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July 15, 2011
Demystifying dairy-free desserts
Paula Shoyer’s The Kosher Baker aims to please the novice baker and the more advanced.
ELIZABETH NIDER AND BASYA LAYE
“Homemade desserts are the greatest pleasures in life,” said kosher-cookbook author and cooking-school proprietor Paula Shoyer in an interview with the Independent from her home in Chevy Chase, Md. She believes that there are so many people missing out on the gratifying adventure of homemade baking, that she decided to take it upon herself to simplify the art in The Kosher Baker: Over 160 Dairy-free Recipes from Traditional to Trendy (Brandeis University Press, 2010).
Her love affair with baking started after attending law school, when Shoyer and her husband were living in Switzerland. Shoyer, working as a speechwriter and legal advisor, decided to go to cooking school just for fun. After receiving a pastry diploma from the Ritz-Escoffier école de Gastronomie Française in Paris in 1996, she started a Geneva-based catering business, which she ran for two years. By the time Shoyer returned to the United States to live, she had decided to open a cooking school, and she now finds herself traveling the country, “teaching kosher cooking and baking and proving that kosher food can be beautiful, elegant and delicious.” She does so out of her one-woman Paula’s Parisian Pastries cooking school in the Washington, D.C., area.
“I loved food my entire life and it never occurred to me that one could commit to a career in it,” Shoyer explained about her developing interest. Looking back, she said, she realizes that it was in her genes all along: one of her grandmothers was a “spectacular” baker and that is, in part, the inspiration behind her choice of profession.
According to Shoyer, three of the difficulties in kosher baking are creating something unique, making it parve (in this case, dairy-free) and keeping the end result relatively healthy.
“I wanted to move kosher baking forward,” she explained. “[It’s] all about dairy-free desserts and it was written for a kosher audience, but the appeal is much broader. It’s a book not just for kosher people. One of the things I am sensitive to is when someone can’t eat something, so I’ve included both gluten-free and sugar-free sections. Whether for allergies or food restrictions, this book can be for anyone.”
Tired of always seeing the same desserts at functions and parties, Shoyer began looking further afield for ideas.
“If you go to a kosher function, you’ll see the same desserts that I saw when I was five, which was a long time ago! Most kosher people have about four desserts that they serve over and over, [but] there is a world of dairy-free desserts,” she said. “I travel a lot, so I’ve tasted such wonderful pastries from around the world, and I come home and try to make them dairy free. I do play around with recipes people gave me, but I prefer the challenge of recreating something I’ve seen in another country.”
Shoyer’s éclair puffs with caramel sauce were inspired by éclairs she saw in Switzerland, for example. Her mousses and pear tarts are from France (there isn’t a bakery in France that doesn’t carry pear tarts, she said) and her chocolate babka technique comes from a Sephardi woman in Israel. Shoyer is still trying to invent a parve dulce de leche, inspired by a visit to Argentina, but the last time she tried, she said, “I had to use a blowtorch to clean the pan!”
“I also try to make things healthier,” she added. “In England, they use spelt a lot more and, in Switzerland, I had a whole-wheat croissant. I’ve [made] spelt croissants [and] I am hoping that what we’ll start seeing in stores is more whole-grain desserts. You can take most cakes and substitute about 20 percent whole wheat without noticing, and that way I can get more whole grains into my kids’ [diet].”
This desire to innovate motivated Shoyer to write her first cookbook, and The Kosher Baker has received several positive reviews and endorsements, including from New York Times food writer Joan Nathan and Susie Fishbein of the Kosher By Design series.
Uniquely organized into sections according to the time and effort required per recipe, The Kosher Baker begins with simple one-step desserts, moves onto slightly more involved, two-step recipes and has later chapters for those recipes involving multiple steps, a format that can work for chefs at any level of skill.
“Let’s say I want to make something – my first thoughts are, ‘What am I making and how much time do I have? Am I having a lot of people or is it a small group? Do I need several simple desserts or can I make one elaborate dessert for a small crowd?’ We’re all busy; if we’re not working, then we’re busy with our kids,” said the mother of four.
Shoyer has included a section called The Ten Commandments of Kosher Baking, in which she gives plenty of helpful and inventive ideas for all kinds of bakers – from the novice to the advanced. One of her most gratifying experiences, she said, is helping those who need to be walked through the finer points of cooking and baking. One way she does this is by teaching her students how to properly use a cookbook. Today, she teaches cooking classes on a regular basis to groups as small as three and as large as 70, and gives cooking and baking demonstrations in her home, at synagogues and community centres around the country and in her students’ homes.
For those who don’t normally bake or are even afraid of baking – a problem more common than assumed – Shoyer recommends using recipes in the first section, “which has 45 desserts ready for the oven in 15 minutes or less. The basic idea is to turn on the oven to preheat and, by the time you hear the ding, you’re almost ready to go. I usually tell people to start with mandelbrot.”
About sections two and three, she advised, “Just because a recipe has two steps, it doesn’t mean it’s harder, it just [requires] more planning.”
Shoyer has at least two favorite recipes from her new book. “I like making all the fancy layer cakes, but my favorite recipe to eat are the cinnamon buns. The last time I made them, I finished them at midnight and I couldn’t help eating some. Nothing makes your house smell better.”
The Kosher Baker is available in Judaica stores, select bookstores and online at Shoyer’s blog, kosherbaker.blogspot.com, or her website, paulaspastry.com.
Elizabeth Nider is a freelance writer living in Richmond. JI editor Basya Laye is Paula Shoyer’s first cousin, once removed.
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