Portuguese · Dessert
Pão de Ló de Ovar
- Intermediate
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 10 egg yolks
- 4 whole eggs
- 250 g caster sugar
- 90 g plain flour, sifted
- 2 g fine salt
- 10 g unsalted butter, for the paper
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Beat the yolks, whole eggs, sugar and salt on high for 15 minutes, until the mass triples, goes ivory pale and falls in a thick unbroken ribbon that sits on the surface. 15 min
- Sift the flour over in three lots and fold from the base of the bowl with a spatula, stopping the instant the last streak disappears.
- Line a deep 20 cm clay bowl or cake tin with buttered paper pleated 5 cm above the rim, and pour the batter in.
- Bake at 180C (350F) for 30 minutes to 35 minutes, then judge it by probe alone, pushed into the geometric centre of the bowl: pull it out when that reads 80C (176F), which is the reading that makes the loose centre safe to eat, and ignore the skewer, which comes away wet. 30 min
- Cool it in its paper and serve straight from the bowl, spooning the soft centre over the outer crumb.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Pleating dumplings 8 recipes
- The seam is closed along its whole length with no gap at either end of the pleat run: hold one up to the light and no filling shows through the join. A dumpling that opens in the water was sealed against a wet or floured rim.
- The rim is clean and dry where it meets itself. Filling smeared onto the sealing edge is the single most common cause of a burst, and it cannot be wiped off once the dough has taken it up.
- The pleats are even in size and count across the batch, so every piece holds the same weight of filling and cooks in the same time. A tray that ranges from eight folds to eighteen will not finish together.
- The wrapper is thicker at the centre than at the rim, so the base carries the filling without tearing while the pleated edge stays fine enough to eat. A disc rolled evenly flat splits at the bottom.
- It stands up on its own base without slumping, and the pleats still read as pleats after cooking rather than having relaxed into a smooth seam.
Where it goes wrong The rim was wet, floured or smeared with filling, so the seal never took: the dumpling opens in the pot, the filling leaves, and what surfaces is a slack empty wrapper in cloudy water. Uneven pleat counts across a tray compound it, because the batch stops finishing at the same moment.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauternes
- Also Right
- Demi-sec Champagne
- From the Taps
- Belgian tripel
- Zero-Proof
- Jasmine tea
The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.
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