Regular reader and commenter Chana writes in with this:

You see -- you take a simple potato knish, change the dough a litte, fill it with something a little different, and everyone is screaming "you call that a knish? You call THAT a KNISH?? Are you crazy? That is NOT a KNISH!!"

You take a macaron, completely and unashamedly change the ingredients on both the inside AND the outside, and what do people say? "Oh, what a brilliant idea! What an absolutely magnificent macaron! Oh, I wish I could make macarons like that! Boy, these macarons are just incredible, aren't they?"

Too true. I tell you, the things I put up with for you people.

So. Two disks of almond meringue stuck together with a filling. Not terribly much to work with from a creative standpoint. Or at least that's the conclusion Parisian pastry chefs seem to have collectively arrived at in the decades after Desfontaines' innovation. For more than fifty years macarons remained pretty straightforward affairs. The meringue disks were generally flavored with the traditional almond (sometimes chocolate) and fillings consisted of ganache, buttercream or jam. Then Hermé showed up and really put the creative pedal down. Soon macarons of very different kinds began showing up at Parisian tea parties, from the conventional (chocolate, raspberry, caramel, coffee) to the adventurous (chocolate mint, mango, pistachio, passion fruit) to the exotic (jasmine, rose-lychee-raspberry, white truffle and hazelnut, lime-basil and violet-cassis) to the downright odd (olive oil and vanilla, chocolate and foie gras). Of course once that got started, ambitious pastry chefs the world over wanted in on the act. Today, depending where you go, you can find macarons made with everything from green tea and adzuki beans to roasted red peppers, whiskey and tomatoes. How far can it all go? Who knows? But personally, I sometimes wonder how much creativity one little cookie can take.

Here are the kind of posts I'd be putting up if I were four inches tall, made of clay and living in a cardboard box. The techniques are amazingly similar. Terrific stuff. Thanks to reader Lisa H.!

What do macarons and macaroni have in common? Not much, other than the fact that they're both made from pulverized ingredients (almonds and wheat, respectively). Though etymologists debate the subject, it's thought by many that the Italian word maccheroni comes from an earlier Italian word, maccare that means "to reduce" or "make smaller." The present day Italian word macarie, "rubble", lends credence to this idea. The Spanish word for "chew" — mascar — is quite similar.

Macarons are such simple preparations, their origins are fairly easy to triangulate. Their principal ingredient is sugar, which means they date no further back than the Colonial period, the time when cane sugar was flowing in earnest from the West Indies. That supposition is bolstered by the fact that they are meringues, which means they were probably invented in the 18th Century, a period known here at joepastry.com as The Century of Foams, the time when everyone who was anyone in Europe was eating trendy egg foam-based foods like mousse and sponge cake. Further, their defining ingredient is almond, which means they're from southern Europe, areas where the almond — a plant native to the Middle East — was either imported by invading Muslims (Spain) or brought in via trade (Italy). Their name is the giveaway there: macaron, a word that's strikingly similar to the Italian maccherone, singular of the word we English-speakers know as "macaroni."

There are a number of stories about the origin of macarons, all of them likely apocryphal. However they all trace their invention to Italy, where indeed macarons still exist in the form of amaretti, small almond cookies made from — you guessed it — almonds, sugar and egg whites. But amaretti, it's important to note here, aren't meringues. That technical twist was added almost certainly by the French.

Exactly when the macaron became a meringue is a mystery. What is known for certain is that simple, thin disks of almond-flavored meringue (then called "macarons") were common in France in the first few decades of the 20th century. It wasn't until the early 1930's that the macaron was transformed into the Parisian pastry shop staple that it is today. That's when an enterprising young baker by the name of Pierre Desfontaines, an employee of the legendary Ladurée bake shop and tea salon, thought to join two macarons together into a sandwich with a ganache filling in between. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Here it's important to note that not everybody in France considers the Ladurée macaron to be the perfect iteration of this classic snack. Plenty of folks still prefer the plain disks, and consider the filled, double-decker Parisian versions to be foppish, citified nonsense. To each their own, as they say. I'll eat them either way.

