Neglect of duty

  Thanks for your patience while I was off shaking my thang yesterday. Fortunately we can continue today with a little chat about proportions. It kind of goes without saying, but though we've looked at the functions of different ingredients, the proportions are also important.

  What's unhelpful is that the examples I'd thought of to illustrate this have completely slipped my mind so I'm going to have to fire up the grey matter again. (Why do we put up with this? -Ed.). Oh, yes, béchamel sauce, profiteroles and custard.

  The difference between a béchamel and a velouté is the liquid added to the roux. And milk and it's a béchamel, water, in the form of stock, and it's a velouté. A roux is made from butter and flour that are cooked together but check this out; heat the butter and water together first and then add the flour and you're on your way to making a choux pastry. All you need is to add some eggs, (for rubberiness), and you've got the choux buns you need for profiteroles.

  Custard and creme patissiere are basically thickened sweet milk. Custard gets a bit of cornflour to thicken it, creme pat gets a combination of wheat and corn flour and is thicker. Thick enough to pipe, in fact, but with more milk and some eggs we're back to pancake batter again. To complete the tour, back off the milk and and add loads of butter and pancakes become cake. 

  I'm going over this again because it's really useful to see how these basic ingredients show up in so many similar recipes. It's a useful way to learn the functions of these ingredients so when you see them in recipes, it's easy to envisage how it's going to end up and, and here's the exciting bit, what you need to do to adjust or make up your own recipes. Doesn't that sound exciting?

Re the pic. This seems to be the most monumental waste of money I've seen in a long time. I doubt it would get used more than twice before sitting around collecting dust, but I'm sure you'd have worked that out by yourself.

Kirk out

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