This Neapolitan Treat is a Culinary MAGIC TRICK | The Secret Behind Babà Napoletano

so I kind of have a weird obsession with what I'm calling uh shock Factor Foods what I mean by that are foods where it totally shocks and surprises you when you eat it usually because the food itself looks kind of boring or meh but then you bite into it and it's absolutely amazing or just totally different from what you were expecting let me know in the comments if you can think of any uh good foods like that I'm always on the lookout but I do want to talk about one in particular today maybe the best example I found so far if you walk through the streets of Naples Italy a city which is renowned for uh their amazing pastries you'll walk by all these windows where you'll see all kinds of amazing stuff Folia and colorful cakes and amazing cookies there's one pastry that you'll see everywhere but if you didn't know what it was you would probably never ever think to try it and that's because it looks so lame I'm going to show it to you now um TR try try not to laugh and stick with me here okay this is it this little weird mushroom looking thing this is called a baba or if you're speaking in Neapolitan dialect B Baba Baba and yeah it doesn't really look like much doesn't look like something that you walk past and you go I need to get me some of that Baba is a very surprising food though so surprising in fact that the first time you eat one it's almost like you're witnessing a magic trick illusion Michael it almost seems impossible some of you probably already know what the magic trick is if you're familiar with French cooking because yes neapolitans did learn how to make this from the French but the French learned how to make their croissants from the Italian so it was a good trade Naples as usual did their own kind of unique thing with it and this is an absolute classic there and we would like to show you how they're made today I think we're going to kind of do this pen and Teller style we're actually going to show you how the illusion is made before we show you the illusion so stay tuned because this has some surprises in store uh okay so I see a stand mixer yeast I'm assuming salt sugar butter flour eggs is this basically a Brio dough yes but it's a little bit special baa is made with a very strong flower and for strong flower I mean a flower that has an higher protein content in this case I'm using a flour that has about 14 14 and a half% of protein I'm going to add yeast salt sugar all the butter in and we need the butter room temperature it needs to be soft it's very important it's fundamental for the Baba to have a stand at least a stand mixer because forget that you can do it with your hands and we start to make our sun mixer works at the beginning of this process what we need is start to mix the butter with the flour and we need a medium low speed some sometimes as you can see you need also to help the dough which means if the butter goes on the side just bring it back right now as you can see the butter is mixed with the flour and with all the rest which means that is the moment in which I can start to add the first two eggs it's very important to add the eggs a little bit at the time because we need the the dough the the flour to absorb all the fat liquid content of the eggs when a rough primitive dough is formed we can add our third [Music] egg when the door is attached to the hook and in Italian we say the door is inada I not this in English is like that is the moment in which we can add the other [Music] egg so far every egg you've added has taken even longer so I'm assuming the final egg is going to be a doozy it's a very long process but when it's done here we see the wild Ava in her natural habitat watch as she carefully observes her unwary prey waiting for the perfect moment to strike it is at times like these when one can't help but wander has this Majestic creature ever pondered the expression a watched Kettle never boils it takes time our last [Music] egg the gluten of this dough is so well formed that as you can see it takes time also to break the eggs [Music] oh my gosh is it done yes finally after I don't know 1 hour and 45 minutes we're done I can see through it I know this is the sign that our dough is ready it should be soft but also very elastic the next step is to transfer the door in a fresh clean bowl and let it rest for about about 45 minutes now we need to get our mold ready I'm going to use this that makes a good size for a Bubba real quick aside these uh silicone cup mold things are really cool and they're made for Baba they're perfect for making that classic kind of mushroom shape that you'll find in Naples that really is the shape of Naples but they don't have to be this shape or size for instance once Ava and I celebrated our anniversary in Naples and we got this amazing uh Baba cake that was in the shape of vvus while I have you here if you agree with us that food is love then please help spread the love and give this video a thumbs up and if you're new here and you like learning about interesting foods and consider subscribing all right I'll shut up back TOA and what we need to do is brush some uh vegetable oil or some uh butter so we will avoid the B stick to the mold with the gloves the D doesn't stick to in this case my hands so what we need to do is make a small bowl of D small to how do you say feel half of the mold would this same rule apply even if you Ed the bigger mold so always off now I noticed that you still have quite a bit of dough does that mean that we can also make some big ba here we can make a b [Music] and I have a feeling you're going to say we let these rise yes and now we let them rise until they reach the the edges top yes of the mold I'm going to let them rise in the oven with the lights on obviously the oven is turn off but with the lights on in this way they will rise a little bit faster oh yeah those are starting to look like baa they have that kind of paneton smell I know it's like I'm tempted to eat like that I call dibs on that one that one's mine dibs you know what di dibs is it's yours yeah you okay this is mine and now we need to cook them and we are going to bake them at 180° cus which is 350 355 far night for about 15 minutes holy moly AA I know it's big but now I need to check if they are properly cooked because otherwise we need to go back in the oven so I would give to mine another minutes 1 minutes and a half is that too pale here yes let's go back [Music] now we need to take them out of the mold and let them completely cool down this is not at all what I was expecting this is like a