Tell an experienced gourmand that you're planning on making macarons for your dinner party this weekend and he'll look at you as though you've just announced you're going to jump the Snake River Canyon on a rocket-propelled sky-cycle. You can't! It's too dangerous! Such is the aura of fear that has come to surround this once-humble sweet, mostly thanks to one man: French pastry master, Pierre Hermé. For it was Hermé who, in the 1990's, set out to reinvent the simple macaron as a showpiece for his singular creative genius.

He succeeded. In fact he succeeded too well. So much so that in the process of updating a classic he — as my mother might say — ruined it for everyone. Now all but the most audacious professional bakers go limp at the very thought of making a macaron. Why? Because theirs won't look as good and taste as good as Hermé's, obviously. Even some of the world's best cookbook authors have bought into the mentality, omitting macarons entirely from their books — or worse — writing about them but declining to provide readers with a recipe. The message is unmistakable: if you can't make a world-class macaron, you shouldn't even try.

What hogwash. A macaron is composed of just three ingredients: sugar, almonds and egg whites. Exactly how they come together is, admittedly, a bit of a trick. However it's by no means beyond the ken of a careful and committed home baker. If you know what to look for, you can make up an excellent macaron batter in as little as ten minutes — and have them baked up in about an hour total. Heed the science and you can, with surprisingly little effort, produce a macaron that will amaze your friends and terrify your enemies. I'll show you how. Stay tuned.

Here are two projects that I couldn't resist lumping together since they're ostensibly the same thing, at least to an etymologist. In practice of course they are very, very different. One — at least if it's made by master pastry chef Pierre Hermé — is widely considered to be bakingdom's ultimate one-bite delight. It's also thought by many to be the world's most difficult cookie (though it's technically a petit four). The other is largely dismissed in elite pastry circles, a pedestrian concoction of baked, sweetened coconut and egg whites. Exactly which is which I'll leave to you to ponder for the moment. But let's just say I've been looking forward to this high-low matchup for quite a while.

Hope everyone celebrating Thanksgiving this past week had a terrific holiday. As for me, I want to offer my own thanks to yet another anonymous StumbleUponer whose posting of my jelly doughnut tutorial brought some 300,000 visitors to the site over the weekend. Now if I only could have persuaded each one of them to give me a dollar...

Reader Chana continues the conversation on Marie the Jewess (Miriam) and her connection to the bain marie:

In classic Jewish commentary, Moses' sister Miriam is always associated with wells and water. (Although I doubt the classic Jewish commentators cooked anything, much less in a bain marie.) The bible says that after Miriam died, the people were without water. The commentary takes it several steps further and says that throughout the 40 years of wanderings in the desert, there was always a well of water because of Miriam. When Miriam died, the well dried up. (Luckily it was toward the end of the trip.) Miriam's other claims to fame are checking up on Moses while he was hidden in the Nile (water, water), and "the song of the sea," leading the Israelites in a song of praise to God after the splitting of the red sea when they all escaped Egypt. And now we can add the bain marie to her list of accomplishments!

Do I have the world's most erudite readership or what? Great stuff, Chana — and thanks!

Chef Mike C. offers this:

My Banquets & Catering chef at the CIA would always sprinkle an initial layer of sugar onto his brulees as soon as they came out of the oven. This way, that sugar would melt and fill in the little pits or uneven bits on the surface. That way, he said, when you put another layer of sugar on top when they were all cooled, you would have a perfectly smooth, glass-like layer of caramelized sugar.

Another chef I worked with in California used brown sugar instead of granulated sugar. I don't remember them having an exceptional crunch (maybe because of the molasses?), but the flavor on them was great.

Great tips, Mike! I'll add them to the permanent crème brûlée tutorial.

It's Thanksgiving in the States, and the Pastry family is headed out of town for a few days. Back Monday. When I return: macarons — and macaroons!

