french | toast

Leslie Cooperband with some of her goats at Prairie Fruits Farm in Champaign. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

Leslie Cooperband’s husband hadn’t even decided to take the job he’d been offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when a friend called from the road to tell them about a farm with a log house and a “for sale” sign just 10 minutes from campus.

Cooperband and her husband, Wes Jarrell, had been to the area before. Cooperband recalled thinking, “My God, who could possibly live here?”

That phone call came in 2003. Six years later, Jarrell teaches at the university and Cooperband spends most of her time tending the orchards and goats of Prairie Fruits Farm.

“This is really satisfying work, much more so than being a professor. Right now I feel like this is what I want to do for a while…quite a while. And learn how to do this well,” Cooperband said.

Cooperband and her husband are both soil scientists who worked at the University of Wisconsin – Madison before their move to central Illinois. They knew they would need to rehabilitate the land at their new farm, which had previously grown corn and soybeans. “Even though we’re in the heart of the prairie soils here, which are inherently really fertile soils, it was just really beat up from years of corn and soybeans,” Cooperband said.

The first year they planted only one thing: a cover crop of buckwheat. That fall, they composted the used animal bedding and other waste from the Champaign County Fair and spread it in the fields.

In the spring of 2004, Cooperband and Jarrell planted 350 fruit trees and 600 berry plants. Prairie Fruits Farm grows pears, apples, peaches, apricots, cherries, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, currants and gooseberries. After three years of transition, the land was certified organic in 2006.

“We knew that we wanted to have fruit, because we both love fruit and my husband grew up on a small fruit farm in Oregon near Portland,” Cooperband said.

Then there are the goats.

Cooperband was intrigued by goats and loved goat cheese, particularly the cheese sold by a small producer at a farmers’ market in Madison. After talking with her, Cooperband started thinking about making her own cheese on a small scale.

“She said, ‘Just get some goats, because if you’ve never raised ‘em, how do you know you’re gonna like ‘em?’” Cooperband said. “So we did.”

After a significant amount of research, the first four Nubian goats arrived at Prairie Fruits Farm in June of 2004, and Cooperband took a five-day cheesemaking course in California shortly thereafter. The three does and one buck were a little over a year old. Cooperband planned to breed them in the fall, so they would kid and start producing milk in the spring.

The long-eared goats, however, had a slightly different plan. Within two weeks of their arrival at the farm, two of the does were pregnant.

“We had them all together and I thought they were not supposed to breed until the days got colder and shorter,” Cooperband said. “But they didn’t read that book.”

The first kid was born shortly after Thanksgiving and the other one followed a few weeks later. Throughout the cold winter, Cooperband would have to go milk the goats on a little wooden milk stand.

“My husband was sure that was gonna be the end of the goat project,” Cooperband said. “But I proved him wrong. I was out there twice a day, milking those girls. We made cheese in the house and shared it with friends and people liked it.”

From there, Cooperband started thinking about selling her cheese commercially. She and Jarrell came up with a business plan and got a loan to make the necessary improvements. The health department had to approve the plan. Cooperband wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before in Illinois: have her own herd, milk the goats and make cheese in a farmstead setting.

“For the health department, it was a new thing,” she said. “We had to spend a small fortune to become licensed and by that point we had to get more goats to be able to justify the expense.”

The facilities and the herd continue to expand. Cooperband estimates she’ll milk between 55 and 60 goats this year.

“It’s turned into the major enterprise that happens here,” she said. “When we came here, we thought we would have fruit and do goats…they would kind of be equal. They’re just such wonderful animals that it’s kind of hard not to have them,” Cooperband said.

Prairie Fruits Farm became a licensed dairy in 2005 and started selling cheese in Urbana. The following year, Cooperband began selling at Chicago’s Green City Market.

Her cheese is also available at the Marion Street Cheese Market in Oak Park. Owner Eric Larson recalled reading about Cooperband’s cheese production in the Chicago Tribune a few months after the market’s opening in late 2004.

“I picked up the phone and called her and we’ve been carrying her cheese ever since,” Larson said. “The actual quality of the cheese is exceptional. She really knows what she’s doing…[with] almost an intuitive or artistic sense.”

Larson, who said Cooperband’s cheeses rival some of the great French cheeses, also appreciates Cooperband’s sustainable approach to farming.

