Tova du Plessis Transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps. You are listening to She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast from The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and cookbook author, and my fourth book is coming out this fall. Each Saturday I'm hanging out with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes.
Today's guest is Tova du Plessis. Tova is a pastry chef and baker, and she's the founder of Essen Bakery in Philadelphia. Since its opening in 2016, Essen has taken the city of brotherly love by storm with its Jewish pastries and breads, and Tova's been nominated four times for the James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker. She joins me today to chat about her culinary journey. We chat about her shift from pre-med to culinary school, her wildly supportive parents, making challah with her mom when she was little, and we walked through her recipe for black and white cookies, a staple on Essen's menu. Stay tuned for my chat with Tova.
Thank you to Plugra Premium European-Style Butter for supporting today's show. As some of you know, I've been a big fan of Plugra for some time now and was introduced to it at my very first bakery job when I was just a newbie baker. Fast-forward to today, I'm a professional baker, cookbook author, and recipe developer, and I continue to rely on Plugra for all my baking needs. My fridge is always stocked with Plugra sticks and solids. I especially love that Plugra contains 82% butter fat. The higher butter fat content means less moisture and more fat, and as bakers know fat equals flavor. Plugra butter is also slow churned, making it more pliable and easy to work with. I do a lot of baking this time of year for work and for myself and my family. Comfy bakes like my Pistachio Chocolate Anytime Buns and Cinnamon Sugar Buttermilk Doughnut Holes, and I always reach for Plugra unsalted butter. I've also been making a lot of yeasted breads lately, and I love the buttery flavor Plugra adds to my dough. Plugra Premium European-Style Butter is the perfect choice. From professional kitchens to your home kitchen, ask for Plugra at your favorite grocery store, or visit plugra.com for a store locator and recipes.
Kerry Diamond:
Hi everybody, this is Kerry Diamond from Radio Cherry Bombe, and I have a little housekeeping for you. Cherry Bombe is on the road. We're hosting eight events this summer and traveling from Portland Maine to Portland Oregon with lots of stops in between. Head to cherrybombe.com to check out our events calendar and see if we're coming to a town near you, or maybe our travel schedules will overlap. That would be fun.
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Let's check in with today's guest.
Jessie Sheehan:
Tova! So excited to have you on She's My Cherry Pie, and to talk black and white cookies with you and so much more.
Tova du Plessis:
I'm so excited to be here.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Johannesburg, South Africa, and in your family food was super important and your mom cooked a lot, but she was not necessarily a confident baker, though she did make challah with you. But she really encouraged you to help her and also to make dessert for the family.
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah, like you said, it was an Orthodox Jewish family. Every Friday night dinner was a whole three course meal, and then of course there's all the holidays, so we're cooking, hosting. I grew up with always cooking, hosting. To my parents it meant that all the kids have jobs, all the kids have to contribute. My mom generally cooked, but my job was generally dessert. I was just landed with that.
Jessie Sheehan:
What kinds of things did you bake and make for dessert? I mean, the challah isn't sweet, but besides the baking of the challah, what other kinds of things were you making?
Tova du Plessis:
It's so funny, I made these brownies. I remember from the Australian Women's Weekly. My mom used to get all of those publications. I think it was a magazine, but she would get cookbooks. She had so many of them, and there was one baking one that had a brownie in it, and it was called cappuccino brownies, and all it was was a brownie recipe with instant coffee in it, but they wanted a fancy name for it so it was cappuccino brownies. And so when I made it, we just called them the cappuccino brownies, and then it became this thing that... I mean, everyone loved them by the way. That's the secret for it. If you want to make awesome brownies, just add some instant coffee with a little bit of water.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, people always think, "Well, does that mean the brownie is going to taste like coffee?" But it actually doesn't. It just blooms or pops the flavor of the chocolate.
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah, it just gives more depth.
Jessie Sheehan:
So good. Oh, I love it that you were a cappuccino brownie maker back in the day.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. So my family would incessantly ask me to make it every week. It was like the cappuccino brownies.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's so great.
Tova du Plessis:
Became known far and wide, but it was just brownies.
Jessie Sheehan:
Back then did you have a dessert style? Did you make any of the things that you make today for Essen or was it just cappuccino brownies?
