4 Levels Of Strawberry Shortcake: Amateur To Food Scientist | Epicurious

I'm Billy, and I'm a level one chef. I'm Gina, I'm a level two chef. My name is Amber, I'm with Mazadar Bakery. I've been a professional chef in pastry for 10 years. Strawberry shortcake is the perfect dessert for having friends over on a Sunday afternoon. It's like eating air, you could eat 10 slices and not feel, like, robust afterwards. It reminds me of childhood. You can't eat strawberry shortcake without feeling happy. So, with any strawberry shortcake recipe, you need the cake. I'm using store-bought, ready-made biscuits. This is all about speed and deliciousness and finding the balance between the two. And nothing wrong with a good can of biscuits, if you ask me. I get stressed out because opening them is like a time bomb. Depending on what kind of person you are, you either like this or it's traumatic. Hey, traumatic. There's two routes you can go. There's the layer cake version, and then there's the biscuit version. I'll be making the biscuit kind, because I like scones. We're going to do a lemon pound cake. Mix lemon zest into the sugar. I'm going to put it into the mixing bowl. And then the next thing is to put in the butter. I'm going to start with the dry ingredients. Flour, kosher salt, and then I have baking powder. I'm going to whisk it together. If you overmix your flour, you activate the gluten in the flour, and that's when you get the chew. So make sure you don't overmix. And then, this is cold butter. You want layers of flakiness. Cold butter helps that. This actually feels quite nice. So now I'm going to focus on the wet ingredients. Three quarter cups of buttermilk. I'm going to crack this egg right inside the buttermilk. I always break my eggs and put them into a separate bowl. Don't ever break an egg directly into a mixing bowl. It guarantees that you're going to find a piece of shell in there. Whisk it together. I add eggs one at a time. It allows the mixture to sort of absorb each egg. I just want to make sure that I get a light and fluffy mixture. The next thing I'm going to do is add in my dry ingredients. I have my flour mixture, and I have my buttermilk mixed with lemon juice. Mix it all together. I'm a big stickler about getting all of the batter off of the mixer. It doesn't leave much for anybody to lick, but we'll be okay. So we're going to do the fun part. We're going to dump it on the table and make a big mess. Welcome to the scone zone. Fold it together, pat it out into a round shape, and then I'm going to take my bench scraper and press it straight down. If you think about a snowflake, overestimated here. A couple of people are going to get really big pieces of cake. We've got eight biscuits here. Arrange them onto the baking sheet. This piece is for your favorite person because it's the biggest. I'm just going to pop these into the refrigerator for 20 minutes. All right. These have been chilling, so now I'm going to brush them with some buttermilk. Give a light brushing of melted butter to each. Now you can imagine that this is going to make them toast up and look nice and golden. I'm going to take a little bit of granulated sugar. So this is the coarse sugar. And that's going to go a long ways towards these toasting up and looking brown and delicious. I'm going to pop these into the oven until golden brown. Yeah, boy. Got some biscuits. Tell you, just a little bit of butter and sugar on top is a good way to elevate some store-bought biscuits. I'm going to let these cool. I have a cake ring, and I'm going to cut out the ring of cake that I'm going to be using for the dessert itself. She's still going to be in the kitchen making her cake. I'm going to be having Aperol Spritz in the garden. We all make our choices in this life. And once I've done that, I want to remove the edges. Do not throw these away. They are gold. The next step for me is to remove the very top layer of the cake. It's almost like a little barrier. I want to eliminate that barrier and let everything to get absorbed into the cake itself. The next thing I do is cut all the way through the cake. And now I have two separate pieces. So my cake is ready. The last step is to make simple syrup. To moisten each one of the cake layers, I take a small pot and put it on medium heat. Add equal parts sugar and water. I let it boil for just a little bit, let this cool, add in my lemon juice, and I stir it around. The lemon simple syrup is going to be a great way for me to reinforce the flavor and the texture of the cake as I build it. And it's not strawberry shortcake without strawberries. I've got a bowl of beautiful red strawberries here just waiting to be sliced up. Nothing too fancy. We're going to kind of combine them with some granulated sugar in the bowl. Strawberries are the star of the cake, so I want to get some good ones. And these are from the farmer's market. I'm using these strawberries that come from a special farm in California. They're just like full of flavor, full of sunshine, and full of a lot of juice. The other strawberries that I'm going to use on the outside of the cake as more decorative, but still just as incredible in flavor, are a varietal of