For Cooperband, 48, it’s been a winding road to rural Champaign. She grew up in an urban area near Boston, without any background in agriculture but with an interest in ecology and natural history. After majoring in biology at Barnard College in New York City, she started working as a horticulture intern for the city’s parks department.

“All the parks had been trashed in the 60s and 70s,” she said. “There was a push to clean up the parks and to try to restore the landscape to how [Frederick Law] Olmsted had originally designed it.”

As part of a crew in Brooklyn, Cooperband had several different responsibilities. She got a Class 3 driver’s license and drove dump trucks full of debris to the dump at Coney Island.

After that internship, she inventoried the flora and fauna on parcels of land the Nature Conservancy was considering purchasing. Her duties mostly involved hiking and identifying species.

“That was a really fun job,” Cooperband said.

But it was while working for an ecologist in Costa Rica that she became interested in agriculture.

“The park [in which they were doing research] was really an amazing place, but then I started to become more intrigued by the agriculture that was going around on the outside of the park,” she said. “I started thinking that I needed to know more about agriculture…how could you be focused on plants if you really didn’t know anything about soil?”

She went back to school for ecology but switched into a soil science program, graduating with a doctorate in soil science from Ohio State University in Columbus. She moved to Wisconsin and started working with farmers.

“I always was thinking that I should really learn how to farm because here I was telling all these farmers what to do and I had never really farmed myself,” she said.

Along the way, Cooperband met Jarrell at a scientific conference in Las Vegas.

Now Jarrell teaches full-time at the University of Illinois, where Cooperband also has a part-time position. Her job is flexible enough to allow her to work full-time in the winter but stay on the farm starting in March.

“It’s been kind of a combination of doing some applied research-type projects and doing some adult education,” she said. “Most of the work that I’ve been doing here has been focused around helping communities develop a local food system.”

And that farm, the one her friend called to tell her about?

“We love it here,” Cooperband said. “The sky is unbelievable. You can see storms coming in. You just don’t have that kind of horizon on the coast.”

Nubian and La Mancha goats in the barn at Prairie Fruits Farm Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

A scientific look at Miss Muffet’s curds and whey

It is common knowledge that cheese comes from milk, but the scientific processes that take place during cheesemaking are less well known.

As you might expect the process begins with milk. Leslie Cooperband of Prairie Fruits Farm in downstate Champaign, explained that milk is mostly water, with proteins, fats and milk sugar, which is also known as lactose. To make a solid cheese from the liquid milk, she adds bacteria. These bacteria feast on the lactose, producing lactic acid as a byproduct. This process sours the milk.

The solids still need to thicken into a curdled mass, so Cooperband adds rennet, an enzyme that is naturally produced in the stomachs of young cows, goats and sheep. The rennet helps to curdle the milk.

Once the bacteria and the rennet act on the milk, the solid curds have separated from the liquid whey. (This is what Little Miss Muffet was eating when that dastardly spider sat down beside her.) The more the curds are manipulated, the harder the finished cheese will be.

The cheesemaking procedure depends on the kind of cheese Cooperband is making. For fresh chèvre cheese, she gently ladles the curd into a cheesecloth. Some of the bloomy rind cheeses, which have a white mold rind similar to that found on a brie or a camembert, are made from cut curds. Cooperband cuts the curd into pieces to drain out more of the whey before the curds are ladled.

The bacteria continue to eat lactose and produce acid throughout the process. Once the cheese is properly acidic, the cheese is salted. The salt doesn’t kill the bacteria. It just slows their activity down significantly.

At this point, the fresh cheese could be considered done. Even more microbial activity is involved in making aged cheeses. These cheeses require more than just the lactose-loving bacteria; molds, yeasts and other microorganisms break down the fats and proteins to give aged cheeses more depth and flavor, as well as different textures.

While people can age without doing much work, aging cheeses require maintenance. Cooperband said some of her cheeses must be flipped regularly and others must be washed during the aging process.

“Even the finished cheese is still alive,” she said.

This story originally appeared on the Medill News Service website.

