Kitchen Project #173: Strawberry Shortcake
Bronwen Wyatt with *the* dessert of (early) summer
Hello,
Welcome to today’s edition of Kitchen Projects. Thank you so much for being here.
If you’re reading this anywhere outside of the US, I’m guessing you’ve probably not tried the classic US dessert strawberry shortcake. I don’t say this a lot, but I BEG you to make this asap. Bronwen Wyatt, whose presence on this newsletter leaves me in awe, has shared her perfect version and it really is a dream dessert that deserves to be adopted worldwide.
Over on KP+, Bronwen has shared her guide to the best infused creams, from rose geranium to bay leaf, these creams will level up your desserts all summer (and beyond). Click here to read it.
What’s KP+? Well, it’s the level-up version of this newsletter. By joining KP+, you will support the writing and research that goes into the newsletter (including the commissioning - and fair payment - of all the writers), join a growing community, access extra content (inc. the entire archive) and more. Subscribing is easy and only costs £6 per month or £50 a year. Why not give it a go? Come and join the gang!
Love,
Nicola
Strawberry Shortcake
When Nicola and I were scheming about what recipe I should write up next, she asked me about American biscuits and strawberry shortcakes - was this one topic or two? To be honest, I went back and forth nearly up to the last minute.
Strawberry shortcake is an old dessert, first mentioned in in the 16th century British cookbook ‘The Good Huswifes Handmaid for Cookerie in her Kitchen’. Like shortbread, the “short” was a reference to a rich, crumbly texture produced with a generous addition of fat to flour. Over time shortcake has evolved to take on several forms. In Korea and Japan, a strawberry shortcake might consist of soft, fluffy chiffon-style sponge filled with fruit and cream [covered on Kitchen Projects here!] . In America, a similar sponge can sometimes be bought - pre-made, shelf-stable, and individually shaped like a cup - in supermarkets, so you can pile on your own berries and cream at home. To be honest I haven’t seen many of these since my childhood in the 80’s, where they would always be stacked in an endcap by the berries themselves. I wonder if their slow demise might be a result of the waning popularity of Strawberry Shortcake (an enormously popular cartoon from that era).
These days, the American strawberry shortcake usually features a biscuit filled with fresh cream and macerated strawberries. To me, this is the most delicious version, the crispy edge of the biscuit providing a little textural contrast to the soft berries and cream. Sometimes, the biscuit borders on savory, nearly the same type as you might split and fill with bacon and eggs for breakfast. Other shortcakes are enriched with sugar and cream, perhaps more like a cream scone than an American-style breakfast biscuit.
An aside - I’m not a British scone expert, and the last time I had one made by someone from across the pond was 15 years ago by my Scotch-Namibian roommate at the time. I finally made Nicola’s scone recipe from Sift, and can report that, based on that single experiment, a British scone and an American shortcake aren’t quite the same (though built on the same foundations). For one, I found the scone to have a finer, more crumbly texture. The recipe called for breaking the butter down into the flour until the whole was the consistency of breadcrumbs, whereas for an American-style recipe I would have stopped when the mass had an irregular consistency, with butter chunks ranging from breadcrumb to blueberries in size. I also found the dough to be a bit thicker and required kneading to make a cohesive mass. For an American shortcake recipe, the dough is purposefully shaggy and requires less handling. I’d imagine it’s similar to the difference between American and British pie doughs. I think the only way to settle the debate would be a side-by-side shortcake / scone bake off!
Moving on! If my American strawberry shortcake is basically a biscuit, then was there truly enough difference to justify having these live as two separate pieces? As I mulled it over, I thought back to my first real brush with strawberry shortcake greatness. When I was a young pastry cook, I worked at a since-shuttered restaurant called Range in San Francisco’s Mission District, under the pastry chef Michelle Polzine (Michelle went on to open the 20th Century Cafe, an Eastern-European style pastry shop with its own terrific cookbook).
At Range, Michelle served gorgeous strawberry shortcakes, made with cream biscuits so fragile they crumbled immediately under the fork. During strawberry season, I was responsible for carefully hulling flats of tiny, fragrant, perfect California strawberries, which we would macerate to order and serve under billowing piles of cream scented with vanilla, meyer lemon, or peach leaf. With a dessert so simple, the quality of the fruit can really make or break its success. These strawberry shortcakes were transcendent, in large part because of this gorgeous fruit.
Over on KP+, you’ll find a guide to my favorite flavored creams for Strawberry Shortcake, from rose geranium to lemon balm.