Tova du Plessis:
Oh, that's a really good question. No, I wouldn't call it a style, but I have found myself in recent years when looking for inspiration for a dessert, I think back to something from my childhood or something that I made. It's something about aging where you start thinking back to something like 30 years ago, my mom used to make this meringue roulade with fresh raspberries and whipped cream, and that's so simple, and it's something that as a pastry chef today just seems very simple and basic, but light and refreshing and not perfect. So I did that for a dessert one day. I elevated it and I added components. But yeah, I mean sometimes you just think of back to those things from your childhood that ignited that love for food in your experience growing up.
Jessie Sheehan:
As a young person and when you went off to college, you were on a doctor path, you came to the U.S. for college, and you decided though that after graduating that you didn't actually want to go to medical school and that you wanted to cook instead. But I wonder, did that biology training and being science-focused to help your baking?
Tova du Plessis:
Oh yes. Oh yes in a big way. Well, I would say from the biology point of view, bread baking and what's happening in a bread, the process of fermentation was something really innate to me and something I could understand right away. And it became even more interesting when learning about sourdough and the relationship between yeast and bacteria and the place you are in the world. It definitely gave me that understanding for bread baking, but also in chemistry and using leaveners and all of that I picked up on very quickly and easily. I do understand the science behind baking, but I think more importantly what it did for me is I really appreciate the scientific process, the scientific method, and that is really important in developing a recipe.
Jessie Sheehan:
Understanding how the different ingredients work together, how much of one you need or don't need.
Tova du Plessis:
Or how to figure that out using the correct methods, having a control changing only one variable in each batch. So testing a recipe by making lots of tiny batches is something that just made sense to me.
Jessie Sheehan:
I read that, and I loved this about your parents, that when you did decide to leave medical school and move to Napa and enrolled in the CIA, that your parents were not only supportive, but that actually they'd always said, "You're a creative person, Tova. This is exactly what you should be doing. You should not be a doctor."
Tova du Plessis:
Well, this was my mom. She thought it was important to keep me busy and pursue interests. I really did do everything outside of school. I would go to art classes, dance, drama, some sports.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, that's creative.
Tova du Plessis:
It's a lot.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. So after graduating from the CIA, you made your way to Philly and you were a sous chef at Zahav and then a pastry chef at the Rittenhouse Hotel. When your first daughter came, you realized you didn't want to go back to those kinds of hours and you thought it was time to open up your own business. So in 2016, you opened Essen Bakery, which is a little Jewish bakery in South Philly, and it's known for its... Oh my gosh, this sounds so good. Chocolate halva babka, challah, rugelach, black and white cookies. The menu is inspired by your childhood as well as your technical training, and I love this. You've said that all your favorite things take hours to make, but you're a patient chef, and I wondered when you refer to that, are you just referring to all of the...
Tova du Plessis:
All the yeasted doughs. Yeah. I mean the process for babka, it's two and a half days for us. So we mix, ferment our dough, portion it and refrigerate it, and we leave it refrigerator overnight and we shape it the next day and then we bake it the following morning.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, because all of that rest increases all that fermentation and makes it a million times tastier than if you bake it off...
Tova du Plessis:
It does create a really yeasty flavor that's low fermentation, but it's also to fully chill the dough. It can be done in a shorter period, but since the dough has that tolerance, it's a system that works a lot better for us.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, for you guys. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right, now we're going to talk about your black and white cookies. I think you've called them a grown-up version of black and white. They have a chocolate ganache and a vanilla bean royal icing. I think you've described the batter of a black and white is a tiny bit more like cake batter than cookie batter in a way. It does call for cake flour. They've been called half moons. There's a legend or a story, I think you told that maybe they started because somebody had some cake batter left over maybe in New York City and decided to put it down on a baking sheet and...
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah, I remember reading something like that. I mean definitely sound like urban legend.
Jessie Sheehan:
Exactly. That the black and white was born. So first things first, we're going to make the cookies, so we're going to take very soft unsalted butter. So softer than room temperature butter?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, good to know. Good to know. So what people...
Tova du Plessis:
I hate to make this reference, not going to sound great, but mayonnaise. Like that soft.
