“The next dessert that will become fashionable, the canelé”. More than a prophecy, this statement a few weeks ago on Twitter of Lluís Bernils, owner of El Celler de Matadepera, begins to be a reality. And it is that, it is less and less strange to come across these small sweets of a very dark color, vanilla flavor and originating from Bordeaux, on the counters of pastry shops and cafes or in appetizing publications on social networks that sometimes defy the traditional recipe. A crunchy snack caramelized on the outside and tender on the inside that has become a must in establishments such as Santo Bakehouse (Calle Espiritu Santo, 25, Madrid). “We baked them from day one and I think we will never stop doing it”, Comment on your Instagram account.
“They are something very special and to make them you need to be patient,” says Valerie Hassan, 30, who owns Santo Bakehouse with George Kallias, 32. There, around six in the morning, they bake about 40 a day and there are days that at 11:00 a.m. they have already flown. Neither Hassan nor Kallias are French—she is American; he, British-, but when they began to make bread and pastries at home after the pandemic, under the name of Little Oven, they decided to include canelé on the menu and now, in the small workshop that they opened a year ago in the neighborhood from Malasaña, is already an icon among Croissants, pains au chocolat, and other more common pastries. So much so that he now wears the t-shirts they have designed as merchandising from the premises “We started developing the recipe we have at home and we always make it with a traditional flavor, except once it was cardamom dipped in chocolate with edible glitter for a pop up what we did”, says Hassan, who arrived as an English teacher nine years ago and gradually entered the world of baking, working in workshops.
Hassan and Kallias —who competed in Masterchef in the United Kingdom in 2018— spend three days making the cake that is eaten in just two bites. First, they denature the milk because that way they get “a more consistent result,” she explains. The second, they make the dough using milk, egg yolks, flour, icing sugar, butter, salt, rum and “pure” vanilla. And the third, they bake for an hour in copper molds —according to the canonical recipe— that they bought in Bordeaux, but that they do not paint with beeswax, as tradition dictates, but with a vegetable fat also purchased in the French city and what is sold expressly For that. The result is a kind of very dark-colored cake, completely caramelized on the outside and crunchy, and somewhat moist—but not raw—on the inside. “It has been difficult for us to introduce them because of their dark color. At the beginning I gave them away so that they would know them because I only knew what tourists were”, recalls Hassan. Now they have faithful consumers of canelé.
The exact origin of this sweet, according to the Aquitaine website —region to which the French city belongs— is uncertain, although it is attributed to the nuns of the convent of the Annunciations, in Bordeaux. They were in charge of making sweets for poor people with the wheat that fell on the docks of the port and the unused egg yolks from the wineries in the Chartrons neighborhood. To these two base ingredients they added rum and vanilla, two products that came to the port town from colonized territories, thus giving rise to the famous sweet. However, the recipe fell into oblivion until the eighties, when it was recovered and revised by local confectioners such as Philippe Baillardran, from the Baillardran pastry shop, which since 1988 has made this sweet one of its star products. The establishment, chosen by Lonely Planet as one of the best places to eat it, even makes a non-alcoholic version.
Although now its fluted shape and its shiny crust is seen in more and more places, canelé has been dispatched for years in specific establishments, mainly, in those where the pastry chefs have some connection with France or carry out their work following the trail of pastry tradition. from the country. In Santa Eulalia Patisserie (Calle del Espejo, 12, Madrid), José Tabanco and his team only make them on weekends, but they have been part of his wide selection of pastries and desserts since the store opened in 2015. Nicolás taught him how to make them. Serrano, his teacher at the time at Le Cordon Bleu, and since then he has followed the canonical Bordeaux recipe to the letter, also using beeswax to paint the copper molds that he buys at La Moderna, a store specializing in honey that dates back to 1919. “It is unscented wax and I had a hard time finding it. It is given to increase the crunchiness of the exterior ”, he comments. It is also essential, he points out, to rest the dough for at least 24 hours and to be precise in each of the steps. “The margin of error is minimal. For example, you have to pour the mixture of yolks, sugar, butter and milk over the flour and not the other way around, because in that case, it goes to the trash ”, he exemplifies.
Tabanco agrees with the rest of the interviewees that canelé is unknown to many customers, except for the French, who purposely go looking for it, as is the case with the galette de rois on Christmas. They dispatch -at a price of 3 euros- between 40 and 50 the day they are made because, and this is important to underline, they cannot be sold the next day as they have lost much of their crunch and “it is in the contrast where Grace resides.” Like Tabanco, they have also been baked since 2013 by Miguel Costa, pastry chef at El Palace Barcelona, where he first began serving them as petit fours in what was the hotel restaurant to later include it as one more sweet, available on the pastry menu with the formula cake and bubbles for a price of 15 euros with a glass of cava. Curiously, he bought the copper molds at the Can Fabes tableware auction, by Santi Santamaría, when he closed the establishment. “The preparation is easy, the cooking is not,” says the pastry chef, born in Toulouse, who uses clarified butter to paint the molds instead of wax and who lets the dough rest for 72 hours instead of 24 to “encourage it not to rise so much ”. “It stays crunchy and sweeter on the inside,” he says, adding that he has now created a version that contains “mousse of chocolate, biscuit hazelnut, passionand yuzu”.
It’s hard to imagine a croissant plated as a dessert from a tasting menu, something that does happen, more and more in gastronomic restaurants with the Bordeaux sweet. This is confirmed by Jorge Ruiz, chef and pastry chef by Vandelvira (Baeza, Jaén), and responsible, together with chef Juan Carlos García, for having turned the “piece of pastries” into one more pass on the haute cuisine menu that they serve at a price of 73 euros. In fact, with it they close the proposal and they do so by accompanying it with a ganache of chocolate and ginger. “It was the only dessert that we knew was going to be on the menu, we were clear about it,” explains Ruiz, who previously went through Enigma, by Albert Adrià, and L’Atelier, by Frenchman Eric Ortuño, something that influenced the decision. “When I started doing it, I used to look on Instagram to find out what was being done in other places and it was very difficult to find restaurants that did it beyond French pastry shops… now, however, I see more and more canelé molds in petit fours and for dessert somewhere else in Europe and Spain”, he points out.
Ruiz and García developed the Bordeaux recipe and later adapted it to the circumstances of a haute cuisine restaurant where up to 70 covers are served. This is the reason why they dispensed with the copper molds —with a price of around 35-40 euros per unit— and replaced them with stainless steel ones that, according to Ruiz, provide a perfect crisp. In addition, they do not use beeswax but spray butter and, as a nod to their location, they have replaced the rum with Cream wine, a generous wine from Marco de Jerez, to “get closer” to their “land”. “The first day we put canelé on the menu, two foreigners from Bordeaux came to eat and when we asked them what they thought, they told us: ‘well, very good, but it’s a canelé from Baeza,” the cook humorously recalls.
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