[Sca-cooks] Proportions?

[Terry Decker]

Oven temperature and baking time are not mentioned.  For these tarts, it 
will likely be 325-350 F (so they don't get too brown on top).  I would 
expect her recipe to take at least an hour and yours to take about 45 
minutes.  The higher the percentage of cream to cheese requires a longer 
baking time to get the milk proteins to coagulate.  Egg proteins are more 
sensitive to coagulation under heat, so adding more eggs should shorten the 
baking time.

Having been bit by this particular problem on some tarts, I wouldn't depend 
on a fixed baking time, but would keep an eye on the filling after about 40 
minutes until it set.

Bear


Greetings! For those of you good at understanding proportions, here's a
recipe that I wonder about.

For a "tart owte of lente", which doesn't give any proportions, here is
what an someone has redacted for the online food history course I'm
taking. US/UK equivalents in brackets.

100 g Cheshire cheese [.22 lb]
150m ml cream  [.634 cup]
1 egg
[No butter was used, although some was specified.]
"Make a spreadable paste."

One of the course participants tried this but it was too runny. She
wondered if there was too much cream in the recipe.

When I tried the tart in 2008, I used these proportions:
.81 lb Cheshire cheese  [367 g]
1/4 cup cream  [59 ml]
3 eggs
2 Tbsp butter  [30 g]
(I noted that 2 eggs were probably sufficient, but using a bit more cream.)

To me, it seems obvious that I used more cheese to cream and eggs than
she did. In her recipe, is the proportion of cream too much for the one
egg to bind the mixture? Am I missing something as to why her version
would be runny and mine wasn't? I'm not claiming that my proportions are
the "right ones". I would just like to know what might be a good
proportion of these ingredients to keep it stiff enough so that a wooden
spoon can stand up in it. There's a photo on Flickr that shows the
Hampton Court product: http://tinyurl.com/zecpkt5 . Thanks for any
elucidation!

Alys K.



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