Kouign amann and the queen of pulsars
Hi all! Apologies for the maaaaajor delay on the third post. Things have been nutso with courses and planetarium work and I've been traveling a lot, but I've still been baking! I've been working on the challenges but by the time I'm finished with them, I'm usually too exhausted to post. I've been doing at least one challenge per week and just haven't posted any of them, but look out for a bunch in the near future. Anyway, in this post, I'm going to talk about one of last week's bakes: kouign amann (the first word pronounced like "queen"), better known as Brittany pastries!
After traveling for 3 weekends in a row and not having access to my stand mixer, I took to Twitter for suggestions as to what to bake. When someone mentioned kouign amann, I knew it had to be my next challenge. I had been putting them off simply because they're time-consuming. They do, however, only require basic ingredients like bread flour (what the British call "strong flour"), yeast, butter, and sugar. The whole process was a lot like making croissants, which I've done from scratch a few times; you take dough and butter that's been rolled out, put the butter in the middle, fold it, rest it in the fridge, and repeat. You have to prove this dough (let it rise) before the laminating (folding in of butter) which I thought was a bit weird, but the recipe was fairly straightforward. The dough had to go through 3 rounds of lamination but it wasn't too bad (croissants basically take a whole day to make and you bake them the next day!). Only stumbles were caused by the fact that I didn't fully read the directions...I made measurement errors and didn't put the sugar where it should have been (I sprinkled it as I made them into their shapes instead of after that). This recipe was really successful though and if you have some time, definitely worth trying (recipe here). Plus they're pretty!
Number of mistakes made because of not reading directions: 2
Difficulty of the bake: 6/10
Weird ingredients needed: none
Kitchen destruction factor: 5/10
So today we have a very special pulsar post! The week before I tackled these pastries, I got to meet the discoverer of pulsars herself, Jocelyn Bell Burnell!! She was such an amazing individual and so modest about all she's accomplished (and it's a lot!). So, in honor of her, let's talk a bit about the discovery of pulsars.
After traveling for 3 weekends in a row and not having access to my stand mixer, I took to Twitter for suggestions as to what to bake. When someone mentioned kouign amann, I knew it had to be my next challenge. I had been putting them off simply because they're time-consuming. They do, however, only require basic ingredients like bread flour (what the British call "strong flour"), yeast, butter, and sugar. The whole process was a lot like making croissants, which I've done from scratch a few times; you take dough and butter that's been rolled out, put the butter in the middle, fold it, rest it in the fridge, and repeat. You have to prove this dough (let it rise) before the laminating (folding in of butter) which I thought was a bit weird, but the recipe was fairly straightforward. The dough had to go through 3 rounds of lamination but it wasn't too bad (croissants basically take a whole day to make and you bake them the next day!). Only stumbles were caused by the fact that I didn't fully read the directions...I made measurement errors and didn't put the sugar where it should have been (I sprinkled it as I made them into their shapes instead of after that). This recipe was really successful though and if you have some time, definitely worth trying (recipe here). Plus they're pretty!
Number of mistakes made because of not reading directions: 2
Difficulty of the bake: 6/10
Weird ingredients needed: none
Kitchen destruction factor: 5/10
So today we have a very special pulsar post! The week before I tackled these pastries, I got to meet the discoverer of pulsars herself, Jocelyn Bell Burnell!! She was such an amazing individual and so modest about all she's accomplished (and it's a lot!). So, in honor of her, let's talk a bit about the discovery of pulsars.
Pulsars were discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell when she was a graduate student at Cambridge University. At the time, she was looking for quasars (which are really really ancient giant black holes) with the radio telescope she helped make. While searching, she noticed a repeating signal in her data. The signal was really periodic and appeared to be coming from one area of the sky. Because it moved with the stars (rose 3 minutes earlier every day), she thought that it must be coming from the heavens and not Earth. Finally, after ruling out everything else, she and her advisor Dr. Anthony Hewish named the source LGM-1, standing for “Little Green Man 1" because they thought the source might be extraterrestrial. The term "pulsar" was coined during an interview with the press, who wanted some kind of catchy name for the stars. Soon more of these sources began to pop up from different areas of the sky, and the field of pulsars was born! Her advisor went on to win the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars, even though she's the one who discovered them (that prize is aptly called the “No-Bell prize"). When asked about how she felt about her advisor getting the prize, she said that there had been no astronomers given the Nobel Prize in Physics and the fact that her discovery paved the way for more astronomers being rewarded for their work makes her happy (see, modest!!). She's such an amazing human being and it was so wonderful to get the chance to hear her stories and interact with her.
Thanks so much for reading and check back next week for more stories of British baking and pulsar facts!
Thanks so much for reading and check back next week for more stories of British baking and pulsar facts!