Only one story left in the quarter after this post, folks, and that will go up Wednesday. Here’s our final project:

Reading between the leaves: Tea’s benefits balanced by potential medical interactions

Marv Bolt, collections curator at the Adler Planetarium, holds part of a 18th-century telescope. The ornate script instructs the user (in Italian) to choose between better magnification and a clearer image, depending on how the red insert is placed. The telescope goes on display in May, part of a new exhibit celebrating the 400th anniversary of telescopes. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

An 18th-century paper telescope and a NASA interstellar explorer might seem to be galaxies apart. But they’re both part of the Adler Planetarium’s celebration for the International Year of Astronomy.

The Chicago museum is kicking off the year with two new movies the museum produced and an exhibition covering 400 years of telescope technology. A Dutch optician invented the instrument and the astronomer Galileo, creating an improved version in 1609, soon discovered with it the four largest moons of Jupiter.

In addition to a 3-D video exploration of the universe set to Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures from an Exhibition,” the Planetarium has produced a film about NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer.

The IBEX satellite was launched in 2008 to map the boundaries of our solar system. The boundary is estimated at as far as 15 billion miles from the sun, according to data from NASA’s Voyager I space probe.

The Adler Planetarium handles education and public outreach for NASA’s IBEX mission.

The IBEX spacecraft is in an elliptical orbit around the Earth that reaches nearly to the moon. It detects atoms that are formed when the solar wind, a cloud of charged particles from the sun that travels outward at about a million miles per hour, interacts with interstellar particles from elsewhere in the galaxy, said IBEX principal investigator David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas.

Some of these atoms travel all the way back from the edges of the solar system and are picked up by IBEX, which beams the data about them down to earth. McComas said a quarter of the sky has been mapped thus far and he expects the full map to be finished this summer. Once the data set is complete, the IBEX video will be updated. A simulation of the finished map will be replaced with the real thing.

A fourth-stage rocket from the IBEX mission has also recently arrived at the Planetarium. IBEX launched using a Pegasus rocket, said Planetarium master educator Lindsay Bartolone. An airplane carried IBEX in a rocket hanging from its underside. Once the Pegasus rocket separated from the plane, it fired to send the spacecraft into orbit.

Pegasus rockets usually have three stages, but IBEX had a unique fourth stage that put the satellite into its elliptical orbit. Only two of these were made. One was sent up with IBEX, and the second one was used in tests that simulated the launch. The fourth-stage test module is now at the Planetarium.

The gleaming metal module is a stark contrast to another never-before-seen piece that will be displayed as part of the International Year of Astronomy: that 8-foot-long telescope made of colorful marbleized paper in the 18th century.

It was fashioned in Milan from tubes that nest tightly together when the telescope is folded down. The lens, signed with a diamond-tipped pen by its maker, is powerful enough to see the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter, said Marv Bolt, collections curator at the Planetarium. He described the paper telescope as both light and durable and said holding a section of the telescope was “like holding the core of a roll of paper towels.”

Both “3-D Universe: A Symphony” and “IBEX: Search for the Edge of the Solar System” will debut at the Planetarium on March 6 and will also be shown around the world. “Telescopes: Through the Looking Glass” runs May 22-Dec. 31.

The twin of this fourth-stage rocket sent NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Exploration satellite into an elliptical orbit, allowing it to map the boundary of our solar system. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL	The 18th- century telescope is properly focused when pulled out to a length of 8 feet. The telescope can extend to 10 feet, but does not function properly at that length. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

This story originally appeared on the Medill News Service website.

If the phrase “I reject your reality and substitute my own” is familiar, then you’ve probably seen “MythBusters” on the Discovery Channel, where various myths and urban legends are put to the test using science.

MythBusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman came to Chicago’s Harris Theater Sunday to speak to a sold-out crowd of science enthusiasts young and old. The MythBusters’ first appearance in the Windy City was part of Science Chicago, a yearlong series of science-related events, according to its science director Rabiah Mayas.

Although neither Savage nor Hyneman had formal scientific training, they use the scientific method in each episode of their show. They form a hypothesis to test the myth in question. Then they conduct methodical experiments under various conditions before declaring the myth “confirmed,” “plausible” or “busted.”

“We end up miles from where we started and it’s thrilling,” Savage said. “If we had tried to teach people about science, we would have completely screwed it up.”

Savage and Hyneman discussed one of their favorite myths. Fans may be surprised to hear that the myth did not feature any explosions. The idiom “that’ll go over like a lead balloon”—an idea that sinks under its own weight—led them to try to actually build a balloon out of lead foil. It took them two years to find a foil thin enough to make flight plausible, they said, but they ultimately succeeded. One sheet of the foil is as thick as one-sixth of a human hair. The lead balloon they made hovered in the air, proving that lead balloons don’t necessarily sink.

