A note before beginning: the recipes in Part Three are written for the Level 2 kitchen, meaning they contain no biological leavening of any kind and no chemical leavening agents — no yeast, no sourdough culture, no baking soda, no baking powder, no hartshorn, no potash, and no pre-mixed preparations containing any of these. Mechanical techniques, including the beating of eggs and egg whites, the creaming of fat with other ingredients, and the deliberate folding in of beaten mixtures to preserve their incorporated air, are fully available and are used in a number of the preparations that follow. Each recipe is labeled at the top with its level of applicability, and where a Level 2 preparation can be made in a form appropriate for Level 3 observance with modification, that adaptation is noted. All recipes have been tested in both a home kitchen and a professional bakery kitchen. Where a preparation requires a specific tool — a particular pan size, a specific baking surface — this is noted at the head of the recipe, because the Level 2 kitchen is more sensitive to pan size and surface character than the Level 1 kitchen, and improvisation in this area produces less reliable results.
When I was a student — a long time ago now, at the Provincial College where I would eventually spend the better part of my career — I had a professor of food chemistry whose name I will not record here because she would not appreciate the attention, and who held a view about eggs that I have carried with me ever since. She said, in the context of a lecture on protein coagulation that was considerably less dull than that description makes it sound, that the egg is the closest thing to a universal baking ingredient that exists in the natural world, because it contains, within its single oval package, a complete toolkit: a fat-rich emulsifying yolk, a protein-rich white capable of holding more air than almost any other naturally occurring substance, a coagulating network that sets under heat into structures ranging from the delicate to the almost architectural, and a flavor contribution that is simultaneously rich and neutral enough to enhance rather than compete with whatever it accompanies. She then said something I have repeated to every first-year student since: remove the leavening from a kitchen and what you have left is the egg, doing the work the leavening was covering for.
This is, I think, the most useful single sentence ever spoken about Level 2 baking, and it is the sentence this chapter is built around.
The preparations in this chapter depend on the egg in its various forms and functions as the primary structural and leavening element available in the Level 2 kitchen. They use whole eggs for enrichment and coagulation, egg yolks for fat, emulsification, and color, and egg whites for the mechanical lift that this chapter’s title refers to — though, as I will explain shortly, the mechanical lift in these preparations operates differently from the dramatic egg-white foams of the meringue preparations in Chapter 10 and requires a somewhat different understanding of what the egg white is doing and why. They also, in the case of the cream-based preparations later in the chapter, use the fat and protein of heavy cream as a structural and enriching element in ways that have no direct parallel in the Level 1 kitchen and that produce some of the most distinctive preparations in the Level 2 repertoire.
All of this is available in the Level 2 kitchen. None of it involves biological or chemical leavening. The egg and the cream are doing the work, and understanding how they do it is the curriculum of this chapter.
On the Behavior of Eggs Without Chemical Leavening
In the ordinary baking year, eggs frequently share their work with chemical leavening agents, and this collaboration produces results in which the contribution of each partner is somewhat difficult to isolate. A standard cake recipe that includes both baking powder and eggs is, from the baker’s analytical perspective, a somewhat muddy document: the baking powder is lifting, the eggs are enriching and binding, and the precise degree to which the eggs are contributing to the lift as opposed to the structure is not easy to determine from the outside. Bake the same recipe without the baking powder, as the Level 2 baker does, and the egg’s contribution becomes suddenly and clearly legible, because it is the only leavening mechanism left.
What eggs do without chemical assistance depends entirely on how they are prepared before they enter the batter or dough.
Whole eggs added without beating contribute richness, color, emulsification through the yolk’s lecithin, and the coagulating structure of their proteins, which set under heat and hold the prepared product in its shape. They do not, in this form, contribute meaningful lift: an unbeaten egg stirred into a batter contributes the same volume of liquid as the same quantity of any other liquid, plus the structural contribution of its proteins, but nothing that meaningfully aerates the batter. Preparations that use whole unbeaten eggs are using the egg as a structural ingredient, and the lift — if any lift exists — must come from somewhere else. In the Level 2 context, that somewhere else is often the steam generated within the batter during baking, or the natural expansion of heated proteins and starches, neither of which produces dramatic lift but both of which contribute to a texture that is somewhat less dense and compact than a fat-and-flour mixture without any egg would produce.
