Some weeks ago, I visited the Dahlia Bakery, a Tom Douglas effort that recently opened next to his well-known Dahlia Lounge. I had heard some extremely complimentary comments concerning the food there, and decided that it was worth a visit.
I had also been told that the Dahlia Bakery had the best éclairs yet produced in the city of Seattle, and it is with great sadness that I must report that the eclairs at Dahlia Bakery were in fact the best I have had in Seattle... Which is to say that they were a failure, but an intriguing failure.
Do not mistake me; overall, Dahlia Bakery is indeed outstanding. The pear tart with caramel sauce is a delight; the chocolate pecan cream cookies are a marvelously addictive demonstration of how the mass-produced sandwich cookies we all have eaten from time to time should truly taste; and the gingersnaps, the chocolate truffle cookies, indeed, almost every item in the shop - truly worth the time to eat.
But then there were the éclairs. The tragic, could-have-been-a-contender, perhaps irredeemably flawed éclairs.
From the outside, these éclairs were truly fantastic. The perfectly moist, tender puff pastry was quite sublime in appearance and texture. The chocolate on top, spread in a thick, beautiful layer, was perfectly bittersweet, with a consistency just thick enough to stand alone without being intrusively hard. These elements were absolute perfection, and worthy of applause.
But of course, these elements, even when executed perfectly, do not an éclair make. No, one must fill it with the proper substance, the absolute, unalterable prerequisite: I am referring, of course, to the crème pâtissière.
Which was not present.
Instead, upon biting through the peerless exterior of one of these seemingly utopian confections, I was confronted with a substance with the exact flavor and texture of melted vanilla ice cream. Truly outstanding vanilla ice cream, mind you; indeed, had it been actual ice cream, I might even have been persuaded to excuse the impudence of its presence in place of crème pâtissière.
It was not actual ice cream, however, and the result was a gloppy mess that failed to satisfy and succeeded in besmirching my hands and immediate surroundings to a surprising degree. Upon inquiring as to why this otherwise outstanding pastry had thus been mistreated, I learned that the éclairs had once been filled with pure crème pâtissière, but that some customers had complained that it was "too rich", resulting in the addition of "just a little" whipped cream.
"Too rich"? "Just a little"? Pfaugh!
If the crème pâtissière were in fact too rich for the debased tastes of some Seattlites, there are two acceptable solutions:
The first (and preferred) method is to slightly increase the proportion of flour in the crème pâtissière. This will make the taste lighter without compromising the quality of the final product.
The second approach is simply to make smaller éclairs, though it is difficult to maintain the quality of the puff pastry at the smaller size, and small éclairs are something of a lesser travesty in and of themselves.
Adding whipped cream, even "just a little" (a description with which I take significant issue in this case), is not acceptable. At this point you have something best described as Bavarian cream, only without the gelatin needed to stabilize it. Any of you who have read my views on éclairs will also know that Bavarian cream is not an acceptable filling.
Knowing that Tom Douglas has a good record of caring about his food and being responsive to feedback, I sent him a polite note directing him to my oh-so-reasonably-expressed views (see Éclairs: Make them right, or BURN in HELL!) concerning proper éclair-making.
Last week, I received a response indicating that they'd decided to "spruce up" their éclair output, and so I returned to inspect the results.
As I shall soon disclose in part II, all is not yet well with the éclairs at Dahlia Bakery.
No comments:
Post a Comment