Ready to roll

Pastry making is just one of many cookery skills taught by Camilla Schneideman at her Lemon Tree Cookery School in W10. Pendle Harte has a go

Making pastry is all about temperature. Even the slightest bit of warmth from your hands, the room or your rolling surface can ruin your chances of achieving the perfect light and crumbly texture. That’s why Camilla Schneideman keeps all pastry ingredients in the fridge, even the sugar, and opens the window to the February chill. We are in her teaching kitchen and for once my cold hands are a good thing, because they won’t hurt the butter.
This is a course in pastry making at W10-based Lemon Tree Cookery School, run by Camilla. Her credentials are impressive: daughter of the couple who set up the original stylish kitchen store Divertimenti (in the 60s when you couldn’t buy a soufflé dish anywhere else in London), she ran the Marylebone store’s café before producing her own cookbook (The Divertimenti Cookbook, £20, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), having trained at Leiths. Now her family has sold the business, she has had a baby and she has turned her attention to setting up a school in the family home.
It’s a normal domestic kitchen designed with classes in mind. Students stand at an island with Camilla at the head, and she hands out pre-weighed, Blue Peter-style ingredient kits. We are kicking off with a smoked haddock, leek and chive tart, because, Camilla says, “at Leith’s, we made things with smoked haddock all the time and it made me realise how delicious it can be.” The haddock is already poaching and the leeks frying as we begin the pastry lesson. “The trick is to combine the butter and flour without allowing the butter to melt,” says Camilla ñ and while a food processor would achieve this with careful use of the pulse button (you don’t want to over-mix it), the true way to do it is by hand. That is, with minimum actual handling, but maximum arm movement.
So Camilla shows us a trick (yes, Leith’s again) where you hold two knives at right angles, with their blades flat against each other and make quick, scissor-like cutting movements through the flour and butter. This disperses the butter without melting it, the cold knives being more effective than your hands at resisting warmth. We get the hang of it pretty fast and it really works, though it’s demanding work. When all that’s left are tiny lumps we have to resort to a bit of hand work, being careful to keep the mixture between our fingertips and never squeezing it in our palms until there are no more butter lumps and we are ready to add the eggs and water and press the entire lot into a ball. And that’s another good time to cool it again, so put the ball in the freezer for a bit, or leave it there for weeks, until you’re ready to roll.
“When you are rolling pastry, be sure to keep it on the move,” is Camilla’s advice. You have to keep lifting it off the surface and turning it slightly, so it doesn’t stick and so that you are rolling it evenly in all directions.“And it will crack a bit, so don’t be disheartened.” Another special Camilla trick is to roll the flattened pastry onto the pin and then sort of unroll it by draping it generously over your form. Press the pastry into the base and then roll the pin over the top of the form again to shave off the excess surround, cover it with greaseproof paper and scatter little baking beans (you can use coins for this, says Camilla, brilliantly justifying the jar of unwanted coppers in every kitchen) and slip it into the oven. It shouldn’t really change colour, just develop a rough outer layer, before it’s ready to be taken out, filled and put back in. And that’s it.
Add a bit of sugar for the sweet version and experiment with other ingredients if you like (one of Camilla’s recipes uses cream cheese and polenta in a pastry mix) but pastry is essentially about combining butter and flour, and that’s what we’ve learnt to do today.

www.camillaschneideman.com
For details of classes at Lemon Tree Cookery School, phone Camilla on 07942 283 790