![]() ![]() He, like Lamb, thickens it with plain and cornflour (Lee adds cornflour alone, for a smoother, but more jellied consistency). ![]() On the other end of the spectrum, Mendes’ custard, which contains just two yolks compared with Seal’s 12 (though she makes a larger amount, this still represents a five-fold increase for the same amount of liquid), and almost as much sugar, has a pleasingly fondant quality. Neither Seal nor Vieira uses any starch for a richer, more solid result, while Lee, who was raised on the Macau egg tart (“more supple, with a flan-like texture that wiggles”), provides a hybrid best of both worlds with a minimally sweetened filling that’s solid enough to slice. Mendes clarifies that the filling “should be really runny – just perfect for small boys with coffee spoons”. This combination is responsible for its unusual consistency: solid, yet oozy, and surprisingly light. One of the reasons that pastéis de nata aren’t exactly custard tarts as we know them in the UK is that the custard itself is somewhere between an egg custard and Bird’s, in that it’s thickened by egg yolks and larger than normal amounts of starch. Nuno Mendes says the egg custard filling ‘should be really runny – just perfect for small boys with coffee spoons’. This is my best compromise between flavour and texture.) The filling ![]() (I find that the 1:1 ratio of butter to flour recommended in Vieira’s classic collection The Taste of Portugal, though delicious, means that her pastry softens very quickly and lacks the filo-like crunch of those recipes, such as Seal’s in her book Lisbon, which use less. Lamb’s pastry turns out to be the crispest, so I obediently follow her advice, though I’ve increased the butter content slightly, because I’ve opted for a less rich custard. ![]() Vieira cuts the butter into small pieces, and dots it across the dough in three stages, while Lamb beats it into a rectangle and folds the pastry across it. (Lee, who writes the brilliant Lady and Pups blog, cleverly uses a pasta machine, rather than a pin, to roll the pastry into thin sheets, which I think would work well for those not blessed with the world’s smallest kitchen, but I find it hard to house such long strips of dough.) The more familiar method, deployed by Lamb and Edite Vieira, involves rolling a cold rectangle of butter into the dough, which to me seems easier, though, as with the rolling issue, it’s worth reading through the various options and deciding which one suits you and, crucially, the space you have available. Nicola Lamb’s pastry begins with dough folded over a layer of butter.īased on her forensic research, Lamb suspects the pastéis de Belem use margarine, and their soft consistency suggests the spreading technique, but though I try this in both Rebecca Seal and Mandy Lee’s recipes, I find it hard to keep the soft butter in the pastry, and it has a tendency to leak out in the oven. The second is camp ‘lock in’, which involves using firmer butter and a traditional method similar to how you’d approach a croissant or making puff pastry.” On one side you’ve got camp ‘spread’, a traditional method which involves smearing soft butter on to the dough and then performing the folds. As pastry chef Nicola Lamb observes in her incredibly detailed exploration of the subject on her Substack, Kitchen Projects (which should be required reading for nata nerds), “There are two camps when it comes to getting your butter into the dough. Having mixed flour and water, kneaded it until it comes together into a smooth dough (though a certain amount of gluten is required to hold the leaves together, overworking the dough will make it tough) and left this base pastry to rest, it’s time to introduce the butter. Unlike shortcrust, this is a laminated pastry in which the fat acts as a sandwich filling between sheets of dough, separating them into the shatteringly crisp layers that are the hallmark of a proper pastel de nata. (Lard or vegetable fat, with their lower moisture content, may give a crisper result, but they don’t taste as good, and I don’t find any recipes suggesting them, though Mendes does tip me off that “a bit of pork fat in the moulds is nice”.) Where they differ is largely in how much butter they use and how they get it into the pastry. The pastries I make myself all have the same basic ingredients: plain flour, salt, butter and just enough water to bind everything together. If you really must have pastéis de nata and can’t be bothered with the effort of making your own pastry, make sure you get the all-butter sort of puff and roll it as thinly as possible before shaping as below, or layer up sheets of filo spread with soft butter instead. I try Mendes’ recipe using ready-made puff pastry, and it just doesn’t give the same crunchy effect as the real deal, which sits somewhere between puff and filo. All thumbnail pictures by Felicity Cloake. Filo-like crunch: Rebecca Seal’s pastel de nata. ![]()
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