trying too hard
a wednesday wander
Hullo to readers old and new!
This weekend, paid subscribers will be getting an issue about the latest ways in which venture capital is harming the restaurant industry – my response to this piece in Expedite last week. New readers may enjoy some of my earlier pieces on this topic. This will be the first supporters-only issue, and I’m super excited for it. And now, a Wednesday wander?
These are my canele molds. The patina is acquired, they’re shiny when new. I first started making canele back in 2015, when we were running a cafe – nobody bought them, because almost nobody knew what they were, so they bought chocolate chip cookies instead (funnily, we had no problem selling the equally unfamiliar kouign amann).
This may have been for the best, because the canele were incredibly hard to produce. A third or more of them would go irreparably misshapen baked, with success or failure seemingly determined by the alignment of the stars. I felt pretty bad about this, until someone who’d been in Pierre Herme’s production kitchen told me their failure rate on canele was even worse.
We tried troubleshooting a million different ways – whisking the batter, stirring the batter, resting the batter more, resting the batter less, freezing the molds, not freezing the molds… nothing worked. We closed the cafe before we figured the recipe out.
I started making canele again this week. They’re coming out consistently perfect. All it took was the one thing we never dared to do, which was to turn the oven down. There’s probably a parable here.
I love Caneles. My wife and I first gobbled the small and caramelly bunts while on a Paris vacation, years back. For the last several years we lived in Bangkok, Thailand, where we explored incredible cafes with superb cappuccinos, and, to my surprise, there were Caneles in many of the shops. Again we gobbled. Well, you can imagine my surprise to find them in Thailand. There, with each bite, we had the enjoyment of memories back to Paris. Now I'm in the US midwest where Caneles are not easy to find. This article takes me back to both Bangkok and Paris.
...Caneles, oh how I miss you...
Awe....beeswax. Love this. And as someone with some skills in the kitchen who has never successfully made a popover, Yorkshire pudding, or Dutch baby pancake, i.e., anything with a crêpe-like batter that is supposed to puff, I can relate.