Savage described the lead balloon myth as “one of the clearest descriptions of how excited we get about the process of problem solving.”

Of course, problem solving gets more complex when plants or animals are involved. Although Hyneman noted the show has had worse luck with plants than with children or animals, Savage recalled an episode where they planned to remove the smell after a skunk spray. They filmed the episode shortly after skunk mating season, which apparently can be quite pungent. But there was a hitch.

“No amount of taunting or name-calling would convince these skunks to spray us,” Savage said.

Safety discussions took up much of the question and answer session. To the MythBusters, it’s easy to make mundane items such as household water heaters, cement trucks and denim overalls explode in spectacular fashion.

The high explosive shots are controlled, Hyneman said. Because a lot is known about explosives, there’s actually not much risk involved. Savage said he worries about invisible gases, particularly liquid oxygen, which is less familiar to firemen and can make other materials explosive.

“The more we play with it, the more I see that it’s a situation that could get out of hand so quickly,” Savage said.

Of course, playing with fire worries Savage’s mother – as does most everything else that he does on the show. One episode put several myths about escaping from a sinking car to the test. During the experiments, Savage sat in the front seat of a sinking car and tried to escape while Hyneman sat behind him (in full scuba gear) with a spare oxygen regulator at the ready.

After the episode aired, Savage’s mother asked him for advanced notice of potentially dangerous footage.

Hyneman described what they’re doing now as “many orders of magnitude safer” than earlier seasons. A company that previously worked on “Jackass” and “Fear Factor” programs assesses safety risks, Savage said. In addition to developing expertise on a variety of subjects, the MythBusters team has developed a system of identifying and logging risks. In fact, the most serious injuries have come from moving heavy safety equipment, Hyneman said. Most importantly, they’ve also learned to trust their intuition.

“If we feel like running, we’re gonna run,” Hyneman said.

Despite that, there have been some frightening moments. In one episode, the team packed a cannon carved from a tree with gunpowder. When detonated, the explosion sent chunks of wood weighing between 70 and 80 pounds flying over their heads. This event explains why there is no good shot of their next explosion: a Hawaiian Airlines airplane. A cameraman declined to stick his head out of the bunker to get the shot, Savage said.

One of the potential hazards of airing such experiments is a viewer attempting to recreate the results at home.

“It’s a good way of thinning the herd, I think,” joked Hyneman before acknowledging that he’s nervous about the possibility of fans getting hurt. The MythBusters make a point of stressing the hazards.

“If we need an (emergency medical technician), you’re gonna see a shot of the EMT on site,” Hyneman said. Each episode contains multiple disclaimers, in which Savage and Hyneman ask viewers not to try anything they see at home.

After the session, the MythBusters treated the crowd to a reel of “explosion porn,” their jargon for their favorite blasts, and some unaired high-speed footage of Savage igniting flatulence. Savage said the latter is an example of gratuitous entertainment leading to science. In this case, the MythBusters explored the chemical content of a flatus to determine what might make it flammable.

The event moderator, John Williams of WGN Radio, noted the high proportion of women in the audience. “MythBusters” falls solidly into Discovery’s male demographic, but this show in particular attracts more women, Savage said. A few women have worked on the show, but it’s hard to find female job applicants with the practical machining or welding experience the show’s construction demands, said Hyneman, who along with Savage, encouraged the girls in the audience to study science.

Savage and Hyneman also cleared up some burning MythBusters questions. Hyneman said he gets his berets, which are the same ones used by the military, directly from the manufacturer. Savage revealed the reason he mocks Hyneman’s signature mustache.

“For the same reason Edmund Hillary climbed Everest…because it’s there.”

This story originally appeared on the Medill News Service website.

Many of the candy treats Chicagoans enjoy boast ingredients from plants. Robin Cline, public programs manager at Garfield Park Conservatory, discusses the botanical roots of some common sweet flavors in connection with the Conservatory’s first annual “Sweet Saturdays” event set for Saturday and Feb. 21.