Yesterday's pictures of crème brûlée in progress elicited this response from reader (and apparently working cook) Dennis J.:

This is off-topic, but your picture of egg yolks and sugar got me thinking. Recently I left a few yolks sitting in a bowl with some sugar while I was doing other things in the kitchen. When I came back there were light yellow curd-like bits at the point where the yolks and the sugar were touching. I asked the chef what happened and he told me that raw sugar reacts with egg yolks to create heat, and the egg had "cooked". Is that true?

I've gotten this question a few times, but never answered it on the blog as far as I know. It's common kitchen lore that egg yolks and sugar react to create heat. The truth is that they don't, though it can appear that yolk in contact with sugar has been cooked, especially if the yolks are a deep yellow. In the picture above I left an egg sitting on some sugar for about twenty minutes. You can see that there's a ring of lighter colored yolk along the bottom where the two are touching. What's causing that?

Sugar, as I've discussed on many occasions before, is a hygroscopic substance. Which is to say, it absorbs water. It absorbs it from the air, but it'll also absorb it from an egg yolk if the two are in contact, right through the yolk's membrane. An egg yolk contains a mixture of water, fat and protein with a few sugars and other miscellaneous nutrients mixed in. Take the water away and the long stringy protein molecules get closer to one another, to the point that they ultimately coagulate into clumps. Once they do that, there's no reversing the process. My best advice is to keep your eggs and sugar separated until you're ready to make your mix.

Thanks for the good question, Dennis!

UPDATE: Big Fat Dave points out that there's a term for the movement of water through a semi-permeable membrane: osmosis. You know, Dave, you're exactly right.

As I mentioned last week, it's a water bath (bain being "bath" in French). But then why do we use a French term and who the heck was Marie? I've wondered that for quite a while but have never found much on the subject. Leave it to Jim C. of Chez Jim to chime in with an answer.

Turning (OK, clicking) to the most authoritative online French dictionary, I find...that the bain marie - mentioned at least as far back as the 14th c. - was named for a very specific alchemist...Marie the Jewess, who supposedly came up with this technique. And you can bet she wasn't making creme brulee.

It points out that Marie (Miriam) the Jewess may have been a reference to the sister of Moses and Aaron, a prophetess, and supposedly the author of works on alchemy. From there to an association of the Virgin Mary with esoteric mysteries of alchemy "succeeding to the Egyptian tradition of the myth of Isis." One wonders: did [Carl] Jung ever investigate the bain marie?

Mighty deep thoughts considering a bain marie is such a shallow pan of water. Never let it be said that joepastry.com isn't an intellectual community.

My favorite crème brûlée is a very pain one, with just half a teaspoon of vanilla extract added. After that, it's crème brûlée scented with orange, like this one right here. Like an English pudding, crème brûlée somehow manages to pull off a sense of grandeur while still being an incredibly simple thing to prepare. Among its many virtues, it'll keep for several days in the fridge, making it an ideal dessert to serve at a dinner party. You simply pop them out of the fridge, caramelize the tops and you're good to go.

Start by preheating your oven to 325 and setting a pan of water on the stove to simmer. Next, infuse your cream. Put half a pint of cream in a small saucepan along with the rind of half an orange and half a teaspoon of vanilla extract (this recipe can be doubled if you like). Bring the mixture to a simmer and set it aside.

Add your sugar to your egg yolks...

...and whisk until light in color.

Strain the warm — now orange-scented — cream into the egg and sugar mixture...

...and whisk until the sugar is melted.

Now all there is to do is ladle the mixture into your ramekins. I've got mine sitting in a roasting pan here, but you can use a baking dish too.

Put the roasting pan on a low rack in the oven, then add enough simmering water to come half way up the sides of the ramekins.

Bake about half an hour, until the custard is set (when you move the ramekin it should jiggle, not slosh). Let the custards cool, then put them in the refrigerator for a minimum of four hours, ideally overnight. When you're ready to serve them, spinkle about a tablespoon of granulated sugar onto the top of each custard. Oops...I sort of overdid it here. Oh well, no biggie.