strawberry from Japan that hasn't normally been available in the United States. All about the same size. They're going to be displayed. So if I have a lot of different strawberries that are different sizes, it looks a little bit less uniform. Nothing complicated. I take the top off like that. I go as close to the inside of the stem, and I just make a small little circular motion. And it's preserved as much of the strawberry as I possibly can. Oh, one slice, two slices, and then we get four total out of there. It's starting to look like a murder scene, but that's okay. It's a very tasty murder scene. I'm just making little cubes of the strawberries. Strawb is prepared. Gonna transfer all the berries into the bowl. Sweeten them up a little bit more. Not that strawberries aren't already sweet, but a little bit of granulated sugar. That little bit of molasses gives you almost an earthy flavor, slightly caramel, slightly maple. It adds complexity. It doesn't need to be super sweet. You're basically using the brown sugar to draw the natural juices and sweetness of the strawberries out. Lemon is gonna add some brightness and some tang. Cornstarch is going to thicken the mixture. I'm gonna toss the strawberries a little bit with a spoon. Strawberries have been chopped and dressed with the cornstarch and lemon mixture, and now it's gonna be ready for the stovetop. I'm gonna move into the pretty strawberries. Not that beauty is everything, but, you know, it kind of is here. I'm gonna cut them in half, and I'm gonna keep them all sort of put together so that they don't dry out. I'm going to put these into the saucepan. Drizzle some honey. Oh, it's so cool. The color got even brighter. That looks really pretty. Also looks like guts. You know, I don't know. I think we're about done. I'm gonna let this chill, and we're gonna use that to put in our cake. Now, whipped topping. Didn't get too ambitious. Kept it straightforward. If you'll bear with me, we're going to try to do it right now. A one, and a two, and a three. There we go. And my whipped topping is ready. I love Ready Whip. I shouldn't tell you why, but it was the cheapest tie you could get when you were 12 years old, I'll tell you that much. We're gonna make some whipped cream. It comes together real quick. So now I'm into the fun stuff. Diplomat cream, which is whipped cream mixed together with pastry cream to get a luscious, luscious filling. I'm gonna start with the pastry cream. The first thing I do is put a pot on medium heat. I add the cream in. Lock it in. Some powdered sugar. And then I add in the milk. While the milk and cream are heating up, I'm gonna mix together my egg yolks, sugar, tiny bit of salt. Whenever you make pastry or anything sweet, add a little bit of salt. It will find that balance much better. Then I add in cornstarch. It's because you want the pastry cream to be a little bit thick. I whisk all of these ingredients together until I have kind of a yellow paste. This is a process called tempering. By slowly adding hot liquid to my eggs, I'm avoiding making scrambled eggs, and I'm getting everything to the same temperature. Now I'm gonna add all of the egg mixture back into the rest of the milk. And now I'm gonna heat this liquid. I whisk a bit. I stop. I check. I go back into whisking. You want this to feel like pudding. As soon as this is ready to come off the heat, I put it into another container. I'm gonna add in some vanilla. I love to use vanilla bean paste. You get the actual little pieces of vanilla. So you get the caviar, all of the bean on the inside. We're gonna add like a little dollop of sour cream. I take half my butter, room temperature. If you don't put butter in, it's probably not considered pastry cream. Once I've gotten that melted in, I'll add the balance of the butter. So I have my pastry cream, and it looks so divine. Put this on an ice bath for about 25 minutes or so. Put this in the refrigerator. I leave it overnight so it's completely cooled. Gives it the ideal temperature to mix it with the creme chantilly, which is French for Chantilly cream. The first step is to put water into a small bowl, and then I sprinkle a little gelatin on top. I mix this up, and then I'm gonna microwave it to dissolve the gelatin in the water. I can see now it's clear. Put heavy cream into my mixing bowl. I'm gonna mix it up just a little bit. Now I'm gonna put the gelatin in. I am looking for smooth and eventually stiff peaks. And what that means is when I lift the bowl up, there should be some of the cream left here, and it should look like a more defined peak than it does now. See how fast it is? Like, fast. Now I have stabilized whipped cream. And the next and final step to the filling is to mix this with the pastry cream. Pour this into the bowl. All right, finished. And now I'm done. What I have now is diplomat cream. Have I heard of diplomat cream? No. