The glue that binds

  The main reason that wheat is the preferred flour of choice for pastry is gluten. Without it, pastry has a hard time holding together. There's a gluten free bakery near me, (of course there is, I live in Hackney), and I went to check out their offerings. One thing on the menu was a puff pastry something-or-other. This is the holy grail of gluten free; without gluten it just doesn't work and theirs was no exception.

  My hat came off to them as it was a good effort but it was a poor facsimile of the real thing. But as essential as gluten is, it has its downsides so you must take care. In as brief and simple a way as possible, think of gluten as elastic strands. If you make a dough with wheat flour and start to knead it, the gluten 'comes to life'. At first there are a few strands but the more you knead it, the stronger the and more numerous the strands become. This is fine with bread but if you overwork pastry, the finished article is brittle and tough.

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  Do you remember as a kid when they let you out of your cage under the stairs to make jam tarts? First you rubbed the flour and butter together, then a little bit of water was added and the mix suddenly turned into a big blob of plasticine. You sqooshed and mushed it like you were trying to wrestle with it before you finally rolled it out and cut circles; clumped all the leftovers together and rolled it all out repeating the process until all the pastry was gone. Does that sound familiar?

  What you probably don't remember was eating them and, more importantly, sharing them with grown ups, (who would have been underwhelmed, to say the least). With that amount of squelching and pounding, the pastry would have been so overworked that eating them would have been less like a soft, crumbly Mr Kipling's jam tart and more like a drinks coaster with jam on. Nasty.

  Don't worry, you're older and wiser now. When the quiche recipe you're following tells you to put the pastry in the fridge every so often, do it, because it lets the gluten relax and makes for a lighter bite. In general, as well as using cold butter, the less you work the pastry the better. Even a small amount of kneading and mixing will produce enough gluten to make the pastry hold together. Next time you let some kids out of their cage, give it a try. Make sure the pastry is treated carefully for most of the tarts but at the end, take a bit of pastry and mangle it like you're trying to make it confess. Bake it along with the others and you'll taste the difference as soon as you take a bite.

  Before I go, Professor Scoggis got in touch to mention Marco Polo and his contribution to pasta. You may have heard that Señor Polo is credited with bringing noodles homefrom China with him to Italy in the thirteenth century. If this were true then spaghetti is basically Chinese. A cursory glance on google confirms this, so tune in tomorrow to find out the full story.

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com