Jessie Sheehan:
Wow. Okay, good to know. I feel like so frequently people are like, "Oh, if you can press the butter, that's fine, but if your finger goes right in, it's too soft." But for this cookie recipe, you want really soft.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. The other important thing to note with this batter is that you're putting in sour cream at some point, and if that sour cream was recently in the fridge, working with a batter that's so warm, and I don't mean warm, but maybe think of a hot summer's day. It's that temperature, when you put in the sour cream, it shouldn't affect the batter. It shouldn't make the butter become more lumpy, I guess.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. So we have our very, very soft unsalted butter. We're going to add our granulated sugar and we're going to cream until light and fluffy in a stand mixer with a paddle attachment. Are we on medium, medium high at this point?
Tova du Plessis:
Paddle medium high.
Jessie Sheehan:
Medium high. I love this. You keep giving this note, scrape a lot. You really want people to scrape the bowl here. Are we scraping with a flexible spatula?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
A flexible bench scraper?
Tova du Plessis:
Rubber spatula or a bowl scraper. But you need to scrape the sides of the bowl everywhere.
Jessie Sheehan:
Because it's so sticky at this point?
Tova du Plessis:
In the beginning you just have sugar and butter and if any of that gets stuck to the side of the bowl, when you add the rest of the ingredients and stays there, then you'll have these pockets in the batter in the end of just butter and sugar. Or maybe at the next stage when you have butter, sugar, and egg, you'll have pockets with just that combination and nothing else and no other ingredients. Those pockets they will melt out in the oven and give you some funny looking cookies.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now we're going to add eggs in our eggs room temperature?
Tova du Plessis:
Definitely room temperature.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're going to add some room temperature eggs. We're going to add some vanilla. Do you have a favorite brand of vanilla that you use at home or in the bakery?
Tova du Plessis:
At home, I would use Nielsen-Massey. We do have a brand that we get from our vendor in the bakery.
Jessie Sheehan:
Bakery. So we're going to add our eggs. We're going to add vanilla. Now, this is an interesting ingredient. We're going to add either orange oil or orange zest. Tell us about why the oil is preferable first and then also why orange?
Tova du Plessis:
I think either are great. Orange zest is such a lovely flavor and it's really part of what makes these cookies so good, but that's what you're tasting in the orange zest is the oil on the skin of the orange. You need to buy a really high quality product. And so there's an oil called Boyajian, which is great and then there's... Oh, Nielsen-Massey also makes an orange oil, which is pure orange oil.
Jessie Sheehan:
When you make it in the bakery, you'd use the oil?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
If you were going to make it...
Tova du Plessis:
Yes, we do use the oil.
Jessie Sheehan:
And if you were telling a home baker how to make them, would you say get yourself some oil? It'll really elevate...
Tova du Plessis:
Well, I would say so because then you always have it in your pantry.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you don't have to worry if you don't have an orange around to zest. And would, was that just like a stroke of Tova genius? You're like, "I think this needs orange." What made you put any kind of citrus in a black and white?
Tova du Plessis:
I could say yes or I could admit that in my very first job I worked for a man named Michael Savino, who's a great pastry chef and a dear friend. And I was living in Houston at the time and he gave me my very first job. He has a business called Michael's Cookie Jar. And we just made cookies and he put orange oil in his black and white cookies.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, I love that. I love that.
Tova du Plessis:
So I stole it.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now we're going to add our room temp eggs. We're going to add our vanilla and our orange oil or our orange zest. And we want to add these ingredients slowly because we don't want to break an emulsion. We want to make an emulsion...
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. You want your butter and sugar to accept an egg, which is mostly water.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Tova du Plessis:
So that's an emulsification when you're able to successfully combine fat and water.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. And is that... Not that you were doing that a lot in biology, but is that an example, something that science-wise just makes perfect sense to you?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. What you're referring to is the addition, the slow addition of egg into your queen's butter and sugar. You can't create an emulsion by dumping water, dumping a whole bunch into fat and then whisking it hard.
Jessie Sheehan:
An emulsion when you make a mayonnaise, it's the whole act of the slowness of the addition that will cause the emulsion.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. So aerated fat will hold water in suspension, but there is a limit to how much it will hold.
Jessie Sheehan:
Understood.
Tova du Plessis:
So it will hold this egg, but if you dumped it in, it may break. Have you ever broken when you're creaming butter and sugar?
