Food, Home & Lifestyle
Rye Sablés
Lesson time 09:28 min
In this concluding lesson, Apollonia shows you how to make Poilâne’s popular grain-based cookies, affectionately named punitions, or punishments, because you can’t eat just one.
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Topics include: Rolling, Cutting & Baking · Baking in the Spirit of Poilâne
Teaches Bread Baking
Poilâne CEO Apollonia Poilâne teaches the renowned Parisian bakery’s philosophy and time-tested techniques for baking rustic French breads.
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- At Poilane, we make breads, sablés, and bakers' pastries. A sablé is a cookie. It has a very sandy texture, which is where this name comes from. Over the past decade, I've developed a range of sablés of different grain flours. Our iconic sablé is the wheat sablé. And at the bakery we call them punitions because my great-great-grandmother would call her grandchildren, saying come and get your little punishments, or punitions. The rye flour sablé we're going to make today is one I have a sweet spot for. They're not very sugary. But I will mention you're likely to not be able to stop at just one. And that is also part of the punishment. [MUSIC PLAYING] To make this recipe, we need eggs, sugar, butter, pinch of salt, and some rye flour. First step, we're going to froth the eggs and the sugar. You can use a handheld mixer here. I really wouldn't recommend using a stand-alone mixer just because you probably don't have enough mass. I use the handheld mixer to bring the sugar and the eggs together. Froth it up, and you can see these slight little air pockets. And this is a good sign. I'm going to add the butter. There is a lot of butter here, and do not try and shortcut this. This is what's going to make a sablé. This butter is at room temperature but should not get warm because you don't want the fats from the water to separate. I'm mixing this on low speed just until the butter is incorporated. It should take about a minute. I've just creamed it up. It just looks like you're starting to mix together a purée, I'm going to add the salt to the flour. And this is just so that there's no big pockets of salt. And I'm going to start bringing this together with the spatula just because I don't want to have the flour flying out of the bowl. I started making the sablés only in the most recent years. I've been eating them all my life. In my apprenticeship, I first focused on the breads. And then when I came back from college I learned how to bake the sweet confections of our bakery. At this stage, the dough is delicate, so don't go on high speed. Stay on the slower speeds. It will also help you not create a disaster. Once the ingredients have come together it may look like the dough is a little grainy. It comes in pieces. That's absolutely fine, and that's why we refrigerate it. At this point, you're going to take half and just put them together. So you can use your wooden spoon, or you can use a dough scraper. Here, I'm just going to make sure that the dough comes together a little bit. And just so that it refrigerates faster, I'm just going to make a flat square. Sometimes the dough gets a little sticky. In that case, you can use a dough scraper to put it onto your plastic wrap. To refrigerate the dough, I use some plastic wrap. But you're just as welcome to use some parchment paper or some beeswax paper. The main thing here is you want to keep it airtight to avoid the sablé dough to crust. You see the dough...
About the Instructor
As a third-generation baker and CEO of the renowned Parisian bakery Poilâne, Apollonia Poilâne keeps time-honored traditions alive with every loaf. Now she’s sharing the joy of making bread from scratch with her recipes and hands-on demonstrations. Learn how to make your own starter and a variety of French breads, including rustic wheat, rye, and brioche. Taste, smell, and feel your way to fresh, warm bread at home.
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Apollonia Poilâne
Poilâne CEO Apollonia Poilâne teaches the renowned Parisian bakery’s philosophy and time-tested techniques for baking rustic French breads.
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