“Fact and Flavor” stations help families learn about—and taste!—goodies such as chocolate, vanilla, sugar and cinnamon. Try out the truffle recipe featured on this page where Cline explains the botany behind the bonbons in this edited Q&A session.

Where does chocolate come from?
(It starts as) a pod from a chocolate tree. People pick these pods off the tree, hack them open, and scoop out the wet, pulpy seeds, probably 20 to 40 of them (per pod). One of the very, very important things about chocolate is that it needs to be fermented. Historically, chocolate is fermented between banana leaves in the sun from 3 to 7 days. That fermentation process actually alters the chemical taste of the seeds.

The dried beans will go through a roasting process, like coffee, and then right after the roasting process there’s something called winnowing, when the outer shell of the cocoa bean is blown off. You can use it as mulch; you can sell it to other companies who process it more.

You end up with these husked or hulled beans, almost like the seed of a nut, and these will start breaking up on their own. When those beans are broken into smaller bits they’re called nibs. Basically, if we were to equate a chocolate bar to peanut butter, eating the nib would be like eating the plain peanut. Actually, there’s quite a few roasted and also raw nibs on the market right now. It’s becoming kind of a higher-end, gourmet food.

The nibs are made into a paste. In the industry, it’s called chocolate liquor. There’s not actual alcohol in this. It’s just called chocolate liquor because when it’s heated to room temperature or when it has been agitated, it is a liquid. After it rests for a very short period of time, it’s back to a solid form. If we were to pour (the chocolate liquor) into a mold, it would be sold as baking chocolate.

To actually make a chocolate bar that tastes like what we like, you take another set of nibs and you mix that into chocolate liquor. You keep on mixing it. Then what you end up with is your fats, which is cocoa butter, and your solids, which is cocoa powder. Some of that cocoa butter is then mixed back into (the first) chocolate liquor so that you have a higher fat content than you would normally have if it was just plain nibs.

So a chocolate bar has cocoa liquor mixed with cocoa butter and then some varying degrees of sugar and vanilla and maybe a little bit of nonfat milk.

What about white chocolate?
Cocoa butter with a little sugar and vanilla is white chocolate. It doesn’t have any of the dark stuff, which is the part that is supposed to have the special health benefits. Cocoa butter doesn’t have any of those health benefits left in it. It’s just the fat. So when you hear ‘chocolate is good for you, antioxidant’ kinds of things, they’re specifically talking about the darker parts.

What kind of plant does the vanilla bean come from?
It comes from an orchid. We actually have a really wonderful vanilla orchid that grows in our new Sugar from the Sun exhibit. It’s an orchid that grows above ground. It is a yellow orchid flower and it produces a long, green fruit that looks much like a bean pod. Of course, when it dries, it gets much smaller.

How does a cane of sugar become white crystals?
They take sugar cane and they put it through a juicer. That juice is this deep brown juice that they boil, much like maple syrup is boiled down. You reduce this syrup or juice from sugar cane and it’s a brown, crystallized liquid.

What we’re familiar with goes through probably five or six more processing steps. Dark impurities are spun out. Do you know what those dark impurities are? They actually sell that—it’s molasses. The rest of the crystals –which are actually still brown– (are) put through a number of processing steps to the point where we get our really white crystallized sugar.

What makes brown sugar brown?
Brown sugar is not much healthier than white sugar because it is white sugar with molasses mixed back into it. That being said, molasses does have a little bit more flavor and molasses is actually very high in iron. Because it’s impure, it actually has quite a few more nutritional benefits than white sugar.

“Sweet Saturday,” at Garfield Park Conservatory from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and again on Feb. 21, is open to visitors of all ages. The suggested donation is $2 per person. The Conservatory is at 300 N. Central Park Ave.

A young chocolate tree grows at the Garfield Park Conservatory. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL	Vanilla beans hang from an orchid at the Garfield Park Conservatory. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL	Sugar cane enjoys the sunshine at the Garfield Park Conservatory. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

This story originally appeared with a video component on the Medill Web Service website.

Pastry chef Keli Fayard offered paris-brests and chocolate éclairs after a talk on the history of French pastry. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

Some Chicagoans won’t get up before 10 a.m. on a Saturday without a very good reason, and a French pastry provided more than adequate incentive for a group of culinary connoisseurs.