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have heard of diplomat cream. It's a diplomatic answer. I'm going to put it into pastry bags. Diplomat cream is lighter in color, has more structure, and is gonna work beautifully inside the cake. Sliced strawberries, baked biscuit, can of whipped topping. I'm ready to assemble my strawberry shortcakes. First thing I'm gonna do is take one of these biscuits and they should open up comfortably without, yeah, without a knife. Thank you, modern commerce. Ta-da! Ooh. Texture looks very fluffy, which is exactly what we want. I have the same cake ring that I used to size out the cake pieces earlier. I'm going to add a piece of acetate because it gives it sort of an added level of security that the cake isn't gonna fall apart after I'm done constructing it. I'm gonna take the bottom layer of the two layers of cake and paint the top of the cake layer with this gorgeous lemon simple syrup. Let's start with the whipped topping. Healthy dollop. Take the fancy strawberries, and this is the design part. And now some strawbs on top. It's about, you know, two spoonfuls, maybe three if you love the person more. I'm going to very lightly fill in the cake. Top that. A little bit more cream on top. I'm going to add the macerated strawberries to the inside of the cake. I'm gonna make a garnish. This is like where you could get fancy. Put the lemon simple syrup on the cake. There it is. What I have now is a star tip, which just makes a really beautiful little flower. The last and final step. I took freeze-dried strawberries, chopped them up using the back of a spoon, and now I have a really beautiful decoration. Isn't she so pretty? And this is my strawberry shortcake. You're not gonna win a beauty pageant. Might win a tummy pageant. It looks yummy, and all the things are melting. Oh my gosh. I would call it a fraisier américain, an American strawberry cake. This kind of dessert is the reason why we eat our regular food so quickly, so we can get to dessert as fast as possible. It is time to taste. I bet you it's gonna be a delight. I'm gonna try to get a little bit of everything in one bite. Mm. That's delicious. Oh my gosh. You're in and out of the kitchen in the time it takes for the biscuits to bake, 10, 15 minutes total, and you got something delicious to serve to your friends and family. There's that ultimate Asian dessert compliment where people say, it's not too sweet, so it's not too sweet. It's really yummy. I get the strawberries in every single bite, so I know that it's a strawberry shortcake, but everything else around it is just so perfect. You're gonna have to turn that camera off because I am gonna eat this whole thing. Strawberry shortcake is such a sweet summer treat. Let's see how each of our three chefs made theirs. Billy made pop and serve biscuits. Pressure inside the tube is greater than outside, compressing tiny air pockets in the dough. When opened, the pressure's released extremely quickly, the dough expands, and as it pushes against air, sound waves are generated. It's always a little scary to open these things. Gina made biscuit-style shortcake. This is a method of combining a flour mixture with a solid, flavorful fat like butter. The butter is cut into the flour mixture where it coats all of the gluten proteins. This shortens the gluten molecules, hence the name shortcake. It prevents interactions between proteins and water molecules and inhibits gluten development, which keeps the biscuits tender. Umber made a lemon pound cake, originally named such because you would use a pound of each ingredient. Pound cakes have a very tight crumb with tiny air pockets evenly distributed throughout the entire cake. The intense lemon flavor is from limonene, a compound found in high concentration in the peel. Billy simply sliced strawberries and added sugar. Sugar initiates osmotic changes and draws water out of the strawberries to create a viscous, sweet sauce. To accomplish this, you only need a small amount of sugar. Gina made a cooked strawberry sauce with honey to amplify sweetness. She also added cornstarch, which gelatinizes when it's combined with the macerated strawberries, thickening the strawberry juice. Billy used a can of Ready Whip. The can is pressurized using nitrous oxide as a spray propellant. When you press on the nozzle, pressure is released, the nitrous oxide expands and quickly infuses into the cream as it's released, resulting in a sweet, fluffy whipped cream. Gina whipped heavy cream, which is upwards of 35% milk fat. It foams well due to the proteins that form around tiny pockets of air as it's whipped, preventing the air from combining with the water molecules present, which would deflate the whole mass. The cold fat stabilizes the proteins, which is why that high fat percentage is necessary for stable whipped cream. No, America, look. Look what science has done for you. Umber's diplomat cream is an intricate mix of pastry and Chantilly creams. Chantilly cream is sweetened whipped cream, which Umber stabilized by adding gelatin or hydrolyzed collagen. It's the result of a reaction with water that breaks peptide bonds and increases the number of free amino acids. I mean, are you really gonna go home and make your own creme diplomat? No, you're gonna buy a can of whipped cream, just like I did, and there is no shame in that game. Next time you have strawberries and you're craving a sweet summery treat, we hope you'll take some of these tips from our three creative chefs.