Question
Elise Benoit
I am looking for a solid recipe for a Buche de Noel and for oil and oil-less pie crusts.?
Answer
Well, Elise, I don't know if you were here earlier, but we showed a photo of Aush de Noel and it is solid and it is easy and it is this chocolate cake, my chocolate cake to live for, but baked in a sheet pan and then cut into strips and shaped like a bouch complete with a lo you know, a knot and meringue mushrooms and any other kind of decoration that you want. It works really, really well. So I suggest you try that. Um, the recipe is in my cookbook, vegan Chocolate. But if you google Fran chocolate cake to live for, you're going to find that all over the web in terms of oil. You want oil and oil less pie crust. For an oil free pie crust, I would do a cookie crust, the kind I was talking about earlier where I would use dates and oats and maybe some coconut and get it nice and sticky and press it in. And in terms of oil pie crusts, we teach one in essential vegan desserts. You know, when I transitioned I was working as a traditional pastry chef and um, this was like over 30 years ago. And when I changed my diet, I had to really rethink. I I set up a taste, a test kitchen. Actually there was no good vegan butter at the time. There was just hydrogenated stick margarine, which was awful. It smelled awful. And then of course we learned that hydrogenation is awful for you. It's very unhealthy. I don't know if it's even available anymore. I mean, I guess it is, but I see margarines that don't aren't hydrogenated, but there are lots of vegan butters. So what I did was I created a pie crust, pie dough that you can roll out using oil and the still follow the exact same rules as you would with making a butter crust. You get the oil very, very cold, for example, and you let the, the dough rests several times. You make it, you don't overwork it into the refrigerator, it goes to rest. Then you roll it out and into the refrigerator, it goes to rest. What we're doing the rest bit is to limit the amount of gluten, to lower the gluten that happens just mixing water and flour even you're creating gluten. And then I put it in the pipe pan unless I'm doing a rustic tart and I let it rest again. I also use a bit of apple cider vinegar that keeps the gluten down. So I find that really terrific. The thing to remember when you're swapping oil for butter is you use three quarters to seven eighths of the amount you use less because there's no butter fat.