Jessie Sheehan:
100% and it gets curdling and weird and... Yes, totally.
Tova du Plessis:
You know exactly what I mean.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know exactly what you mean. After we've slowly added, we're going to beat on medium-high speed, and again, being really thorough and smart about scraping.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to add our dry ingredients, which is going to be kosher salt and baking powder and sifted cake flour. And I wondered, do you take all those three ingredients and whisk them in a bowl and then add them?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes, I do. So yes, you're adding all your dry ingredients all together in stages with the sour cream also in stages.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Tova du Plessis:
I'm not very particular about it. I just dump in some flour. Dump in some sour cream, dump in some flour dump in some....
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Usually I feel like it's a three, two, it's like three times with the dry and twice with the wet. But you're easy-peasy. You don't care how many, or...
Tova du Plessis:
I've seen it written so many different ways, but you could be doing both at the same time and having it mix really slowly as you add both.
Jessie Sheehan:
And our sour cream is room temperature at this point?
Tova du Plessis:
It doesn't need to be. As long as your butter was soft enough, your eggs were room temperature, cold sour cream shouldn't affect it at this point.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect, perfect. So we're adding on low speed just until everything is combined. Then we're going to scrape, and then this is a little scary for peeps, but we're going to beat on high speed for two to three seconds or five seconds just to make sure everything comes together.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. And that's ensuring that we don't get that error that we spoke about, which is usually from using butter that's not soft enough. We push on butter and if it gives, we think it's soft. That's not soft. Soft is like...
Jessie Sheehan:
Mayonnaise.
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah, mayonnaise. I'm telling you, just use butter that's the consistency of mayonnaise. It's very hard to achieve in the microwave. It goes from one second to soft to melted the next second.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. You know what I saw, a new way. There's so many tips now on social media, but one thing that I'm into is taking... If you have a foiled package of butter, putting that into warm water just like you would...
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah, makes sense.
Jessie Sheehan:
The entire package as opposed to sometimes people will heat up a glass and then put the hot glass over a stick of butter, but I thought actually as long as it's sealed, putting it right into the water was a good way to mayonnaise butter. Are we going to portion with our cookie scoop now or do you like to chill the batter before you scoop?
Tova du Plessis:
So I can tell you how we do in the bakery, but you may want to do it differently at home. It depends on you. We do chill the batter to make it easier to scoop and we use a cookie scoop.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. We're not freezing because you want to be able to scoop and you can't scoop frozen dough. So you just chill it overnight for an hour, for half an hour.
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah, we'll chill it either for a couple of hours or overnight.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. But if we're at home, first of all, our batch is probably much smaller. We might be able to chill it for half an hour and have it scoopable. I guess why I ask is it's not one of those moments where we're trying to rest our cookie dough for flavor.
Tova du Plessis:
No.
Jessie Sheehan:
This is just about scoopability.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Tova du Plessis:
What we do in the bakery is we use a hot scoop on the cold cookie dough, and so we put in hot water and just by tapping off the hot water, that's fine. Getting a little water on the batter is fine.
Jessie Sheehan:
And do you dip in the hot water every scoop or will there more...
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. Each time.
Tova du Plessis:
So dip each time and we just knock it off onto a towel.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're going to portion with a cookie scoop into mounds or you can use a piping bag to portion. Would that be with a large round, simple straight tip for the piping?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. Yeah. So if you're not too concerned about getting the size exact, perfectly consistent, you could also do it by eye. And that's a really easy way to pipe mounds.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're going to pipe or we're going to scoop and the dough is a little bit chilled enough that we can scoop easily. I think I might've seen two different ways of doing it. Freezing at this point maybe is what you do in the bakery or you can just chill it or can you just bake at this point?
Tova du Plessis:
How do you know about everything that we're doing? Did you actually come to the bakery? Were you spying on us? So yeah, we do freeze. I mean we make giant batches. We make enough for the week and then we freeze all these mounds. You can just go run into the oven.
Jessie Sheehan:
You can go into the oven at this point. And do they keep their shape a little bit better if they're frozen?