Whole eggs beaten lightly — to the point of uniform combination but before any significant aeration has occurred — contribute modestly more lift than unbeaten eggs, because even minimal whisking incorporates some air into the mixture. In the Level 2 context this light beating is freely available and produces preparations of somewhat lighter character than unbeaten egg additions, while stopping well short of the deliberate foam-building that defines the upper boundary of Level 2 mechanical technique.
Whole eggs beaten vigorously with sugar over gentle heat — the preparation known in the Bravian professional baking vocabulary as a warmed foam, used in certain traditional festival preparations and in the genoise-style preparations described later in this chapter — incorporate a substantial quantity of air into both the white and yolk proteins simultaneously and produce a pale, thick, genuinely aerated mixture that provides real lift to a batter. This technique sits firmly within Level 2 mechanical leavening territory and is the most powerful whole-egg leavening technique available below the full beaten-white standard.
Separated egg whites beaten to soft or stiff peaks are the maximum expression of egg-based mechanical leavening, producing the foams whose behavior I described in Chapter 3 and that appear in their most developed form in Chapter 10. In this chapter, we use beaten whites in a somewhat more restrained way than Chapter 10 will: the preparations here rely on beaten whites for structure and a degree of lift, but they do not push the foam to the extremes of texture and height that a meringue-based preparation requires. The distinction matters because partially beaten whites — beaten to soft rather than stiff peaks, or incorporated into a heavier batter by a gentle fold that preserves most of their air without developing the foam to its maximum — behave somewhat differently from fully beaten whites in a finished preparation and produce a different category of result.
Egg yolks beaten with fat — with butter or with oil, as in certain of the cream-based preparations in this chapter — produce an emulsified mixture whose incorporation into a batter contributes richness and a fine, even texture that is distinct from the contribution of whole eggs or separated whites, because the emulsification produced by the yolk’s lecithin distributes the fat throughout the batter more evenly and finely than fat can achieve without this emulsifying assistance. The preparations in the later sections of this chapter make specific use of this technique and are among the most texturally interesting in the Level 2 repertoire.
Understanding which of these egg preparations is being called for in a given recipe, and why, is the primary analytical skill this chapter develops. The recipe instructions will specify what to do. This introduction is intended to explain why, so that the baker who understands the reasoning can adapt intelligently when circumstances require it.
On the Role of Cream
Heavy cream is the second primary ingredient of this chapter, and its role in Level 2 baking is worth explaining before it appears in the recipes, because it is used here in ways that may be unfamiliar to bakers who think of cream primarily as a liquid enrichment or as the raw material for a whipped topping.
Cream is, in its physical structure, an emulsion of fat globules suspended in liquid, and this structure gives it baking properties that are distinct from those of milk, butter, or any other dairy product. When cream is incorporated into a batter in sufficient quantity, it contributes several things simultaneously: fat for tenderness and richness, liquid for hydration and gluten development, proteins that coagulate under heat and contribute to structure, and the natural sugars of dairy that promote surface browning and caramelization. It is a richer and more texturally complex enriching liquid than buttermilk or whole milk, and in the Level 2 context — where chemical leavening is absent — its fat and protein contributions do significant structural work that the baker would otherwise need to accomplish through other means.
The cream-based preparations later in this chapter also use cream in a partially whipped state — beaten briefly, to the point of thickening and increased volume but not to the stiff peaks of fully whipped cream — as a means of incorporating a moderate quantity of air into a batter without the full mechanical leavening commitment of a stiff whipped cream fold. This partially whipped cream technique is one of the more nuanced available at Level 2: it contributes genuine lift through incorporated air, but the air is distributed more gradually and less dramatically than it would be in a fully whipped cream fold, and the structure of the resulting preparation is accordingly lighter than an unenriched batter but less dramatically aerated than a beaten-egg-white preparation.
The baker who develops a feel for this partially whipped technique — who learns to recognize the point at which the cream has increased in volume and lightened in texture without having developed the rigid structure of full whipping — will have a very useful tool in her Level 2 repertoire that transfers to many preparations beyond those specifically described in this chapter.
