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Hello everyone, I'm Claire Saffitz. Welcome to my rented kitchen. We are not at home. It's very late summer, early fall, and my family and I were trying to get away for a little vacation. But that won't get in the way of our fall baking schedule. So today , even though it's still warm outside, I have a recipe to accompany you during your holiday baking. And since we're in a rented apartment, I'll keep things very, very simple. Today I'm making a pumpkin bar recipe. I was even surprised that I had n't made it yet, because this is a recipe that I have made many times over a very long time. I'll tell you about its origins, but it's so delicious.
This recipe has no baking spices at all. The flavor is caramel, butter, and pumpkin. And they.they're just insanely delicious. This is a recipe adapted from a blog I read many years ago, in my prime, I mean, it was about 15 years ago, that had a huge impact on me, before I became a professional chef, before I went to culinary school, when I was just an amateur. It's called Joe Pastry. This blog has taught me so much about baking and technique. And again, you can still go back and look at old posts. He is so wonderful. They're just much better than they seem in terms of ingredients, because there are n't that many of them. It's just so, so
delicious. Such a great fall recipe. We have a sand base. And then we have pumpkin filling. The pumpkin filling is something I adapted from a Joe Pastry recipe. So, the ingredients for the sand base are extremely simple. I just have flour, a little powdered sugar, unsalted butter, and a pinch of salt. For the pumpkin filling: a cup of canned pumpkin, half a cup of sugar, 2 tablespoons of butter, a quarter cup of light brown sugar (you can use dark), two eggs, a little vanilla, and a little heavy cream. I cook this in an 8 by 8 inch pan. This is a metal mold. It's like anodized aluminum.
This is my favorite material and generally the best material for baking. If you only have a glass or ceramic mold, that's fine too. You will need to reduce the temperature by 25 degrees. It's really.there's no special equipment here. So, no combines. I'll just.I'll use this as a bowl. This is my mixing bowl. And the saucepan is behind me, because we will be making the filling. The first thing I want to do is cover the mold. I have a piece of parchment paper already greased with butter, I will reuse it from a previous recipe. For this recipe, I recommend lining the bottom and all four sides with parchment paper. So, my form is still a little fat. This fat is
even useful for making the parchment stick better. So I put it in my form. And I make sure it fits snugly to the sides. By the way, my oven is preheated to 350 degrees. Because first we will make the base from shortcrust pastry. I add flour. And this is powdered sugar. You know, it's interesting that the recipe says a third of a cup. That's a third of a cup, but that's a weight measure. As you can see, it is 15-20 percent less full. But I know it's the right weight. This only proves that measurements are not only not always accurate, they are often wrong. Now I'll use half a teaspoon. I measure kosher salt by eye. And here I have 10 tablespoons of unsalted butter. I'll just cut the butter into cubes. Like I said,
that's 10 tablespoons-a whole pack plus a quarter. Now we just rub this oil in with our hands. I mix all the ingredients a little. This is the easiest part of the recipe. There's no- well, technology is always needed. But here there is no-it's not too technical. You just need to knead everything together. I will rub everything with my fingers until the butter is well mixed. And when the mixture gets a little sticky, I'll switch to a spatula to keep my hands clean. We'll bake the base at 350, but we'll cook the filling at 325. So know that we'll have to lower the oven temperature later. So, the dough is starting to come together.