Tova du Plessis:
They should go in. If fridge temperature is okay or room temperature, they shouldn't be too cold.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. So when you guys freeze them in the bakery, you then kind of temper them or just bring them down temperature wise before you bake them off? Makes sense. Makes sense.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you're going to bake at about 325. Would that mean 300 if it was convection or is 325 the convection temp?
Tova du Plessis:
So I can't give you a temperature because every oven is different.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know. It's so true. It's so true. 325, 350.
Tova du Plessis:
I would say at home it's very likely with most home ovens, it's likely that you'd be baking these at 325.
Jessie Sheehan:
That makes sense because it's like a more delicate cookie. You don't really want this 350...
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. 350 is probably going to be... They'll color too much before they're set.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right.
Tova du Plessis:
Now ovens, we do like 290. They're powerful convection ovens. Those fans are intense.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh. I have one at home. Not as intense, obviously as a professional oven, but the paper is... I have everything has to be clipped down or paper flies.
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah, you get really good at placing knives around the edges of pans.
Jessie Sheehan:
Totally, totally. So we're going to bake at 325 for approximately 13 minutes. We're going to rotate halfway through, which I love. I learned to rotate when I worked in a bay. I still rotate at home..
Tova du Plessis:
Oh good. You must many. There's no way your oven is baking super evenly.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's what I tell people.
Tova du Plessis:
None of them do.
Jessie Sheehan:
I cannot believe that people don't rotate. I can't even imagine if I didn't rotate, but not everyone rotates.
Tova du Plessis:
Well now you know, rotate your bakings.
Jessie Sheehan:
Exactly. Then you're going to remove from the oven when the middle obviously doesn't collapse when you gently touch it with your fingertip. And that reminds me, "I love whoopie pies. I make a lot of whoopie pies." It's exactly the same thing. It's like I don't even try to test a whoopie. I just touch the top. As long as it doesn't leave an indentation, you're good to go.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes, but it's ready at exactly that point.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, exactly. Don't leave it in.
Tova du Plessis:
So yeah, if it bounced back, but it's been there already for a minute. You overbaked it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Now we are going to let these cool. And while they're cooling, we'll make the ganache. And would it traditionally be just royal icing with cocoa powder?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. Traditionally you'd make royal icing, then you'd split it into two batches and put cocoa powder in one.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we're going to scald some heavy cream and glucose syrup in a pot until it almost boils. Is glucose syrup, are you using that? The same way that I use a little bit of corn syrup in my ganache, which is for a little bit of shine and malleability.
Tova du Plessis:
It's really to keep the emulsion.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Tova du Plessis:
It's like a little extra insurance. That it won't break. Adding an invert sugar when making a ganache helps to prevent it from breaking.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is glucose syrup similar to corn syrup but not as sweet?
Tova du Plessis:
It's a different sugar. It's a different sugar molecule. So it's glucose, liquid glucose.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Tova du Plessis:
So liquid form. And I imagine corn syrup is fructose.
Jessie Sheehan:
And is glucose something that we could find? Can you...
Tova du Plessis:
I don't think I've ever seen it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Anywhere...
Tova du Plessis:
And I do think it also performs better.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, I'm sure it's a product you can find on the internet.
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Tova du Plessis:
If you want to, you can order it on Amazon, I'm sure.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. So we're going to pour the cream and the glucose syrup over chocolate, which you like 53% Valrhona-ish.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. We use a Valrhona chocolate, the Tropilia 53%. It is worthwhile talking about percentages though, because we always see percentages on dark chocolate and I think we put too much weight on. It is true that the higher the percentage, the more bitter the chocolate will be.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Tova du Plessis:
You have more cocoa solids, less sugar. It always means less sugar. So yes, the higher the percentage, the more bitter will be. But you can have a chocolate that's 50 or 60 that could be very bitter and it's really about being the qualities of that being.
Jessie Sheehan:
And at Valrhona, obviously the quality is high.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. Yeah, I just don't think about percentages. I do care about fat percentage because that will make the chocolate act differently and then be good for different purposes, but it's actually more flavor that I'm looking for.
Jessie Sheehan:
Makes sense. We're going to pour our scalded cream and our glucose syrup over the Valrhona chocolate. We're going to wait one minute, which is often what you do in a ganache recipe. Tell the listeners why we wait when we're making ganache.
