Besides cheese and wine, France is best known for its delectable traditional pastry selection. From prevalent croissants to the unique Paris-Brest, the patisserie crafts some of the delicious baked goods worldwide. These days, you find different bakeries fusing traditional techniques with a modern flair to bake mouth-watering goods.
Technology has changed everyone’s lifestyle and influenced all processes and activities. Instead of visiting the bakery shop, you can now order bakery products online with a few clicks. You get an idea of all the products sold at bakery shops and order whatever you desire. The range includes cakes, pastries, bread, and other confectionery.
Classic staples
You quickly find an array of traditional goods in any bakery. These treats are a central part of the food culture, so try as many as you can. Following are the categories of traditional desserts you find:
Bavarois
Bavarois or Bavarian creams are cold desserts set in a mould with gelatin. They include fruit, whipped cream, liquor, and other ingredients.
Cakes
Traditionally, cake or gateau referred to only bread-like confectionery mixed with nuts and fruits. However, after the 18th century, sweeter gateau became a standard. An example of traditional cakes is the Opera Cake with thin layers of confection soaked in coffee syrup and layered with chocolate ganache, coffee, buttercream, and mille-feuille.
Charlottes
These are first dipped in liquor, molded, and often filled with mousse, fruits, and cream. Famous cookies like macarons and ladyfingers and bread, like brioche, fall into this category.
Choux
Famous as the puff pastry in English, it is the airy shell of dough found in profiteroles and eclairs. Choux requires precision as you first cook the ingredients on a stove and bake them into an oven later.
Creams
These areas are based on many desserts. Four primary cremes help make desserts: custard-like cream, pastry cream, almond flavored cream, and buttercream frosting. Additionally, ganache is categorized as a cream type because it combines chocolate and whipped cream.
About puffs
Puffs have a laminated structure built up of alternate layers of dough and fat. They result from rolling out the paste and giving it sufficient turns until there are thousands of layers of dough and fat. The expanding air and water vapor puff the separate layers apart during the baking process, forming a crisp, light, delightful, and flaky pastry.
The layers
There is no fixed number of layers in the pastry, and they differ between 700 and 1,500 depending upon how you roll them. They are of four types, namely half, three-quarter, complete, and inverted puff. These terms describe the amount of fat to the weight of the flour. ‘Full’ symbolizes equal weights of fat and flour, ‘three quarter’ means three-quarter of the weight of the fat to the flour, and so on.
Inverted puff is a unique way of making choux where you encase the dough into a butter block. You find many savories made from flour and bread as well. Indulge in these sweet delicacies or relish some crispy rolls and croissants as an alternate option.