chinese egg tart recipe with puff pastry

#Chinese egg tart recipe with puff pastry skin#
#Chinese egg tart recipe with puff pastry full#

But I am already happy having the ready-made puff pastry sheets. Kitchen Tigress used ready-made puff pastry shells (good for her), unfortunately, they are not available here in Germany. and put the pot in a water bath to stop it from cooking further. You should stop there and remove it from the heat a.s.a.p. The correct thickness is when you dip a spoon and it gets a thin coat from the mixture. It should then be cooked first on medium-low heat until the correct thickness is achieved. Now to stop the custard from curdling, it should be stabilized by adding cornstarch to the egg-milk mixture.

#Chinese egg tart recipe with puff pastry skin#

to get those burnt marks on top, there should be enough milk to have the protein needed to create a skin while they bake in the oven at 250☌. They also tasted good too but not quite the Portuguese egg tarts that I know.then finally I found this recipe from Kitchen Tigress and she explained so well why I, and Rasa Malaysia in this case, were failing at making Pastel de Nata. I found some and tried them but still no spots and I get curdled custard instead. Next step was to look for the right custard recipe. I felt a bit more optimistic since ready-made puff pastry sheets are easily available there, so half of the work is done. The secret to perfect Portuguese Egg Tartsįast forward to 2016 and with a change of location (Germany), I decided to give it another shot. So after so many failed attempts, I gave up :-(. Not only was it difficult to make puff pastry in a really warm and humid kitchen but I also cannot get the custard to be as smooth or the top as shiny with those burnt spots which is a signature of Pastel de Nata (aside from the time I burned a batch of course). It is a small milky, creamy egg custard tart that has a flaky, crispy pastry as a base.įrom that very first taste of this buttery pastry, I got hooked! I cannot get it out of my mind for months after getting back to the Philippines so I tried recreating it using a different recipe (from the internet) but every single attempt ended up as a failure. Macau has been a Portuguese colony until late 1999 so that explains how this delicious pastry found its way to this tiny island in Asia all the way from Portugal. Pastel (Pastéis for plural) de Nata, also known as Portuguese Egg Tart is one of the famous local specialties in Macau that should never be missed.

The secret to perfect Portuguese Egg Tarts.

It wasn’t quite as good as the last one I had at the famed Tai Cheong bakery in Hong Kong, but holding the egg tart in my hand-one that I had made from start to finish-felt pretty darn empowering.

I bit into the crisp, tender pastry and savored the smooth custard. My first try turned out terribly I had overworked the dough and it was tough and brittle. “You can just feel really prideful of yourself and your culture too.” That afternoon I thought about Cho’s words as I followed Wong’s egg tart recipe. “When you make yourself, you lay a little claim to it,” Cho says.

#Chinese egg tart recipe with puff pastry full#

Setting my dinner table full of the foods I grew up eating-and sharing this experience with my husband-filled my chest with pride. Cooking through Irene Kuo’s The Key to Chinese Cooking, Cecilia Chiang’s The Seventh Daughter, and Grace Young’s The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen felt like reconnecting with my culture. I immersed myself in Chinese food blogs and cookbooks. But last year’s shooting in Atlanta and the recent rise in anti-Asian hate crimes jolted me awake. I never learned to make turnip cake or mooncakes from scratch. In my most vulnerable moments, I thought that disregarding my heritage seemed like a fair price to pay if it meant I’d be unequivocally accepted by my peers. After these negative experiences in high school and early adulthood, I couldn’t help but feel that being Chinese was more a burden than a joy. I was emotionally exhausted by the rejection that often came when I shared my food and culture with others. I want to steam a whole fish, dive into a bowl of red-cooked chestnuts, and fill my apartment with the warm, spiced aroma of flavor-potted tofu.įor a long time I felt pressured to assimilate and shied away from my Chinese heritage. Lately, I’ve been yearning to re-create the flavors of my childhood in my own kitchen. It wasn’t just about embracing a new challenge, though. It seemed silly that I was confident in my ability to make a fancy French cake like a marjolaine or opera but couldn’t imagine baking something as essential to my culture as the egg tart is.