Recipe 20 — Unleavened Crepe-Style Thin Breads
Level: 2 only
A note on this recipe: the crepe-style thin bread is perhaps the most immediately versatile of the Level 2 egg-based preparations, and it is the preparation I introduce first because it requires the least equipment, the most minimal technique, and produces a result that is almost immediately useful at the festival table as both a vehicle for fillings and a preparation in its own right. It is not the same as the savory wraps of Chapter 6, which depend on gluten development in a yeasted-or-enriched dough for their structural coherence: this preparation is held together primarily by egg protein rather than by gluten, which gives it a distinctly different texture — more delicate, more yielding, slightly silkier against the tooth — and a character that is immediately recognizable as its own thing rather than as a flatbread made by a different method.
The Level 2 crepe-style thin bread uses whole eggs beaten to a light, uniform mixture — not frothed, not beaten to foam, but beaten past the point of mere combination to the point at which the egg mixture is noticeably homogenous and slightly increased in volume from the whisking — combined with flour and a generous enriching liquid to produce a thin, pourable batter that cooks on a hot, lightly greased flat surface into a preparation of great delicacy and considerable utility. The egg’s structural protein sets around the thin layer of batter as it contacts the hot surface, producing a preparation that holds its shape and can be folded and filled without tearing, while the beating of the eggs before combination introduces enough air to give the finished product a texture lighter than its simple ingredient list suggests.
Makes approximately 12 thin breads
Ingredients:
- ¾ cup soft wheat flour — soft wheat is essential here; hard wheat flour develops too much gluten in a batter of this liquidity and produces a preparation with a noticeably chewy, rubbery character that is not the goal
- ¼ teaspoon fine salt
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup whole milk, at room temperature — cold milk can cause the batter to become lumpy; room temperature milk combines more smoothly with the flour and egg
- 3 tablespoons melted butter or olive oil, plus additional for the cooking surface
- Optional: 1 tablespoon finely minced fresh herbs for savory preparations, or 1 teaspoon honey dissolved in the milk for sweet preparations
Method:
Combine the soft wheat flour and salt in a mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the three eggs with a wire whisk until the mixture is completely uniform and slightly thickened in appearance — approximately one minute of moderate whisking. This is more than the token beating used in ordinary egg-addition to a batter and less than the extended beating used to build a foam: the goal is a homogenous mixture in which the yolks and whites are fully incorporated and in which a small but real quantity of air has been introduced. The mixture will be noticeably paler than unbeaten eggs and will fall from the whisk in a thin, even ribbon rather than in the chunky drops of unbeaten eggs.
Add the room-temperature milk to the beaten eggs and whisk briefly to combine. Make a well in the flour and salt mixture and pour the egg-milk mixture into the well, whisking from the center outward to incorporate the flour gradually and minimize the formation of lumps. When the batter is smooth, add the melted butter or olive oil and whisk to incorporate. The finished batter should be the consistency of thin cream: it should coat the back of a spoon very lightly and run off in a steady, unbroken sheet.
If the batter is lumpy despite careful mixing, pass it through a fine sieve into a clean bowl. Allow the batter to rest at room temperature for fifteen minutes before cooking: this rest period allows any remaining lumps to hydrate and dissolve and allows the gluten that has developed during the mixing to relax, which produces a more tender finished preparation.
Heat a smooth, flat pan — a wide flat griddle, a crepe pan if you have one, or the flattest heavy-bottomed pan in your kitchen — over medium-high heat until a small drop of butter flicked onto the surface sizzles and immediately begins to color. Reduce the heat slightly to medium. The correct heat for this preparation is lower and more sustained than the high, aggressive heat used for the flatbreads of Chapter 5: the crepe-style bread requires enough heat to set the egg proteins quickly and produce a slight golden color on the surface, but not so much heat that the delicate batter scorches before it can spread thinly and cook through.
Brush the cooking surface very lightly with melted butter. Pour a small ladleful of batter — approximately three tablespoons — onto the center of the pan and immediately tilt and rotate the pan so that the batter spreads in a thin, even round to approximately eight inches in diameter. The spreading must happen quickly, before the egg proteins begin to set; a batter that has sat in the pan for more than three or four seconds before spreading will have begun to set at the contact point and will spread unevenly. Work with confidence and speed.
