Jacques Torres' Number One Tip When Making Fried Pastries - Exclusive
When it comes to pastries, it'd be difficult to find a better person to ask for tips than Jacques Torres. Tasting Table attended his Making the Perfect Pastry event at Netflix Bites, a former Los Angeles restaurant based off of the platform's famous food shows, where the pastry chef and chocolatier served up his advice for making fried pastries — and his guidance is perfect as you get cooking for the holiday season. Of course, fried pastries can span from doughnuts to beignets, all topped with sugary goodness like icing or powdered sugar.
While the sugar adds that signature sweet flavor, the dough is what can make or break your pastry. Thankfully, dough is normally a pretty simple recipe, usually a variation of key ingredients like flour, baking powder, salt, eggs, and butter. But how you treat that dough matters. During the pastry-making event, Torres revealed the tip that you should always use when making pastry dough: To garner the best-tasting results, you'll need to alter the butter and egg ratios in any dough that you plan to fry — often, less than you would normally use for non-fried dough.
Change up the butter and egg ratios
Jacques Torres told us that when it comes to fried treats, the dough may require less butter and fewer eggs than you'd think. In certain pastry recipes, this is because you will be using those ingredients later on — perhaps one less egg or a few fewer slabs of butter, depending on the ratios being used later on. You might see them come up in the form of an egg or butter wash to enhance the flavor and golden crust, or even an additional amount of butter included in the frying process.
However, this tip comes with a caveat: Only reduce your eggs and butter in the dough if you'll be using these ingredients at a different point in the recipe, such as for the aforementioned wash. If you won't be, then reducing the amount of butter and eggs in your dough can negatively affect the outcome of your pastry. Looking for a fried pastry to test out Torres' advice? You can check out Tasting Table's New Orleans beignet recipe — or if you want to play it safe and leave the frying for another day, a croissant or Galette Des Rois (French King Cake) recipe could satisfy your pastry craving without worrying about playing with egg and butter ratios.