very hard firm dough which is not really at all how these should end up because still we need to do two two or three things on this Baba this is the first stage now is the moment in which we can make our Baba sweet because as you saw before we didn't use a lot of sugar in the dough but as you can see now we are going to use some sugar just a little bit to prepare what in Italian we call B bath yes in order to do that we need water sugar orange zest and lemon zest so I assume this is like a simple syrup this is for now a simple syrup one we need to make it boil and this is the moment in which we can add the room because the B for the Baba is B room [Music] oh the gloves are on again see the B requires a lot of gloves we have ways of making you talk H what we do with this we take this and we place here more than once at a time because otherwise it will take one whole day and [Music] then oh look at those bubbles because now is when the magic is happening D what are you doing was squeeing them you're squeezing them see you're going to break them nothing happens they are B so you place them again [Music] oh my gosh it is literally a sponge it's a sponge and now after we soak them we just leave them here to drain the excess moisture that they have do a big one next I want to see a big one you're like a baby yes how many time you you so many times but I've never seen these made before bu actually bone actually Naples this is the size we made the Min ba over there this is the size don't ruin my fun I was about to ask if it's possible to soak them for too long and then I realized that you can buy them in Naples literally in a jar of that so my my guess is no your guess is no Al in order of taste they are perfect like that but if it happens that your enabl and you see them you see this Baba very very shiny shining and what they do they spread on top some very hot apricot [Music] marmade so that brings you up to speed on how Baba are made Eva made these yesterday because the first really important thing to note is that they do need to sit overnight because like every said the day after they are much much better there's also another kind of important thing do you want to talk about the syrup and how you continue to treat the Baba it's very important that you save some of the syrup before you eat every time you keep soaking it and because they're essentially preserved in alcohol they have an incredibly long shelf life as long as you keep it saturated in that from this point of view Alper they they can be treated like uh the cake the fruit cake frake that you have here in America it's like you make then you keep adding alcohol alcohol and they can last forever except instead of a dense brick you have one of the lightest squishiest fluffiest DS you can possibly imagine all right should we do it sa you want to do the honors and so yeah if you buy these in the street in Naples they'll come in a little dish to help contain the rum but right before they give it to you they'll do exactly that and they'll squirt it down with more rum oh I wanted to point out real quick so how to eat these because last year on the pastagram RoR we took our group to Naples and we were at a restaurant and we arranged with the restaurant to get a baba from one of our favorite Baba places in Naples so that was our dessert but because they're a restaurant they served them you know like this like on a plate with a knife and a fork you know I felt like it was polite at a restaurant to not be like eating it you know with my hand like I would in the street and then this guy this like guy with a heavy Neapolitan accent comes up he's just like what are you doing it's a BBA you take it and you eat it so we'll do the same hereo it is completely completely soaked in that I mean it's like holding a completely saturated sponge but is so good so fluffy and more you suck them better they are and when you eat it it's like it doesn't even make sense how the dough can still be so perfect and hold up so well you can bite into it any other dough you would think that it would just dissolve into a mess but with this mush this is perfection no I think having now seen you go through the process of making it I understand better how this magic trick illusion Michael this illusion if you want to call it is done because what surprised me the the dough is so soft and fluffy that I expected you to make a very soft and fluffy Brio but no it was the opposite it was a very firm almost Hard Dough and then it's the soaking that rehydrates if this kind of dough has a lot of fat inside or a lot of sugar it becomes too mushy while if it's a pretty dry dough can absorb the syrup and be like that without any problem in Napoli when something is really beautiful really good something or someone they say s which means yes which means you're a bab just to make you make understand how good is a baba baba now we serve the Baba in the most easy and simple way because a baba actually doesn't need anything else but if you want to exaggerate you can actually open a baba stuff a baba with custard and sour cherries or with I don't know Pac your custard whipped cream whatever you want see I don't like like those because it ruins the surprise what I love about these is how they look just so plain and boring it just looks like I don't know like a little piece of sponge cake or something and then when we give them to people on the tour and it's their first time they've ever had them they just bite into it they're like whoa like what is that what just happened I love that it's so much fun that usually is the reaction that we get from people one of our other favorite shock Factor desserts is uh paste de mandera these amazing little cookies they look just like dry brittle cookies and then you bite into it and you have the most glorious gooey cookie you could possibly imagine and this pasta Garian made the very excellent pistachio version of that they look excellent well done now I want one of them I know that this is not exactly the most uh uh accessible recipe ever but if you do try the Baba recipe tag us on a picture on Instagram or Facebook ostagar all right we'll see you guys next time CIA now question when you have the big one do you think then it's acceptable to use a knife and fork absolutely not you got to really see it's okay challenge accepted

Channel: Pasta Grammar

Views: 133,405

Keywords: babà, baba, baba au rhum, rum baba recipe, rum baba, baba au rhum recipe, how to make baba, naples, napoli, neapolitan, babà napoletano, babbà, cake, recipe, how to make

Id: ZWX0-FFeOpo

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024