Did you know TV Celebrity chef Paul Hollywood worked as a chef in Cyprus
Paul Hollywood: ‘I’m a bakery tourist’
Judge of ‘The Great British Bake-Off’ Paul Hollywood describes how his first stop in a new town is always to the bakery
I do love my full English breakfast, but not every day. What I can’t do without first thing in the morning, though, is my Danish pastry or a croissant – anything with a laminated dough, enriched with butter to make it beautifully golden and flaky.
When my career in hotels was taking off in the Nineties, I went to work as a head baker in Cyprus, where I was making Danish pastries every day. I can remember that the head chef was always on my back to put more seasonal fruits in with the crème pâtissière. I’d even make them with rhubarb. Try it, it’s a good twist.
I was also out there teaching other bakers. It is what I am still doing now – passing on the knowledge I have accumulated over the years. What I have learnt is that the key to a good Danish pastry is, like most things, good-quality flour; but more particularly, in this case, good-quality butter. The Normandy butters of northern France have a slightly higher melting temperature, so they allow you to laminate (or layer) your dough and your butter together without the butter melting.
And the key – and this is my pearl of wisdom on Danish pastries – is that when you are layering your dough, you must keep it chilled between each turn.
Cyprus, for example, is a country where baking is still very “village”. By that I mean that they use whatever they have to hand. So there are sesame seeds in everything. Likewise poppy seeds. And a lot of the bread will have tons of cumin seeds on it, all roasted and toasted. Then you’ll get these local mastic and mahlepi spices that are ground down to a powder and used in Greek Cypriot bread. It gives it a distinctive aniseed flavour.
Wherever you go in Europe, you’ll find each country has particular flavours in their baked goods. It is one of the big differences between Europe and the United States. When I was working there, you could travel from state to state and find very little variation between the same basic products – whether Thanksgiving cakes, pumpkin or pecan pies – or how they were made.
In Europe, though, there’s always something new, if you get beyond your hotel and go looking for it. For me, it is always part of my holiday to go and work my way along the shelf in the local artisan bakery with its breads, savoury tartlets, pastries and cakes. It is soul food, one of those things that tells you about a place, and the history of a place and its people.
One thing I have been able to map with my “bakery tourism” is how different styles and recipes have evolved and travelled. The croissant, for example, has its origins not in France, but in Turkey. Whisper it quietly next time you are in the boulangerie, but the French took the idea from the Turks and made it their own.
And the same, I believe, applies to the Danish pastry. I’m not convinced its origins are actually in Denmark. The laminated dough that is its basis started off in Vienna, not Copenhagen, and it is said that what we now call Danish pastries were introduced to Denmark by Austrian bakers in the 1850s. They had gone there because there was a strike by Danish bread makers. And indeed, in Denmark itself, what we know as a classic Danish pastry is usually referred to as a “wienerbrød” – or “Viennese
Daily Telegraph
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