Cook until the edges of the thin bread look set and slightly dry and the underside, visible at the edges when you lift them gently with a spatula, is a pale golden color with a few slightly darker spots. This takes approximately sixty to ninety seconds at the correct heat. Flip the thin bread with a broad spatula — or, if you have the confidence and the skill, by flicking the pan upward with your wrist — and cook the second side for thirty to forty-five seconds. The second side will never be as uniformly golden as the first, because the surface proteins that contact the pan first are not present on the second side in the same way. The second side will be paler, with a slightly mottled appearance, and this is entirely correct.
Transfer the cooked thin bread to a clean cloth and fold the cloth over it to keep it warm and pliable. Repeat with the remaining batter, brushing the pan lightly with butter between each preparation. The stack of finished thin breads can be kept warm in the folded cloth for up to thirty minutes without significant deterioration in texture.
On fillings and uses: The crepe-style thin bread is less structurally robust than the wraps of Chapter 6 and should be filled with preparations that are not excessively wet or heavy. For the festival table, the following fillings are appropriate and have been served in this bakery’s catering operation for the feast season for many years:
Soft cheese and honey is the simplest and in some ways the finest use of this preparation for the sweet festival table. Fresh soft cheese of the kind described in Chapter 16, combined with a drizzle of good honey and a pinch of ground cinnamon, is folded inside the warm thin bread and eaten immediately. The delicacy of the bread is very well matched to the delicacy of fresh cheese in a way that the more robust wraps of Chapter 6 are not.
Poached or very gently scrambled egg with herbs is the traditional savory filling of the port-town festival morning table, where the crepe-style thin bread has been made for as long as anyone can remember as the festival morning preparation for a household that wants something both substantial and delicate. The egg inside the egg bread is not as redundant as it sounds; the two preparations have sufficiently different characters that they complement rather than repeat each other.
Slow-cooked root vegetables with reduced braising liquid produces a more substantial filling that works well as a midday festival meal rather than a morning preparation. The vegetables should be very thoroughly cooked — almost collapsed — and the braising liquid reduced to a near-syrup before filling, because any excess liquid will soften the delicate bread immediately and prevent the clean folding that makes this preparation appealing.
Level 3 note: This preparation is not appropriate for Level 3 observance because the beaten egg whites in the whole-egg mixture constitute mechanical leavening in the Level 2 sense — the whisking incorporates air deliberately — and their removal would produce a qualitatively different preparation whose character would be closer to a flatbread than to the egg-lifted thin bread this recipe produces. The appropriate Level 3 thin bread preparation appears in Chapter 11 in the form of the oil-enriched matzah, which achieves thinness through rolling rather than through batter spreading and liquid egg structure.
Recipe 21 — Rolled Egg-and-Flour Flatbreads
Level: 2 and 3
A note on this recipe: the rolled egg-and-flour flatbread occupies an interesting middle position between the crepe-style thin bread of Recipe 20 and the classic Level 3 flatbreads of Chapter 11. It is made from a dough rather than a batter — the flour-to-liquid ratio is much higher than in the crepe preparation — and it is rolled and baked rather than poured and cooked on a flat surface. What distinguishes it from the Level 3 preparations of Chapter 11 is the presence of whole egg in the dough, which contributes both richness and the structural contribution of egg protein to a preparation that would otherwise be very similar to the oil-enriched matzah of Recipe 16. The egg adds color, a slight additional tenderness from the yolk fat, and a degree of structural coherence that makes this flatbread somewhat more pliable and less brittle when fully baked than a comparable preparation without egg.
This preparation is appropriate at Level 2 in full, using eggs that have been lightly beaten before incorporation. It is also appropriate at Level 3 with the modification noted at the close of the recipe: at Level 3, the eggs are added to the dough without any beating, which eliminates the minor mechanical leavening contribution of the light whisking and produces a dough that is slightly firmer but equally good.