Tova du Plessis:
We want to give time for the hot cream to melt all the chocolate. It's better that it's a passive process.
Jessie Sheehan:
And if you start stirring, you'll cool down your mixture. And if there's tiny solid pieces of chocolate still they're not going to ever melt because you're cooling it down.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes, yes, exactly. As you stir, you're cooling it down.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to stir gently with a rubber spatula. Is there a brand or a type? Do you use those ones with the red handles and the white tops from a restaurant supply store? Or is there...
Tova du Plessis:
If you saw me in the kitchen right now making a ganache, I'd be using a spatula from IKEA that was 60 cents because it was 60 cents. So there's like 10 of them in the kitchen.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, I love it. I love it.
Tova du Plessis:
Well, especially for something smaller that's a smaller spatula. But otherwise, the ones that we have are that red handle, white top. They're really durable and...
Jessie Sheehan:
Very stiff.
Tova du Plessis:
Coming in every size.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes. And so we're going to stir until the chocolate is melted. But you don't want bubbles, so you want to stir gently. Is that correct?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. Yes. Stir gently and you just stir until you have a beautiful ganache.
Jessie Sheehan:
And why don't we want bubbles? Why are bubbles bad? It just makes it less smooth?
Tova du Plessis:
Truthfully, you won't get bubbles with this. If you're using a spatula, it's unlikely you would get any bubbles. But if you were using a whisk for example, you would be incorporating air that way and it would just give you a different product. Would actually, it would be slightly different. It wouldn't be big difference, but it would be firmer actually because of the air.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now, if one was making this at home, would it be a good idea at this point to paint or spread half of the ganache on our cookies? Because the ganache is at a good temperature for putting on the cookie at this point, as opposed to letting it sit there while you go make the royal icing?
Tova du Plessis:
No, you can let it sit for a good amount of time.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is it almost too hot right now?
Tova du Plessis:
It's a little too hot.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right, okay. It'll be too thin, right?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes, exactly. It will be good when it's warm, still warm. So about room temperature. So I would say maybe within 10, 15 minutes it'll be good to use. And then you have a lot of time, so even when it thickens a bit, it's still very spreadable. You have a good, I don't know, maybe 30 minutes to work with it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect. So we're going to make our royal icing, which is the more traditional side of the cookie in a stand mixer with the whisk attachment or the paddle?
Tova du Plessis:
Whisk.
Jessie Sheehan:
With the whisk attachment...
Tova du Plessis:
You can use either.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Tova du Plessis:
You would just need to give it more juice, I think with a paddle.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, with a whisk attachment, we're going to beat an egg white, a vanilla bean paste, or we're going to scrape a vanilla bean pod. Could we also use extract or would the extra...
Tova du Plessis:
You can, of course. Yes, you definitely can. For these grown up cookies, I wanted to have the pure vanilla flavor.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love. Love, love, love, love.
Tova du Plessis:
And see the specs.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So pretty.
Tova du Plessis:
But I mean any high quality extract would do the same job.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then we're going to add some powdered sugar, and then on high speed we're going to beat until thick and stiff. At that point, we're going to add a teeny bit of milk or water just in tiny increments until the icing is thick, but of a spreadable consistency.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
So do you have a preference on water or milk? Is one tastier in your opinion? What do you guys use at the bakery?
Tova du Plessis:
We use water.
Jessie Sheehan:
You do?
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
The milk isn't really necessary?
Tova du Plessis:
It doesn't need to be milk. No, I know people like to do that, but put milk in royal icing. There's no reason to.
Jessie Sheehan:
There's not necessary. Okay.
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah. So the reason the recipe is that way is I think it says an egg white maybe?
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, it does.
Tova du Plessis:
So it would be a different amount of egg white depending on the egg. So if I made it a weight, I could give you an exact recipe to get to that consistency. But since it's an egg, and we actually still do this in the bakery, even though we should just have a weighed out recipe, but we do have a number of egg whites and a number of pounds of powdered sugar, and then we just adjust it at the end with lower water. It might be more than you think on the water in the end.
Jessie Sheehan:
Depending on how big your egg was?
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah, it could need a teaspoon or it could need a tablespoon.
