Everyday Gourmet Ep52 - Vanilla Slice

ever I go to the country always stop at a little local bakery for their vanilla slice because they're so good so I thought it's only appropriate that I show you how to make it at home we need to make a thick custard because it needs to be stuck between two pieces of puff pastry so in a medium pot we're going to add some corn flour I've got 100 grams of corn flour here 70 grams of custard powder and 250 grams of caster sugar so give that a really good mix so all those dry ingredients are combined and we can start adding the liquid now I don't want any lumps in my custard here so we'll just start with a low heat and we can start adding our milk now it's 750 milliliters of milk - 250 milliliters of cream now I'm going to leave 200 milliliters of milk aside because I'll need that to dissolve some gelatin later on so we'll start with this milk give it a good whisk and you really need to be patient here we want this to be thick and we want to cook out that cornflour so we don't have that rule cornflour flavor so whisk away on a medium heat until that thickens and then I'll add the cream so this is really thick now so we can start adding 250 milliliters about cream here and stop there and then again give it another good whisk to incorporate but we're not stopping there we want it to be a little bit thicker so I'm adding some gelatin so we'll just use 7 grams of gelatin and I've just left that 200 milliliters of milk so I'll just dissolve that in the cold milk and then we'll give that another quick whisk and that can now go in to our thick custard and again give it a really good whisk okay so that's looking glossy and super thick while it's still warm we can start incorporating our butter now I need 60 grams of butter this is going to make it extra lush so we'll just cut that into cubes just like that and then we can incorporate that along with some vanilla now an either vanilla slice so I'm adding quite a lot of vanilla bean paste to this I want two teaspoons of it and I just love it because you can see all the little speckles of vanilla in this and of course you really want to taste the vanilla in this delicious custard so two teaspoons and we'll just incorporate that all together there you'll see as soon as I start to mix it you can see there's little speckles of vanilla bean which we all love so quick stir and you can see almost all that butters dissolve now so we can add the last ingredient to our custard which is some egg yolk so three egg yolks and they can go in now I'm gonna give that another good stir and this needs to cool completely so I've just got a glass bowl here and we'll transfer this thick custard straight out of this pot here and that goes into the fridge now I like to cover it with a little bit of cling film there so it doesn't form a skin on the top so just a piece just like that and then just actually place that cling film in the bowl and they'll ensure no skin will develop when it's cooling so into the fridge while that's cooling we can get on to our pastry now while the custard is chilling I've got some puff pastry here we can start baking it in the oven so I've just got a rectangle of pastry here and what I do is actually trace where I'm going to cut the pastry afterwards so very carefully straight down they're not cutting all the way through it this is just an indentation so straight down and then we want four rectangles so just like that very carefully cutting it that will just make it really easy when we're cutting our rectangles later it'll ensure that our puff pastry won't break so the first step and then just with a fork just to ensure that it doesn't rise too much we're just pricking the pastry with the fork now the puff pastry has a lot of butter in it so you don't need to put any more on but I do want to keep it quite flat so my little trick is getting another tray popping it on top and then we're going to bake this in the oven at 200 degrees for about 15 to 20 minutes then remove the tray and cook it for another five minutes until it's golden brown and you watch it won't puff it'd be perfect and flat look at our pastry it's looking really nice and as I promised you it's nice and flat we just need to allow that to cool completely before we start building our vanilla slice now this is also cooled down here so we'll just take off a cling film and we've just got a piping bag here and we're going to fill this up so just with a spatula here look how thick that is you really do need to make this thick for it to stand and for it to resemble the perfect vanilla slice so we'll fill that up fold that back over and I always just before I start just test to make sure that you've got the right nozzle and that is perfect so that's ready we'll put this aside and we'll get onto our pastry so very carefully using a palette knife just like this take our pastry off and you can do slabs of this I mean you can see I've got quite a lot of custard here so you could make at least eight here we're going to cut with a serrated knife just where we traced with our smaller knife before so straight down there perfectly cut and then just where we traced it before and then we can start piping on our custard so I start from the outside and we just do dollops and we just continue this until it's completely full with our delicious vanilla custard traditionally vanilla slice is done in a really big slab but I find it really hard to cut afterwards so doing individual vanilla slices like this is best so the lid goes on now just like that now this vanilla slice is ready I mean you could eat it like this but I've got a lot of custards so I think I'm gonna take it to the next level and do another layer of custard and pastry okay so we're just filling in the little gaps there with extra custard and finally we can put our last layer on with the remaining pastry that I reserved just a quick cut there and I promise you won't do any more levels after that you can go crazy and do a few but that is looking just spectacular you can actually see the work that we've done there with the piping bag and you can't have a vanilla slice without a little bit of icing sugar just to top it off so go crazy with it just like that and there you have it you know what I still love the vanilla slices that you do get in the country but sometimes it's nice to go all out and make it extra fancy you

Channel: Queenfinefoods

Views: 42,274

Keywords: Mille-feuille (Dish), Vanilla (Ingredient), Baking (Industry)

Id: zKN-SGv1Zfg

Length: 7min 59sec (479 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 21 2014