Second rate strawberries
What to do if you don’t have access to a flat of perfect farmer’s market strawberries? It’s a problem I run into more than I’d like to admit here in Louisiana. Southerners love a big strawberry, and as a result the dwindling number of strawberry farmers in south Louisiana have favored planting reliable, disease-resistant, and large varietals. These are often picked when not-quite-ripe to preserve their shape in transport. A large, underripe strawberry leans heavily into a green, vegetal flavor with a bracing acidity. I don’t blame the farmers, but it means that the market berries we have access to here tend to be less aromatic than the strawberries you might see in California farmer’s markets. Supermarket berries are even less engaging, the floral, feral sweetness bred out of them in favor of more pragmatic qualities.
Then I was reminded of Nicola’s recipe for blueberry swirl polenta cake, where she cleverly introduces coriander to boost the blueberry flavor. Coriander, you see, is rich in the chemical compound linalool, which is also used to synthesize the taste of blueberries. Like blueberries, the flavor of a delicious strawberry can be broken down into distinct molecular characteristics. Could we employ a similar trick to make just-okay strawberries taste magical?
Here, my recipe development goals were set. I’d use the lessons from my biscuit journey to make a sturdy but tender cream biscuit - one that could stand up to a good soaking from a pile of strawberries. I’d explore the best way to whip up a velvety cream. And last, I’d investigate how to mimic the flavor of perfect strawberries, regardless of the quality of fruit you have access to.
First: The Shortcake
Having just wrapped up my biscuit journey, I felt sure I had the tools to make a tall, fluffy shortcake. I added some sugar to my biscuit recipe, omitted the baking soda, and substituted the sour cream (or buttermilk) for heavy cream. The result was delicious and certainly “short” in the sense that it melted in the mouth, but it fell a little flat, quite literally - it was too short! The high ratio of fat from the butter and cream, plus the tenderness from the lower-protein Gold Medal all purpose flour I used, meant that it didn’t have enough structure to properly form the base of a good strawberry shortcake.
Going back to the drawing board, I remembered that many shortcake recipes will include a little egg as a binder. I also began to doubt my omission of the baking soda - perhaps adding that back in with a little acid would give my shortcakes the lift they needed. I’d also pair back the amount of butter since I’d be using heavy cream as my liquid. The next batch was better, but I still wanted a taller biscuit that would be easier to split in half. The answer, like with the biscuits, lay in a single letter fold of the dough. I then sliced the dough into two portions and stacked them, rolling them out one more time. This final stack meant the shortcakes could be easily split in half with a fork, preserving the craggy texture of the split (rather than sliced) biscuit (perfect for soaking up strawberry juice).
Next, I tested an egg wash, cream wash, and butter wash with both granulated and turbinado sugar toppings. To be totally honest the difference here was minimal! They all browned up nicely, and while turbinado (or coarse) sugar is the traditional topping for a shortcake, I also liked the look of a dousing of granulated sugar on top, which melted into a sparkly sheen.
Last, in the spirit of treating shortcakes as a blank slate, I subbed 20% of the all purpose flour for both cornmeal and buckwheat. 20% is generally my go-to for adding in alternative flours without changing the structure of a baked good too much. Both the nubby yellow cornmeal and the nutty buckwheat shortcake offered their own charms. I could imagine pairing a cornmeal shortcake with fresh peaches and a buckwheat shortcake with plums, for instance.
As with the biscuits, you should generally try to use the lowest protein all purpose flour you can find to maximize the tenderness of the shortcakes, though you’ll have a delicious product regardless of what you use. For information on protein content in biscuits, click here.
Next: The Cream
Have you ever seen a recipe for whipped cream? I haven’t! But every pastry chef I know has a preferred method. Some swear by whipping their cream only by hand (couldn’t be me, who has the time?). Some insist upon whipping up their cream in a cold metal stand mixer bowl, and that the whipped cream must be agitated as slowly as possible, to create a fine network of small bubbles and a smoother, more stable finished cream. And several years ago, I saw the pastry chef Paola Velez declare that the most delicious cream could be whipped up with an immersion blender. It was time to put these methods to the test.