Makes 8 flatbreads
Ingredients:
- 2 cups hard wheat flour
- ½ cup soft wheat flour
- ½ teaspoon fine salt
- 2 eggs, lightly beaten — to a uniform mixture but without significant aeration; thirty seconds of whisking is appropriate
- 2 tablespoons olive oil or melted butter
- 4 to 6 tablespoons warm water — the quantity of water needed will vary depending on the size of the eggs and the absorption of the specific flour; begin with four tablespoons and add more if the dough does not come together
Method:
Combine the flours and salt in a mixing bowl. Add the lightly beaten eggs and the olive oil and work them into the flour with your hands, rubbing and pressing until the flour is evenly moistened by the egg and fat. Add the warm water two tablespoons at a time, working after each addition, until the dough coheres into a firm, smooth ball. The dough will feel richer and slightly more supple than the oil-and-water flatbread doughs of Chapter 11, because the fat and protein of the egg are doing additional work alongside the oil.
Knead on a lightly floured bench for four to five minutes until smooth. The egg proteins will develop alongside the gluten proteins and the dough will become noticeably more cohesive and elastic than a comparable dough without egg. Cover and rest for twenty-five minutes.
Divide into eight equal portions. Roll each portion on a lightly floured bench to a round of approximately eight inches in diameter, approaching the thinness of the oil-enriched matzah preparations in Chapter 11 but not quite reaching translucency: the egg dough is slightly more opaque and holds its structure at a slightly greater thickness than a pure flour-and-water-and-oil dough, and the baker should not try to push past what the dough accommodates comfortably.
Bake on a preheated griddle or stone at high heat for sixty to seventy-five seconds per side. The egg in the dough promotes faster and more uniform surface browning than the oil-only preparations of Chapter 11, and the finished flatbread will be a more consistent golden color across its surface — less spotty than the water-only or oil-only matzah, more evenly golden. This is not incorrect; it is the character of an egg-enriched preparation at high heat.
The finished egg-and-flour flatbread is noticeably more pliable when warm than the corresponding preparations in Chapter 11, because the fat and protein of the egg retard the rapid staling and brittling of a plain flour-and-water preparation. It is particularly good in the warm state, eaten within fifteen minutes of coming off the griddle, and it is very useful as a wrap in the style of Chapter 6’s preparations, because its pliability when warm makes it significantly better at this function than the more brittle water-only matzah.
Level 3 adaptation: Add the eggs to the flour mixture without any prior whisking — crack them directly into the flour and begin working them in with your hands immediately. The unbeaten eggs will incorporate into the dough correctly under the kneading that follows, and the difference in the finished product is negligible in texture and flavor while being theologically significant for the household that observes the strict standard. All other instructions remain unchanged.
Recipe 22 — Cream-Enriched Soft Unleavened Rounds
Level: 2 only
A note on this recipe: the cream-enriched soft round is the preparation in this chapter that most clearly demonstrates what the Level 2 kitchen can achieve through fat and protein management alone, without any biological or chemical leavening. It is not a dramatically lifted or airy preparation: it does not rise in the oven the way a chemically leavened quick bread rises, and it does not have the open crumb of a yeasted roll. It is a soft, tender, slightly domed round — somewhat flatter than a dinner roll in its finished profile, somewhat more substantial than a flatbread — and its softness and tenderness come entirely from the fat content of the cream and from the structural contribution of the cream’s proteins as they coagulate around the gluten network during baking.
The technique that produces this preparation is the partially whipped cream method I described in the chapter introduction: the cream is beaten briefly, to the point of thickening and increasing in volume but not to stiff peaks, and then folded into the flour mixture by a gentle, limited hand. The partially whipped cream incorporates a moderate quantity of air into the dough — enough to produce a noticeably lighter texture than an unwhipped cream addition would provide — while stopping well short of the dramatic aeration of the egg-white preparations in Chapter 10. The result is a preparation that is genuinely soft and pleasant to eat, with a crumb that is slightly more open than a Level 3 preparation and slightly more dense than a chemically leavened equivalent, and that represents the Level 2 kitchen’s own distinct register of texture rather than a compromise between the registers of other levels.