The Culinary Historians of Chicago traced the ancestry of French pastry all the way back to 1440, when a gourmet guild in France banned its members from baking cakes. Keli Fayard, co-owner of Chicago’s Vanille Pâtisserie, filled in the lore of the sweet treats at a meeting Saturday morning at Kendall College. About 45 people attended.

Certain pastry ingredients have their own histories, Fayard said. The Romans rolled phyllo dough in butter, creating an early form of puff pastry. Fritters and other yeast pastries became popular in the 16th century.

Fayard focused on pâte à choux pastries such as éclairs and mousse cakes called entremets.

“A pastry shop without pâte à choux and entremets would probably not be a pastry shop anymore,” Fayard said.

The difference is in the dough. Pâte à choux is a dough made by “boiling milk and butter, a little pinch of sugar. Once it comes to a boil then you add flour, cook that down and then slowly you have to beat in the eggs,” she said. “When it bakes, there’s a little air pocket inside. It’s nice and crusty on the outside and it’s very soft and moist inside. It’s actually a hollow shell,” Fayard said.

Americans are most familiar with the feather-light dough in the form of éclairs, though there’s no written history of the invention of this popular sweet. The name translates to “bolt of lightning,” thought to come from the pastry’s shiny chocolate or coffee glazes, Fayard said.

Pâte à choux is also used to make a variety of other pastries. The religieuse is a kind of vertical éclair meant to resemble a rope-tied religious habit, consisting of two filled choux puffs held together with a little bit of butter cream frosting.

“We’ve actually tried to sell religieuse in our pastry shop,” Fayard said. “We had them sitting side by side [with the éclairs]. Nobody really understood what the religieuse was so they didn’t buy it. They just sat there, which was fine with me because I love them.”

Choux also figures prominently in the traditional croquembouche, a decorated tower of filled puffs held together with a hard caramel. Fayard said the confection is a common sight at French events, appearing at weddings and other festive occasions.

While the casual observer may not immediately link cycling and pâte à choux, an enterprising baker who wanted to peddle his wares to the crowds of spectators developed another pastry, the paris-brest, during the Tour de France, Fayard said. It is intended to look like a bicycle wheel and is filled with a praline cream and topped with caramelized almonds. The name refers to two cities in France.

The entremets also offer a lot of variety.

“Early on, they just did basic cake, a lot of mousse and maybe one cream in the center,” Fayard said.

“Some of the cakes can have six different recipes inside” now, Fayard said. “It’s not ‘let’s see how many we can fit inside.’ It’s creating a balance of flavor and texture and it has to also have a balance of sweetness. They’re very beautiful when they’re cut because you can see all the different layers. If done right, every single layer should be perfectly straight.”

Making French pastries in Chicago poses certain challenges, including some ingredients, Fayard said. France doesn’t export butter or flour, Fayard said, so her French husband, pastry chef and co-owner Dimitri Fayard, has had to change certain recipes.

In addition, American tastes for salt and sugar differ from those in France. Keli Fayard said their recipes were adjusted while keeping the overall balance of sweetness in mind. “It’s another reason that maybe our desserts might be rich, but they’re not that ultra-sticky, gooey sweetness that you traditionally taste in American-made goodies.”

After Fayard’s presentation, the audience enthusiastically tasted samples of French pastry from Vanille, including entremets, cream puffs, paris-brests, and chocolate éclairs. History and tradition filled every delicious bite.

The cream puff offered an airy example of the hollowness of pâte à choux—the delicate, spherical shell was filled with a vanilla pastry cream and topped with a crunchy transparent glaze.

The surprising paris-brest looked like a miniature bagel with cream cheese but proved to be much lighter. With a rich hazelnut filling and dusting of powdered sugar and almonds, it was easy to see why it’s one of Fayard’s favorites.

“I’m far removed from college, but it’s nice for me on a Saturday to actually come to a culinary school,” said Patty Erd, co-owner of the Spice House shops in Chicago, Evanston and Milwaukee. Erd said she’s been a member of the Culinary Historians for about 10 years.

Nicole Musil, of River North, hadn’t been to a Culinary Historians meeting before. She particularly liked the paris-brest, and said she found the meeting online and brought her pastry-loving mother with her. Musil said she might come to another meeting if the topic interested her.