Now, apply the heat. As luck would have it, I ran out of propane about half a second after this picture was snapped. Not having a salamander handy, I went with the other, other option: the broiler. It works just fine, though you want to take care to get the sugared custard as close to the heat source as you reasonably can. You want a lot of heat delivered quickly, so as to caramelize the sugar without cooking — and breaking — the custard. More time in the broiler means a greater chance of curdling — so blast the suckers and get'em out of there.

Once you've got a nice brown top, let them sit for five minutes so the molten sugar hardens. Plate, garnish and serve.

Oh yeah, that's the stuff.

UPDATE: Chef Mike C. adds:

My Banquets & Catering chef at the CIA would always sprinkle an initial layer of sugar onto his brulees as soon as they came out of the oven. This way, that sugar would melt and fill in the little pits or uneven bits on the surface. That way, he said, when you put another layer of sugar on top when they were all cooled, you would have a perfectly smooth, glass-like layer of caramelized sugar.

Another chef I worked with in California used brown sugar instead of granulated sugar. I don't remember them having an exceptional crunch (maybe because of the molasses?), but the flavor on them was great.

Thanks Mike!

Sorry for that, all of you who were waiting for crème brûlée photos on Friday, but it turned out to be one of those sorts of work days: swamped. I'll have'em up shortly!

Which is a water bath to all of us regular people. A water bath is the classic way to prevent custards from curdling (or "breaking") because it keeps the temperature of the cooking custard at a constant low. How so? For one because liquid water —unless it's at a rollicking boil — doesn't get above 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Beyond that it becomes steam. Thus everything below the water line will remain below boiling, usually below the curdling point (which is around 190 for most still custards) even though the temperature of the oven is 325.

But then if the oven is that hot, what keeps all the water from just turning to steam? The answer is that some of it does, however as you may recall from high school physics classes, evaporation is a cooling action. As water molecules leave the surface of the water and depart for the air, the liquid water that remains behind is left cooler for the effort. Neat. Thus the best water baths for custards are very broad and shallow, since more surface area means more evaporation and more cooling.

I break from the early makers of crème brûlée in that I prefer a very smooth, silky texture without any "bits" in it. I also like a simple, clean appearance that's free of any flecks of this or that. The trouble is, it's those bits and flecks that add flavor to this chilly custard dessert. So what to so? The answer for me is: infusion.

If you're wondering what exactly an "infusion" is, it's simply a process by which flavor is extracted from one substance and delivered to another. The extractee is usually something fairly strong like a spice or an herb. The receiving substance is usually a liquid of some kind: water, vinegar or broth, but most of the time something fatty like cream, melted butter or oil. Why? Because the things that are being transferred from point A to point B are usually essential oils: volatile fat-like substances commonly found in plants (indeed, they're part of many plants' defensive systems). Being structurally similar to the fat molecules found in cream and butter, they disperse readily in them, creating a vast, rich sea of flavor.

It's fat's ability to dissolve and deliver flavorful substances that makes it such an indispensable ingredient in the kitchen. Of course that property can work against us too, as anyone who's ever left an uncovered slab of butter in the fridge next to some leftover Thai food knows. Panang gai is lousy on a sweet roll. Yet a little cream simmered with a sprig of rosemary is poetry in potatoes au gratin. Half-and-half that's been heated with thyme and lemon zest can become a sublime crème anglaise. And once the spent herbs, spices and peels are strained out, there's nothing left behind to ruin the presentation. Their flavors and aromas are the only evidence they were ever there.

Reader Maria writes in with this:

I have a question about freezing yeasted bread dough. Is it ok to do, and if so, at what stage in the process should I put it in the freezer? I've been told a variety of things and it seems to me like it would make the most sense to do it after the 2nd rise (if there is one) and rounding process. It would be really handy if I could freeze things, since I have a pretty full schedule. I'm particularly interested in freezing sweet doughs, like for cinnamon rolls. Is there is a difference in freezing a sweet dough vs. a whole wheat bread because of the fat and sugar ratios?