Makes 10 rounds
Ingredients:
- 2 cups soft wheat flour — soft wheat is essential; this preparation depends on minimal gluten development for its tender crumb, and hard wheat flour would produce a significantly tougher result
- ½ teaspoon fine salt
- 1 tablespoon honey, for a slight sweetness that rounds the cream flavor and balances the salt; this small quantity does not make the rounds sweet in the sense of a dessert preparation but simply removes the faint flatness that an unsweetened cream-enriched dough sometimes carries
- 1 cup heavy cream, cold — the cream must be cold for the partial whipping to work correctly; cream at room temperature will whip reluctantly and inconsistently
- 1 egg, lightly beaten, for surface glaze
Method:
Combine the soft wheat flour and salt in a large mixing bowl. Dissolve the honey in a tablespoon of the cold cream and set aside.
Pour the remaining cold cream into a second clean bowl and beat with a wire whisk until it has visibly thickened, increased in volume by approximately one-third, and leaves soft, barely-holding trails behind the whisk. The cream at this stage is neither liquid nor properly whipped: it is halfway between the two, thicker than pouring cream but without the rigid structure of whipped cream. It will hold its shape momentarily when a dollop is dropped back into the bowl but will settle and spread within a few seconds. This is the correct stage. Do not beat further.
Add the honey-cream mixture to the partially whipped cream and fold together gently with two or three strokes of a broad spatula. Add this cream mixture to the flour and salt and fold together with a broad spatula using as few strokes as possible — fifteen at most — until the flour is just incorporated and no dry flour is visible. The mixture will be considerably softer and more voluminous than the doughs of previous chapters: it is almost too soft to call a dough, sitting between a thick batter and a soft dough in consistency.
Do not knead. Do not stir further. Turn the mixture out onto a generously floured bench — it will be sticky and will require a well-floured surface to handle — and, using well-floured hands, gently pat and press the mixture into a rough slab approximately three-quarters of an inch thick, using as little additional flour as possible. The mixture is fragile at this stage, because the air incorporated into the cream will escape if the mixture is handled roughly, and rough handling is the primary cause of cream rounds that are denser than they should be.
Cut rounds from the slab using a sharp-edged cutter dipped in flour, pressing straight down without twisting — as with the biscuit bread of Chapter 5. Gather scraps gently and press together to cut additional rounds; the rounds from the gathered scraps will be slightly denser than the first-cut ones because some air has been lost in the regathering, but they are still good.
Place the rounds on a greased baking sheet or a sheet lined with parchment. Brush the tops very gently with the beaten egg, using a light touch that does not compress the rounds: the egg glaze should be applied with a feather-light stroke rather than with the confident brushing appropriate for a structurally robust pastry. A heavy brush stroke will push down the soft surface of the cream round and flatten the slight dome that the oven’s heat would otherwise produce.
Bake in a moderate-to-hot oven — somewhat lower than the high heat of the flatbread preparations, because these rounds need time to develop their internal structure before the surface sets — for sixteen to twenty minutes, until the surface is a deep, even golden brown and the rounds feel set and slightly firm when pressed very gently in the center. Allow to cool on the baking sheet for five minutes before transferring to a cloth.
Serve warm, within thirty minutes of baking. These rounds are at their absolute best within this window, when the cream fat is still warm and the crumb is at its softest and most yielding. Left to cool fully, they firm to a pleasant but less remarkable texture that is still good but does not quite convey what the preparation is capable of when eaten warm.
Savory variation: Omit the honey. Add half a teaspoon of dried thyme or dried rosemary crumbled finely, and a tablespoon of very finely grated aged hard cheese, to the flour and salt before combining with the cream. The cheese enriches the flavor of the finished round and contributes an additional protein network around the cream structure that produces a slightly more stable round — one that holds its texture for somewhat longer after baking. This is the variation I offer at the Stone Hearth Bakery during the festival season as a savory accompaniment to soups and stews, and it is consistently the most popular Level 2 preparation we produce during the feast week.