Vanille, located at 2229 N. Clybourn, opened in 2003 and became an instant success. While éclairs are guaranteed crowd pleasers, Fayard carries the confection to a new level with the chocolate she uses in the creamy filling. Fayard said her chocolate comes from Switzerland and contains 64 percent cacao solids.

In 2007, Chicago magazine named it the best bakery in Lincoln Park. The same year, Fayard’s husband was voted one of the top 10 pastry chefs in the U.S. by Pastry Arts & Design magazine. He has won several contests and recently became a pastry world champion.

“We really focus on the purity of pastry,” Keli Fayard said. “We do what we love and we won’t change anything we do to pinch a penny or save time.”

Keli Fayard, co-owner of Vanille Pâtisserie in Lincoln Park, shows off an elaborate tower of choux puffs called a croquembouche. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL	Sculptural entremets, or mousse cakes, are among the most popular offerings at Chicago’s Vanille Pâtisserie. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

The Chemistry of Cream Puffs

There’s real science behind the intoxicating taste of pastry. Just ask Kantha Shelke of Corvus Blue LLC, a Chicago-based food science company and think tank.

Shelke was trained in the art and science of French baking by bread specialist Raymond Calvel and Danielle Forestier. She has taught baking science and technology at several universities, including North Dakota State University and Kansas State University.

• What separates French pastry from American counterparts?

Mostly the richness. French pastries tend to be leaner and less [sweet] than their American counterparts. Scientifically speaking, French baking takes advantage of the functionality of the ingredients – flour protein, yeast and/or leavening action and dough structure to develop the texture and flavor without emphasis from additional ingredients. American pastry on the other hand, typically uses sweeteners and fat to emphasize texture and taste for a public that is not as sophisticated about textures and tastes.

• If you were to try to make a French pastry as you would if you were there, how would you go about getting the ingredients? Is there a chemical difference between American and French creams?

Professional bakers usually spec their ingredients and specifications can help tailor the ingredients for the end product. French butter tends to have higher fat content, and one can get that percentage from spun butter here. Butter is 8-10 percent water. The water is not intrinsic but it is definitely part of the butter structure. One way to approximate French butter is to spin American butter in a centrifuge to remove some of the moisture.

Our wheats are very different from native French wheats. In the US, there are 5 kinds of wheat…classified on the basis of the hardness or softness of the kernels. Typically, the hard wheats are higher in protein. Two of those proteins form gluten when mixed with water. The quality of the flour is based on the amount and quality of gluten. Soft flours are used to make cookies, cakes and pastries, while harder flours can support the formation of air bubbles in breads. Generally, we can achieve a similar functionality by blending hard and soft wheats to match the functionality of French flours.

• Do the hormones we give our cows affect the butter?

Emotions aside and scientifically speaking, growth hormones do not affect the quality of butter. They only affect the amount of butter produced.

There is a significant difference between the compositions of French dairy cream creams and American dairy cream. The difference arises from the species of the cows and their diets and also to the farming style. Free range farming often produces creams with complex taste and color compounds based on what plants the cows choose to eat and cannot be duplicated easily by industrially raised dairy cows fed a packaged meal. “We have focused on uniformity and consistency.”

• Temperature seems to play a large role in pastry. For instance, pâte à choux is made on a stove, and many pie crusts specify how cold water, butter or lard should be. Why is that?

The texture of end product decides the method. The pâte à choux is meant to be tender and soft while pie crusts are designed to be flaky and tender without being moist. Soft tenderness can be attained by the stovetop.

Flakiness comes from layering dough and fat. Home cooks can achieve that by cutting a fat that remains solid above room temperature into the flour. The fat separates the layers of flour.

• There seems to be a lot of debate as to which fats make the perfect pie crust. Some people prefer butter, others lard or vegetable shortening and still others a combination of the two. Is there a difference? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Regional preferences largely dictate the method for creating the texture. Butter has some intrinsic moisture which softens the flaky layers in a pie crust by moistening the flour. The crust also develops a distinct color and flavor associated with butter products.

Lard, on the other hand, is drier and creates flakiness with a crunch that is generally not obtained with butter. In some parts of the country, the taste profile of lard is preferred over that of butter. Vegetable shortenings can duplicate lard textures as well as butter textures but cannot produce the flavor of either to discerning palates.

The general advantage has to do with economics – lard is cheaper than butter and vegetable shortening is the cheapest of all.

This story originally appeared on the Medill News Service website.