Even though I'm talking crème brûlée this week, this question is well worth answering, for I get it a lot. The answer is that yeast doughs of all kinds freeze well, though I personally don't freeze unbaked bread very often. However I regularly employ the freezer for things like Danish, croissants, brioche and cinnamon buns. The best point to freeze a yeast dough is after shaping, just before the second rising (proofing) stage. Simply freeze the whatever-they-are on pans, then once they're solid, put them in freezer bags for storage

The night before you want to bake, lay out your rolls or buns on parchment-lined sheet pans and put the pans in the refrigerator. By morning they will have thawed and will be ready for proofing and baking. The proofing will take perhaps 50% longer than normal because the dough will be deeply chilled, but once proofed, they should bake up every bit as well as if they'd never been frozen.

Thanks for the question, Maria!

What are you kidding me? Other than making crème brûlée you mean? If you dig pastry, lots of things. You can makes s'mores without a campfire, for one. A blowtorch can turn a humble split banana and a sprinkling of brown sugar into a gourmet platform for homemade ice cream. It's also handy for toasting meringue toppings. On the savory side, it's great when you need to roast the skin off a chile pepper or a tomato and don't feel like heating the broiler up. Then there's melting or browning cheese, say, on the top of a bowl of onion soup.

And then of course there are tarts. This is where a blowtorch really shines, in my opinion, since I can think of a variety of tarts — savory and sweet — than are best served room temperature, yet benefit from a light top-toasting just before serving. Alsatian onion tart is a great example. Another is a tri-color pesto tart I used to like to make, since pesto (as many of you know) can't handle oven heat. It turns to a greasy, dark green smear. A quick brush with a blowtorch, though, will brown the very top without "melting" what's underneath.

I also apply mine to my mixer bowl when I want to warm its contents as the machine runs. That's a neat trick if you're mixing a batter but forgot to take the ingredients out of the fridge ahead of time (just be sure to wave the torch lightly so as not to cook anything delicate — like the eggs). I kid you not when I tell you that the biggest proponent of the kitchen torch was Julia Child. For her, a work area wasn't complete without one.

We live in an age of culinary overkill. Our waffles come stacked to the moon with toppings. Our tacos are stuffed with burritos stuffed with nachos. As exhausted as we get by our own over-abundance, it's easy to get lulled into the assumption that every food that came before our time was by definition a study in simplicity. Not so.

Take crème brûlée. Many of us recoil — and many of you folks out there did — at the notion of putting ingredients like whole fruits or peanut butter into the mix. Since I love an ultra-simple crème brûlée, I'm in broad agreement. However it's interesting to take a look at some of the early recipes for this particular dish. They paint a picture of a custard that could practically be mistaken for a fruitcake. This one is from Massialot himself, from the 1705 edition of his Nouveau Cuisinier Roial et Bourgeois:

Crême brulée

Eggs
Flour
Milk
Cinnamon stick
Limepeel/other preserves
Sugar
Orange peel/Lemon peel/pistachioes/almonds
Orange blossom water
Feuillantine
Fleurons

Take four or five egg yolks, depending on the size of your dish or plate. Mix them well in a pot, with a good pinch of flour, and bit by bit pour in milk, about a pint. Put in a little cinnamon stick, and chopped lime peel, and other preserves. One can also add orange peel, or lemon; and it is called Crême brulée à l'Orange. To make it tastier, one can mix in peeled pistachios, or almonds, with a drop of orange blossom water.

Put it on a lit stove, & keep stirring it, watching that your Cream not stick to the bottom. When it is well-cooked, put a dish or a plate on a lit stove; & having poured the cream into it cook it some more, until you see it sticking to the side of the dish. Then, take it off & sugar it well on top, besides the sugar one puts in it. Take the fire shovel, red hot, & at the same time burn the Cream, so that it takes on a nice golden color. As a garnish, use feuillantine, little fleurons or meringue or other pieces of crispy paste. Glaze your cream, if you want; otherwise serve it without that, always as an entremets.

So, not only was Massialot's crême brulée often brimming with candied fruits and nuts, it was adorned with pastry flourishes (that's what "feuillantine" and "fleurons" are). I'm sure it all made for quite a presentation. However it makes for an interesting study in the principle of "less-is-more." Very often, more is actually more.

(Hat tip — as usual — to Jim Chevallier.)