It no longer looks so dry and floury. And it starts to stick to your fingertips. And if I squeeze it, it will hold together. Here, you see how it is. So, now that the mixture is holding together, I'm going to finish it off with a spatula. This is purely to keep your hands clean. And what I want to do here is make sure there are no big chunks of butter. So I'm kind of rubbing it in a little bit. And it helps to mix the butter really well. I will do this until I get a uniform dough that holds together. It is well mixed, combined, and fairly uniform. So, here is my shortcrust pastry. You see, it holds together, like one mass. So now it will take shape. Okay, now I'm using my fingertips. If you used room temperature butter, know that the dough will be much softer. So
it will be easier to press, but it may be a little stickier. Therefore, if necessary, you can use a small palette to smooth it out. But my dough is a little colder and harder because my butter was a bit chilly. It's just not as sticky. So, I squeeze it. And it will seem like it's a very thin layer. That's how it should be. I've mentioned this before in other similar layered pastries, when it often seems, especially with the base, that the layer is too thin. Like when you lay out a tart pan and then cut into it and realize it's much thicker than you thought. So don't worry, this is the right amount of dough. Don't think it's not enough. So, here is our sand base. My oven is at 350 degrees. And we will mostly focus on color. You want it to be a very nice, fairly rich
golden brown color. This is how we know it is fully cooked. The first step to the filling is to prepare the caramel. We will make " wet" caramel. Caramel is simply melted sugar that is heated above a certain temperature so that it begins to caramelize. Perhaps it's the use of the word in the definition itself, but we know what caramel is. So, there are two ways to prepare it. You can simply melt pure sugar or add water, dissolve it and cook the syrup. That's exactly what we will do. So, I have 2 tablespoons of water and half a cup of regular granulated sugar. One thing I don't have is a pastry brush. I didn't take it. I didn't think to
take it, but it's not in this house. It's a little tricky with wet caramel because you definitely don't want the sugar to crystallize during cooking. This actually happened to me last night, and for the first time in my life, I somehow managed to caramelize crystallized sugar. It seemed to crystallize around the edges and the rest caramelized because I made a version last night. The bottom line is that you have to be very careful to avoid crystallization. So, one way to do this is to add the water first, and then pour the sugar into the center. Crystallization usually occurs at the edges of the pan, on the walls. So that's just one way: if the water is on the outside and the sugar is in the middle, it helps a little bit to prevent that. So we'll hope for the best when
making sugar. I'll turn on medium heat. All the other ingredients are already here. They are at room temperature. This is very important. This is what you need, because we want the filling to be warm. Even better if it's hot. This is heating up. And one more thing we can do at this stage is mix it up. You can often hear: " Don't stir the caramel." This applies to the moment after boiling. So stirring will help the sugar dissolve, but it can also cause crystallization. So we're going to stir very, very carefully at this stage while it's heating. So, I stir, and I do it mostly in the center.
I don't want to stir too much around the edges because I don't want the sugar crystals to stick to the sides of the pan, especially now. OK. So, I see Now I'm going to put the spatula away and we'll just shake the pan. It will start to boil. We want all the water to evaporate. And what will happen is this: the caramel will start to take on color, and we will cook it until it becomes very, very, very, very dark, almost burnt. Prepare heavy cream. So, my caramel-see the steam coming off it? Steam or smoke? This is actually very ambiguous. So, my caramel is here. I'll bring it up now and show it to you, because we're
taking it off the heat for now. The same thing happened again, that is, some crystals formed around the edges. OK. So, I slowly add the cream. This will stop the caramel from cooking. It is important that the cream is at room temperature, then the caramel will not curdle and harden. This is the closest I've come to intentionally burning caramel. I was really on the verge of burning her. This is really the hardest part of making the filling. The rest is just mixing. So, here I add 2 tablespoons of butter. This is what I added to the original recipe, and it helps the filling set better in the cold. A quarter cup of brown sugar. You can take dark or light.