But first, we need to talk about American cream. Longtime Kitchen Projects followers may already know this, but what we call “heavy cream” or even “whipping cream” over here doesn’t have nearly the fat content that the lucky inhabitants of the British Isles enjoy. I’m cribbing these fat contents straight from Nicola’s own Sift:
Half-and-half (18-20%)
Heavy cream (US) (35-40%)
Cream (UK) (40-50%)
What does this mean? American cream will be a little less stable when fully whipped, but we have more flexibility too. The lower fat content means the cream won’t break or turn to butter as quickly as higher-fat versions. When I was still dolloping cream on a restaurant line, we would whip the cream till it had just thickened and store it in a tall metal container with a balloon whisk. We’d then re-whip the cream to order to ensure it remained velvety and supple, rather than stiff and grainy. Though I’m not lucky enough to have worked with UK-style cream directly, I’d hazard that you’ll need to keep a careful eye on your cream when employing any of the following methods to ensure you don’t over-whip. No matter what method you choose, you’ll want to make sure your cream is cold, and I like to use a chilled bowl as well.
For my tests, I whipped one cup of cream three ways:
By hand in a chilled bowl
With a stand mixer on medium speed in a chilled bowl
With an immersion blender
I whipped all the cream to soft peaks and examined them immediately, then stored the leftovers in the fridge for an hour to monitor how they did over time.
The cream whipped by hand was a little slack, with a visible irregular structure of bubbles within the cream. It was the fastest process, taking just under three minutes to achieve soft peaks.
The cream whipped by the stand mixer at medium speed felt more stable, with a more even structure, and took around four and half minutes at medium speed. The cream whipped by immersion blender was very, very smooth, with the velvety density of creme fraiche, a delightful texture after about five minutes of blending. I imagine that the immersion blender is whipping very little air into the cream compared to the other methods. [Editor’s Note: British Double Cream, with its high fat content, does not whip well with this method, though whipping cream does!] However, after an hour or so this cream collapsed back into liquid form. No matter, as I could always re-whip it. The creams whipped by hand and in the mixer remained thicker, only needing a light re-whip after an hour.
Of course, no matter how you choose to whip your cream, you will still be rewarded at the end of the process with, well, delicious whipped cream! But because we are here at Kitchen Projects, I know you will be interested in the process of it all. I’ll use the immersion blender method again just to experience that fabulous velvety texture, but there’s no need to run out and buy one if you don’t already own one.
As for sweetness - I use granulated sugar in my whipped cream. I’ve never felt that it didn’t dissolve just as easily into the cream as confectioner’s sugar, and lacks the powdery finish of the latter. The amount of sugar you add to your cream is of course an intensely personal matter, but I do recommend you add at least some! As someone who was raised on unsweetened whipped cream, I find it's buttery blandness a little sickening. In my opinion, unsweetened cream has all the appeal of unsalted food.
And over on KP+, you’ll find a guide to my favorite flavored creams for Strawberry Shortcake, from rose geranium to lemon balm. Click here for the recipe(s)!
Finally: The Strawberry Elixir
So what makes a strawberry taste like a strawberry? According to this fascinating article I found from the Royal Society of Chemistry, a combination of chemical compounds and esters are responsible for their intoxicating scent and flavor. And it’s not just your imagination: supermarket berries have a less intense concentration of these compounds than wild strawberries, and some cultivated strawberries are missing certain aromas entirely.
A fully ripe wild strawberry might have fruity aromas shared by peaches and pineapple, backed by bracing esters also responsible for the scents of caramel, pine needles, bay leaf, grapes, and citrus. Some examples:
Α-pinene - rosemary, pine
Β-myrcene - bay leaf, juniper, hops
methyl anthranilate - concord grapes, bergamot, jasmine, lemon, mandarin orange, orange blossom
2,5-dimethyl-4-hydroxy-3(2H)-furanone - pineapples
Feeling like a mad scientist, I macerated some supermarket strawberries with a little sugar and a splash of pineapple juice, let them sit for an hour until their juices were drawn out and tinged pink, and then reduced this liquid with a few bay leaves until it was thick and syrupy. I then added a couple drops of orange blossom water. The result was remarkable - the liquid tasted alive, vibrating across the tongue like strawberry candy. When I added this reduction back into my pale berries, their flavor was perked up immediately.
This may seem like rather a lot of steps and ingredients, but if you have bay leaves and orange blossom water as pantry staples in your kitchen, I’d highly recommend it! I also tried a similar trick with a little saba, the syrupy reduction of thickened grape must that you occasionally see in fancy Italian shops, to similar effect. It made me wonder about how often we see balsamic and strawberries paired. Looking it up, I found that balsamic is similarly rich in methyl anthranilate, which also gives a ripe strawberry its fruity scent.