Recipe 23 — The Choux-Adjacent Preparation Without Chemical Agents
Level: 2 only
A note on this recipe: of all the preparations in this chapter, this is the one that most frequently produces expressions of genuine surprise in students encountering it for the first time, and I have come to regard that surprise as a useful teaching moment about the nature of the Level 2 kitchen and what it is capable of. What I am calling a choux-adjacent preparation is a pastry made by cooking flour in boiling water and fat until it forms a thick paste, then beating eggs into the hot paste one at a time to produce a mixture of remarkable smoothness and cohesion that, when piped or spooned onto a baking surface and placed in a very hot oven, puffs dramatically — not through yeast, not through baking powder, but through the enormous quantity of steam generated by the water in the paste as it vaporizes under intense heat and is trapped by the rigid egg-flour-fat structure that sets around it.
This is steam leavening in its most powerful and most deliberate form, and it is fully available at Level 2 because steam is a property of water itself rather than a biological or chemical agent. The technique requires no leavening of any kind beyond the application of intense heat to a paste that contains the right balance of water, fat, flour, and egg. The resulting preparation is hollow inside, its walls formed by the set egg-and-flour structure, and the hollow interior can be filled or left empty depending on the intended use.
I want to be explicit about why this preparation is Level 2 rather than Level 3. At Level 3, the beating of eggs into a batter for the purpose of producing lift is a form of mechanical leavening, even though the mechanism of lift in the oven is steam rather than trapped air. The eggs in this preparation are beaten into the paste specifically because their proteins, once beaten in, create the flexible and elastic structure that traps the steam effectively and allows the preparation to puff and hold its shape. A preparation made with unbeaten eggs added without deliberate incorporation would not produce the same result, because the egg proteins need the mechanical action of beating to distribute evenly and develop the correct structure. The beating is intentional, functional, and constitutes mechanical technique in the relevant sense. This preparation is not available at Level 3, and I say so clearly so that the reader observing the strict standard does not find herself misled.
Makes approximately 24 small preparations or 12 larger ones
Ingredients:
- 1 cup water
- 6 tablespoons butter, cut into pieces, or rendered fat — butter produces a more neutral and slightly richer result; rendered lamb fat produces a distinctly more savory character appropriate for preparations that will be filled with savory festival-table fillings
- ½ teaspoon fine salt
- 1 cup hard wheat flour — hard wheat rather than soft, because the structure of this preparation depends on the gluten network of the flour working with the egg proteins to create the rigid walls that contain the steam; soft wheat flour does not provide sufficient gluten strength for this purpose
- 4 eggs, at room temperature — room-temperature eggs beat into the hot paste more smoothly than cold eggs, which can cause the paste to cool unevenly and produce a lumpy mixture
Method:
Combine the water, butter or fat, and salt in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat and bring to a vigorous boil — not a simmer, but a full, rolling boil in which the fat and water are fully combined in a turbulent mixture. This is important: the fat must be fully melted and the liquid must be boiling before the flour is added, because the boiling water begins the gelatinization of the starch in the flour immediately on contact, which is the physical process that produces the paste.
Add the hard wheat flour all at once and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon. The mixture will come together almost instantly into a smooth, thick paste that pulls away from the sides of the pan cleanly. Continue stirring over medium heat for one to two minutes after the paste forms: this continued cooking drives off some of the surface moisture and produces a paste that is slightly drier and therefore better able to absorb the eggs that will be added next. The paste is ready for the eggs when it no longer sticks to the sides of the pan and a thin, dry film has formed on the bottom of the pan.
Remove the paste from the heat and allow it to cool for three to four minutes — long enough that the eggs will not immediately coagulate when they contact the hot paste, but not so long that the paste cools completely, because the paste must be warm for the eggs to incorporate smoothly. Transfer to a large mixing bowl if the saucepan is not large enough for comfortable beating.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating vigorously with a wooden spoon after each addition until the egg is completely incorporated before the next is added. After the first egg is added, the paste will appear to break and become slippery and separated, and this appearance can alarm the baker who is encountering the technique for the first time. Do not be alarmed. Continue beating firmly, and the paste will come back together within thirty to forty-five seconds of sustained beating into a smooth, glossy, coherent mixture. Add the second egg only when the mixture is fully smooth again. Repeat with the third and fourth eggs.