Jessie Sheehan:
But I would go, it's funny that people don't really realize, I mean, I realize that sometimes if we have eggs from a friend who has chickens at home and I'm baking with them, they tend to be much smaller than the eggs I'm getting at the grocery store. So almost always when I'm testing or developing recipes, even though I'd love to use the ones from a friend's farm, I don't because I know they're going to be... They look so different in beautiful ways, like the bright orange of the yolk, but the amount of white just tends to be less.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes, yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
We've made our royal icing, we have our ganache and to assemble, we're going to turn the cookies upside down. So they have a humped bottom now and the bottom becomes the top. We're icing the underside, we're going to ice one half of the cookie with the ganache and then chill it before we do the royal icing. Is that the safest?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
... To have the chocolate set before you do the white?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. That's what makes it pretty easy, getting the line down the middle. So with your chocolate, you try to create that straight line down the middle, pile a bit more ganache on there and spread it and scrape along the curved edge. Make it as neat as you can.
Jessie Sheehan:
I saw you do this in the video. When you make that line down the center of the cookie with the ganache and then sort of say, "I'm going to do ganache to the left of that," let's say, does the ganache not kind of spread like go past its line?
Tova du Plessis:
No.
Jessie Sheehan:
Amazing.
Tova du Plessis:
No, it does keep it... Yeah, it holds it's shape.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Tova du Plessis:
Then when you refrigerate it becomes firm. So then you really can't disturb it when you're putting in the...
Jessie Sheehan:
Then once it's firm chilled, is it like five minutes or... I guess...
Tova du Plessis:
About 10 or 15 maybe.
Jessie Sheehan:
... Would be to make all of them with half the chocolate, put that into the refrigerator for 10, 15 minutes, then pull it all out and start doing the royal icing. And we're using a small offset at this point.
Tova du Plessis:
Small offset, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I wrote...
Tova du Plessis:
The most essential tool.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know, the best.
Tova du Plessis:
If there's one tool I have in my back pocket, it's a small offset.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I also loved this. You have a way, or you said if you have any issues with it going past your line, you can fix it just by scraping with the offset. That thin layer of chocolate, let's say, will just dry and won't be visible once you then put your royal icing on top.
Tova du Plessis:
That's the clever trick to get a straight line. Don't even worry about it. If you can't get a straight line at all, just get the chocolate on there, create the line with your spatula, like you said, scrape it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. And then you're fine. And then it'll chill and you can put them...
Tova du Plessis:
And the royal icing will cover that.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. I love that. And then do you serve them chilled?
Tova du Plessis:
We hold them chilled.
Jessie Sheehan:
So if someone orders one, if I come in and buy one, which I can't wait to do, are they sitting in the counter or are they...
Tova du Plessis:
Will be out so that if you were to eat it right away, it's room temperature, which is how they'll be enjoyed the best. But we do store, we...
Jessie Sheehan:
Of course.
Tova du Plessis:
... Have a couple out and store the rest in the fridge.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Yeah. Since this cookie is a little cakey, I really hate cold cake, so I would want... I just feel like there's no flavor. And anyway...
Tova du Plessis:
Too many bakeries store everything in the fridge.
Jessie Sheehan
Yeah. I don't understand. It makes me so sad. I wanted to talk about a couple of other recipes. First I wanted to talk about your rugelach because you did say it was the best ever, and I wanted to know what makes them special. In New York, we have Breads Bakery making yeasted rugelach, which is almost like baby croissant.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. Which are ours are too.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, they are, that was my question. Are they yeasted or is it a cream cheese dough?
Tova du Plessis:
They are yeasted.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Tova du Plessis:
It is in that same style, similar to breads. Similar but different, but it's one of the trickiest things we make. I would say it's definitely, it's the hardest thing to master at Essen. It's this really supple... Oh my God, this dough feels so good. It feels like silk. This is how bakers talk. But when it's done mixing, that's the best feeling dough in our repertoire, I would say.
Jessie Sheehan:
And is it hard because you have to roll it so thin? What makes it...
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. So we take this delicate dough, it's not a stiff dough or anything, and we chill it down really cold and roll it really thin, down to pasta thin.
Jessie Sheehan:
Wow. Oh my gosh.
Tova du Plessis:
We go to...
Jessie Sheehan:
In a sheeter?
