REVIEW: "Pirogology" by Irina Chadeeva + a small culinary experiment

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Today I want to tell you about the book by Irina Chadeeva "Pirogology". In addition to recipes for pastries and pies, familiar to us from childhood, this excellent edition contains many useful culinary life hacks, some of which I will cite in this review.

In addition to 60 selected recipes for pies, pastries, cakes, muffins, you will also find recipes for ice cream, marshmallows, cookies and even charlotte, which can be prepared in 7 minutes, in the book. At the very beginning of the book, you will find a description of the basic products for baking and the properties that they must have in order to please you with the result; a description of the equipment that will be useful to you, and even a few pages on how to decorate your culinary creations if you want to donate them to someone.

Did you know that cupcakes are a great gift option to send in the mail?

Each of the recipes that are given in the book can be put on the festive table, while they are easy to prepare (perhaps the point is that Irina very clearly explains how to cook) and do not require you to be highly skilled in decorating desserts.

What I liked about the book especially:

1. Lively pleasant presentation.
2. Clearly organized cookbook table of contents with product pictures.
3. Each recipe has useful tips, life hacks and solutions to make the cooking process better / easier.
4. Great photo quality that literally encourages you to try cooking.

Culinary life hacks from the book

• How to tell if the caramel is ready Take the hot syrup with a teaspoon and dip it in ice water;
• Hint for Chopping Nuts Do not use a blender - the nuts can get oily, but if you don't have a processor, you can mince the nuts.
• Before filling with cream, it is better to cut the eclairs in half. It is often recommended to fill the eclairs with cream through the hole, but I do not advise doing this, since there is always the possibility that part of the cake will remain empty due to the presence of partitions in the dough.
• How to quickly bake apples I bake apples in a microwave oven - cut them into halves, remove seeds, put them cut down on a plate, baking time in minutes is equal to the number of apples in pieces. The oven must be at maximum power.
• Tips for making puff chopped dough You can skip the salt and use slightly salted butter for the dough.
• To remove the wax coating from citrus fruits, wash them well with hot water and baking soda.
• To squeeze more juice out of the lemons, heat them in the microwave for 10-15 seconds.

A culinary experiment for a noob

Well, things like cookbooks are best tested in action. Therefore, I chose a recipe that appealed to me visually, and tried to cook it, following the instructions from the book. The choice fell on curd rings with raspberries. Because, firstly, as a child, I baked eclairs several times and am familiar with the dough, and secondly, because the cream contains raspberries.

For understanding: since childhood, I practically never baked anything more complicated than the simplest apple charlotte.

With the preparation of the recipe dough, everything went relatively smoothly.

The first difficulties arose after it was necessary to put the dough on a baking sheet using a bag with a toothed tip. Somewhere in the bins there was a set of old Soviet tips of different diameters and a super-small bag.

I guessed that it was worth using a toothed tip of the largest diameter, which did not fit into the bag:)

If you do not have a tip or a matching bag, use heavy duty plastic bags (for example, freezer bags) as a piping bag. It is enough to cut off the corner of the required diameter from such a package. If you don't have a tip, no big deal. Laying out the dough on a baking sheet can be done using only a homemade bag.

I got a little less rings than in the recipe (12 instead of 15). Divided them into two parties: in the first nine pieces, in the second - three.

I threw the first batch into the oven and began to observe how they increase in volume and brown.

My oven turned out to be very hot, and the dough began to brown too quickly. I got scared and made the temperature lower ahead of schedule. As a result, half of the rings are opal. Even the heating of the oven turned out to be very uneven. Note to the hostess: there is a separate article on Lifehacker, from which you will learn how to determine the hottest place in the oven.

Also a little tip: it is better to cut the rings in half using a narrow thin knife with a wavy blade. Normal will crush the product strongly.

Now a few words about the filling. In the book it is written as clearly as possible what and how to do with it. Everything worked out in the best possible way.

It was:

Became:

While I was fiddling with the cream, a second batch of rings arrived, which I did not take out, even though it seemed to me that they were about to burn out.

Ultimately, the second batch turned out well and did not fall off, neither during the baking process, nor after I took them out.

Results of the experiment

In the book "Pirogovedenie" it is written that it will be useful for both beginners and experienced chefs. I consider myself a beginner, and the book turned out to be useful to me in practice. The experiment has shown that there will be baked goods in my life. As a result, we got delicious ruddy rings with light and healthy curd cream and raspberries, reminiscent of summer.