Hello from NL 37. This is Bake Sense, the somewhat ordered record of ramblings that concern the world of baking, from championing flavour and wholesome ingredients to questioning where those ingredients come from and how we can make the most of them. Along the way, you’ll find recipes and insights from life in and out of the professional bakery and plenty of fruitful chat.
I’ll be travelling this week, so I expect the next newsletter will land in two weeks so take your time over this one, and if you’re new here, look back through the archive for any editions you might’ve missed.
Autumn has well and truly arrived at the bakery, and we’re ready for it. Ready to settle into the rhythm and sync with the sunlight. The first few weeks of darker mornings bring the risk that you’ll lose your place in a routine that is rhythmic with the sun’s rise, and you remind yourself to watch the clock a little closer for a while.
The pear becomes prolific, offering an alternative to the apple. More musk with a need to practice patience as they ripen and a cautious care to catch the buttery flesh before it decays from within.
Bunyard writes a pear “…must be approached, as it’s feminine nature indicates, with discretion and reverence; it withholds its secrets from the merely hungry. Fickle and uncertain. It may too often be, concealing an inward decay by a fair and smiling cheek…”
The forename ‘Beurré’, which precedes many varieties, is no misnomer. The butter-like texture is alluring, firm enough to offer just the slightest hint of resistance is my preference. In contrast to the apple, which is deemed desirable if crunchy, a perfectly ripe pear should be able to be consumed quietly; crisp flesh has a tendency to be astringent or underdeveloped in flavour and the texture hard and gritty.
Varieties offer varied flavours, as they should. Many are indescribable, with qualities reminiscent of almond, honey, perfume, metal and musk at various stages of ripeness, with pear ester responsible for the familial flavour. But even an uninspiring unripe pear can be coaxed into submission by gentle poaching in a flavourful stock or by baking with a bedfellow, such as vanilla or star anise.
Pears’ arrival coincides with a turn in our thoughts, as puddings become more prominent a craving. I don’t believe you can survive autumn and winter in Yorkshire without the consoling thought that pudding can legitimately happen at any moment.
I’m not talking ‘pudding’ in the American sense because that is more like custard, which we have with our pudding. I’m talking hot puddings, steaming bowls of steamed sponge, pools of custard, lakes of syrup and seas of sauce—a jug of cream to cut the richness.
For something to constitute pudding, it must be hot or have a hot component. For example…ice cream is dessert, cake is dessert. Serve hot apple pie with ice cream and its pudding, serve hot cake with pouring cream and its pudding. This is not a matter of potayto, potahto. This a matter of hot, spongey facts.
The word ‘dessert’ has connotations of some degree of refinement, whereas pudding needs none. It is rich, sticky and stodgy but not unceremonious. It is dark mahogany, the breadth of beige, every shade of brown, umber and sienna; it is treacle, toffee, parkin, ginger, molasses, crumble and cobbler, a great sponge dome anointed with glistening golden syrup and jewel-coloured jams.
Today’s recipe combines pear and pudding with pitch-perfect partners, dark rye flour and dark chocolate, in a dish to welcome in the first freezing cold evenings of autumn.