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah. We go to one on our sheeter, spread the filling, layer another piece, and cut very fast. And cut, cut and shape very fast
Jessie Sheehan:
In the triangles like you were making a croissant?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. So right now we have a tabletop sheeter, so we do it in... We make rugelach in long strips. We do 60 at a time. So it's the strip of dough that needs to stay cold. You can imagine sheeted to one, it doesn't stay cold for very long. So you very quickly spread your filling, layer the other piece, cut, shape, and throw them in the freezer.
Jessie Sheehan:
So it's two pieces of dough on top of each other. Sandwiching the filling.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. There's a couple ways to do it, but at home I would recommend that you would basically roll dough as thin as you can, put down the filling, another piece of dough as thin as you can, and then roll again, more filling. More filling, and then fold that over.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then cut your triangles and begin rolling up each cookie?
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. So yeah, you're basically stretching the dough with the filling inside it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Incredible. And do you sell them in a million flavors or just chocolate or...
Tova du Plessis:
We do have chocolate, it has been the only rugelach we've made for a long time. And then I want to say last year we eventually debuted out our second rugelach flavor, which is, I don't know, it's kind of become my favorite now, but it's walnut cinnamon.
Jessie Sheehan:
Tell us about the chocolate halva babka.
Tova du Plessis:
So the chocolate halva babka. Yes. That babka was, I think it was the very first recipe I worked on. I was on a mission to make the best babka. So I spent about a month developing that recipe. It's probably our most popular item. It is very similar to the rugelach. It's almost like the large version of the rugelach, but it is also a sweet yeasted dough. It's not the same recipe, but it is similar. That dough does have some lemon zest and vanilla in it. We roll that pretty thin as well. I mean it really does get thin, layer of filling into it, roll it up into a fat log, cut down the middle, braid, and in the end you get lots of thin layers.
Jessie Sheehan:
The filling is a mixture of a cocoa powder-based something with chunks of halva or is it melted chocolate or is it both?
Tova du Plessis:
So the filling has cocoa powder. It is just butter, sugar, cocoa powder, the filling. But we do also sprinkle in a healthy amount of chocolate chips. And they are not any chocolate chips. They're the mini ones from Valrhona. And they are Kubica chocolate. Which is important.
Jessie Sheehan:
Because it melts.
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. And because it has cocoa butter in it, not vegetable fat. Almost every chocolate chip you'll buy, cocoa butter is substituted for vegetable fat and that way it retains its shape.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's what I meant when I said it melts.
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
It doesn't take that same shape.
Tova du Plessis:
We're not looking for that.
Jessie Sheehan:
No, no.
Tova du Plessis:
Yeah, we're just looking for chocolate, real chocolate in tiny form.
Jessie Sheehan:
I didn't even know that Valrhona did mini chocolate.
Tova du Plessis:
And that's what we've been doing since day one. Yeah. I mean, I didn't know until when developing this recipe, I inquired about it and found out. Yeah, they do have a mini chip. I think it was a very new product at that time.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then chunks of halva?
Tova du Plessis:
And then chunks of halva. Yeah. So we take about a pound of halva for six babkas and we crumble it up and sprinkle it all over.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then finally, can you just tell us about your halva? Because I know it's different than the one your mom makes. I think yours is enriched with...
Tova du Plessis:
Yes. I have to say, her halva is amazing. She makes amazing challah. Personally, I prefer a different style of halva to what she makes, slightly different.
Jessie Sheehan:
Different is hers more like water and oil. But yours has eggs. What's her...
Tova du Plessis:
Hers has less egg. It's less sweet too. So a little less egg, less sweet. And I would say it's slightly lower hydration and therefore a little more dense. Not in a negative way, but ours comes out pretty fluffy. Yeah, it's a fluffy halva.
Jessie Sheehan:
Thank you so much for chatting with me today. And I just want to say that you are my cherry pie.
Tova du Plessis:
Oh, thank you.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Plugra Premium European-Style Butter for supporting today's show. Don't forget to subscribe to She's My Cherry Pie on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and tell your pals about us. She's My Cherry Pie is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network and is recorded at CityVox Studio in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond, Catherine Baker, and Elizabeth Vogt. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our content operations manager is Londyn Crenshaw. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie and happy baking.