The finished paste should be smooth and glossy, slightly sticky when touched, and should fall from the spoon in a thick, slow ribbon that holds its shape momentarily before collapsing. If it is too stiff to fall from the spoon at all, add a small quantity of beaten egg — a tablespoon at a time — to loosen it. If it falls from the spoon in a thin, liquid stream, it is too loose, which generally indicates that the paste was not dried sufficiently in the pan before the eggs were added, and this batch cannot be corrected; note the error and adjust the drying time in the next preparation.
Preheat the oven to a very high temperature — as hot as your oven will go, with a baking stone or heavy sheet inside, preheating for at least thirty minutes.
Spoon or pipe the paste onto the preheated baking surface in mounds of the desired size — approximately a tablespoon of paste per small preparation, two tablespoons per larger one. Leave generous space between pieces, because the preparations will expand significantly in the oven. Place the baking surface in the hot oven and bake for twelve to fifteen minutes for small preparations, eighteen to twenty-two minutes for larger ones, without opening the oven door during this time. The rapid initial heat is what drives the steam formation that causes the preparations to puff, and opening the oven door allows heat and steam to escape, which causes the preparations to collapse before their structure has set.
The preparations are done when they are deeply golden across the entire surface and feel completely hollow and rigid when lifted and tapped on the bottom. A preparation that still feels dense or soft in the center needs additional baking time regardless of its surface color. If you are uncertain, cut one open: the interior should be completely hollow or nearly so, with dry, set walls of egg-and-flour structure.
Transfer to a rack and cool for five minutes before filling or serving. The preparations will deflate slightly on cooling — this is normal — but should retain most of their puffed volume.
On fillings: These preparations are hollow and this is their primary virtue as festival table food, because the hollow interior can receive a filling of the baker’s choice. At the festival table, I fill them with one of the following: a thick, well-seasoned mixture of finely minced cooked lamb and caramelized onion for a savory preparation served as part of the main table; a soft fresh cheese lightly sweetened with honey for a preparation served as part of the sweet table; or a thick, reduced fruit preparation of the kind described in Chapter 7 for a sweet festival dessert. All three are appropriate at Level 2. All three produce a preparation of considerable interest and appeal, because the contrast between the crisp, rich, hollow shell and the moist, yielding filling is one of the more satisfying textural combinations available in the Level 2 kitchen.
On not filling: The unfilled preparation is also good — crisp, rich, satisfying in small quantities — served as an accompaniment to soups and stews in place of the unleavened flatbreads of earlier chapters, and it is a preparation that stores better unfilled than filled, keeping its crispness for up to two days in a dry, uncovered environment. Fill immediately before serving rather than in advance, for the same reason that water is added to the house through a pipe rather than through a hole in the roof: timing the addition of a liquid element to a dry structure is always better done at the last possible moment.
The Egg-Based Kitchen in Perspective
The four preparations in this chapter represent the range of what eggs and cream can accomplish in the Level 2 kitchen as leavening and structural elements rather than simply as enriching additions. They range from the extremely simple — the rolled egg flatbread of Recipe 21, which is functionally a straightforward dough preparation with egg replacing some of the water — to the technically demanding — the choux-adjacent preparation of Recipe 23, which requires specific temperatures, specific timings, and a specific technique of beaten egg incorporation that takes a batch or two to develop the feel for.
What connects them is the egg’s remarkable versatility as a baking ingredient and the particular demands that the Level 2 standard places on the baker’s understanding of that versatility. At Level 1, eggs are important. At Level 2, where chemical leavening has been removed, eggs become indispensable, because the structural, enriching, and leavening work that eggs can do fills a portion of the gap left by the absent chemical agents in a way that no other available ingredient can fully replicate. The baker who has worked through this chapter and understands what each form of egg preparation contributes to a Level 2 product has the analytical tools to approach the remaining Level 2 recipe chapters — and, indeed, any unleavened baking challenge she encounters throughout her baking life — with a confidence that comes from understanding rather than from habit.
My professor of food chemistry would, I think, be satisfied with this chapter’s argument, if not necessarily with everything about the way I have expressed it. The egg is doing the work the leavening was covering for. It is, in the Level 2 kitchen, doing it beautifully.
Chapter 9: Fat-Based and Layered Doughs begins on the following page.