My pumpkin, again, is one cup of canned pumpkin. I basically add everything except the eggs. This mixture is still very hot, so I don't add the eggs: I'll let the other ingredients bring the temperature down a bit so the eggs don't cook when I add them. I add 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract. We count: one, two. A large pinch of kosher salt. We have so much caramel there. Caramel loves salt very much. So, now we just whisk everything together with a whisk. It should smell very delicious. While whisking, I try to feel the bottom and walls of the saucepan to see if there is any undissolved caramel left. So we need to help all this dissolve. So, essentially, the filling is ready. All that 's left is to add the eggs. I'll just
take and put the eggs in here so that's the last step. So, two large eggs, again, at room temperature. Okay, I'll check the shortcrust pastry. Almost done, but not yet. Let it brown a little more. I will return it. I can touch the side of the saucepan. I feel that it is warm, but not too hot. So now I know that you can add eggs. So I pour them in here and stir them with a whisk. OK. Here is our filling. She is ready. And just in time, because the cake is almost ready. Now note: if you beat in the eggs while the mixture is still very hot, small pieces of cooked egg may appear. In that case, you should filter it. So I ended up straining
the filling during one of the tests because I thought, "Maybe there's. It's not even necessarily because the egg is cooking." " Sometimes there are strange strings in the egg that you want to remove." But last night I tried it. I didn't strain it. I don't think it really needs to be filtered. If there are any bits of egg left that haven't fully mixed in, I do n't think you'll even notice it in the finished product. OK. So, now here's what I'm going to do: while I'm waiting for the cake to cook, I want this to stay warm. I do n't want it to stay.I don't want it to be too hot because I don't want to cook the eggs, but I want it to be warm. So I'm going to
put this back on the off burner, which is still hot, and just let it stay warm. So, let's take a look here. Okay, about 5 more minutes for the cake. So the next step is to take out the crust, immediately pour the filling-hot crust, hot filling -and back into the oven, and I'll lower the temperature to 325. I'll get it out and get my stuffing. So you see a nice even golden brown color. And before it has had time to cool down even a little, we pour it on top. That's good. This.this sizzle-the sound of the eggs cooking and this layer forming. If it had cooled, you would have gotten a slightly more softened version.
This is not the end of the world. In baking, nothing is the end of the world. So, now carefully back into the oven. I don't want to spoil it too much. And again, I'm going to lower the temperature to 325. It's just that when you're making any custard filling without a double boiler, it's better to go with a lower temperature. This will ensure more even baking. So, now let's lower the temperature. We will bake the filling until we see a moderate rise. This won't be some dramatic uptick at all. It will rise a little at the edges. The main test will be the splash test. We want it to tremble, not slosh in the center. So, it will only take about 20 minutes. The recipe has a few ingredients, but it is very simple.
We will make the dough by hand. The filling is prepared in one saucepan. High result. The filling is ready. I'll get it now. I don't know how much time has passed. 25 minutes, maybe? It seems like it. Good. Okay, great. Baked at 325 degrees. I'll turn off the oven. And I'll show you how to tell when it's ready. I checked several times and the filling was still too liquid, it came in waves. This means it's not ready yet. But when I saw that it started to shake like jelly, meaning the whole layer was moving instead of rippled, I knew it was ready. So, I get it. You'll see, if you look at eye level, that the edges, about an inch from the sides, have risen a little. These are
eggs. This means that the edges are slightly more browned than the middle. We'll leave this to cool to room temperature. And then it must be cooled in the refrigerator. That's why I added a little butter to the filling. This is almost Joe's recipe, only half the size, but I added a little butter so it would hold its shape better after cooling. So you'll have to wait a bit. In the original recipe, it is served as is, just in squares, and it is wonderful. But to make this more like a pumpkin pie that's comfortable to hold in your hands, I'll add a little whipped cream on top. I thought I had mascarpone. It turned out to be crème fraîche. You can use both. I do it "by eye", but I think it's about 2/3 cup of heavy cream to a third cup of
mascarpone or crème fraîche. I'll knock it down now. Okay, looks great. I'll take my workpiece from the refrigerator. Here's the batch I made yesterday. I'll get them out before I decorate. You just need to carefully separate everything. Now I'll get them. I'm going to scrape Spread it over the surface. Good. And now we will cut it. They're pretty filling, so I'll make. sometimes I do. not necessarily. should I make nine 3-by-3 pieces or 16 4-by-4 pieces? So, I'll do 4 by 4. Okay, let's see. So, we have a sand base. There's a small line between the shortcrust pastry and the filling, it's darker, it's where the hot filling came into contact with the pastry, cooked and formed this layer. So, we
know that we have crispy shortcrust pastry. And just a thin layer of whipped cream on top. Mm- m. So tender, golden inside. She is not raw. She didn't get wet. It's light and crunchy, with a creamy, soft pumpkin filling, similar to custard, and cold whipped cream on top. They are simply incredibly delicious. This is such an interesting little project. You can do everything by hand, both the shortcrust pastry and the pumpkin filling. This is the perfect fall baking. So, if you're looking for a new way to use pumpkin, this is a great option.
I hope you try it. Thanks for watching, don't forget to like and subscribe, have a great pumpkin season. Mm.