Recipe: Strawberry Shortcake
Makes 6 strawberry shortcakes (plus two wonky ones)
Shortcake
300 grams all purpose flour
50 grams granulated sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon baking soda
113 grams butter, cold, cut into ½ inch (2cm) cubes
200 grams heavy cream, cold
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla paste (or extract)
1 egg (50 grams)
A little sugar and melted butter for topping the biscuits
Whipped Cream
480 grams heavy cream
60 grams granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla bean paste, or vanilla extract
Pinch salt
Strawberry Elixir Ingredients
680 grams strawberries (about 1.5 pounds)
90 grams pineapple juice
60 grams sugar
Two bay leaves
A few drops orange blossom water
Method:
Prepare a baking tray with parchment paper and set it aside. Prepare about 30 grams of melted butter to brush the tops of the shortcakes.
Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda in a medium bowl and whisk to combine. Stir the lemon juice and vanilla into the cream. Crack the egg into the cream and stir vigorously until it is fully broken up. Keep the cream/egg mixture cold.
Toss the cold cubed butter in the flour to coat it. To break up the butter by hand, pinch the butter chunks and continue to toss them in flour until they have mostly broken down roughly pea-sized pieces. Alternately, tip the flour/butter mixture into a food processor and pulse until you’ve achieved a coarse texture. Tip the flour back into the bowl - if there are any large chunks of butter remaining, flatten them by hand.
Add the heavy cream/egg mix to the butter/flour mix and stir with a rubber spatula or a wooden spoon until the mixture is mostly hydrated. Give it a gentle knead by hand to bring it fully together so there are no dry patches. Tip the dough out onto a very lightly floured countertop.
Dusting a very small amount of flour on top of the dough, roll it into a rectangle about one inch thick. Using a bench knife, fold the top third of the dough over the middle, and bring the bottom third of the dough over that fold to meet the edge. Rotate the dough and roll it out to about ¾ inch / 2 cm thick. Cut the dough in half and stack it on top of itself. Roll the dough back out to just under 1 inch / 2.5 cm thick.
Using a biscuit cutter that is about 3” / 7.5 cm wide, punch out the first round of shortcakes. Make sure you’re dusting the cutter with flour and punching straight down, avoiding a twisting motion, to ensure you get the most height from the shortcakes. When you’ve punched out as many as possible (you should have 4), gently bring the dough back together and punch out another two shortcakes (these will look a little wonky but taste amazing for breakfast the next day). Place the tray of shortcakes in the freezer, if you have space, or the fridge.
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F / 218 C (low fan). When the oven has reached the correct temp, pull the biscuits out and brush the tops with melted butter and sprinkle with a little sugar. Bake for 14-16 minutes or until the tops are golden brown and the center of the shortcake reaches about 195 F / 90 C degrees.
Leave to cool on the tray. Shortcakes are best eaten the day they are made.
For the strawberry elixir, wash, hull, and quarter (or more!) the strawberries. I like to keep mine on the smaller side, especially if the strawberries aren’t perfect, to make sure that our strawberry elixir can thoroughly coat them. Toss the slices in the sugar and pineapple juice, cover, and let sit for about an hour.
When the strawberries are thoroughly macerated they will have released about two-thirds cup of mingled strawberry and pineapple juice. Strain this into a small non-reactive pot and add the bay leaves. Simmer over medium heat until the juice has reduced to a thick and syrupy consistency. This will take about five minutes. Turn off the heat and stir in a few drops of orange blossom water. Remove the bay leaves and scrape the syrup over the sliced strawberries, tossing them to combine. Serve immediately.
For the whipped cream, combine all the ingredients in a chilled bowl. Using your preferred method (see note), whip the cream to soft peaks. I prefer to under whip my cream and bring it back to the perfect texture just before dolloping. Keep in the fridge until ready to use, or whip only when you are ready to serve!
To Assemble, gently re-warm the shortcakes if they have fully cooled (I pop mine in a 350 F / 170 oven for about ten minutes). Using a fork, split the shortcakes in half. Place the bottom half on a plate and pile with macerated strawberries, including a good drizzle of any collected juice. If needed, bring your whipped cream back to soft peaks. Dollop a hefty portion of cream on the berries (more than you think) and top with the upper half of the shortcake. Serve immediately.
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Can this be made into one giant shortcake?
Very well crafted strawberry shortcake exploration.