all of those layers, you periodically have to refrigerate it for a half-hour or so. I even put my flour in the freezer for a while before using it, just to keep the dough chilled.
The filling is a standard custard (milk plus egg yolks plus heat) that is sweetened with a supersaturated sugar solution. That's just a combination of sugar and water that has had some of the water boiled out _ it's what candy makers know as thread stage.
The custard is also flavored with a cinnamon stick and a couple of slices of lemon peel, which make it taste like more than just an ordinary custard. It tastes like a true pasteis de nata.
In Portugal, the pastries are often served with a sprinkling of powdered sugar and cinnamon on top, and they are best when they are still warm from the oven.
After you have enjoyed them, you can think about what to do with all of those egg whites. I'd suggest using them to starch a monastery's clothes.
