No. 148

Savarin Paste

Pate a Savarin

One pound of flour, half a pound of melted butter, four ounces of sugar, eight eggs, six yolks, half an ounce of yeast, half a gill of raw cream, and a pinch of salt.

Sift some of the flour into a warm vessel, and make a soft leaven with a quarter of the flour and the yeast, dilute it with tepid water, and cover it with some more of the flour, then leave it to rise in a warm temperature. When the leaven has risen to half its original size, break up the dough with the hands, and work into it gradually, and one by one the eggs and the remainder of the flour, then knead the dough vigorously for ten minutes to give it a body, add to it slowly the melted butter, afterward the sugar and salt, and lastly the raw cream; the zest of lemon chopped or grated may be added if desired.

← No. 147 Raviole Paste Elementary Methods No. 149 Tart Paste →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a rich yeast batter, closer to brioche than to any pastry "paste," built in two stages: a sponge, then the enrichment. Ranhofer gives no mold, no oven and no baking time, since those come later in the book.

The hinge: build strength before the fatThe ten minutes of vigorous kneading after the eggs go in is what makes the dough hold together; the butter, sugar and cream all weaken gluten and must go in slowly afterward. Add the butter too early or too fast and the batter breaks into a greasy slurry that will not climb the mold.
Half a gill of raw creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup. "Raw" here means unpasteurized and, more to the point, uncooked and unwhipped — ordinary heavy cream is the substitute.
Half an ounce of yeastThat is compressed fresh yeast, about 14 g. Roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons of instant dry yeast gives the equivalent lift; if using instant, still make the sponge, since the sponge is what flavors the crumb.
The leavenRanhofer's "soft leaven" is a sponge: a quarter of the flour, the yeast and enough tepid water to make a soft dough, blanketed with dry flour and left warm. The text's "risen to half its original size" is best read as grown by half, not collapsed.
Fourteen eggs' worthEight eggs and six extra yolks -- Eight whole eggs and six additional yolks to a pound of flour is a very wet batter by modern standards. Use a stand mixer with the paddle, not the hook, and expect something that pours rather than something that can be shaped by hand.
Weights, not cupsWork in grams: 450 g flour, 225 g butter, 115 g sugar. Measuring this flour by volume will throw the hydration off badly given how much liquid the eggs contribute.
Baking, which the recipe omitsA savarin paste is proofed in a buttered ring mold filled no more than halfway, then baked until deep brown and hollow-sounding; a moderately hot oven, around 375F, and 25 to 35 minutes for a large ring is a reasonable modern starting point, though Ranhofer supplies none of this here. It is meant to be soaked in hot syrup, often rum or kirsch, while still warm.
YieldA pound of flour with this much enrichment should make roughly one large savarin ring for eight to ten, or about a dozen small individual molds.

A Little History

The savarin is generally traced to the Parisian pastry house of the Julien brothers in the 1840s, who took the older baba — a yeast cake carried into France from Poland and associated by tradition with the exiled king Stanisław Leszczyński — dropped the raisins, baked it in a ring mold and named it for Brillat-Savarin, author of Physiologie du goût. What distinguishes it is not the crumb but its porosity: the open, eggy structure exists to drink syrup. Ranhofer files it among the elementary methods, as a foundation rather than a finished dish — the same dough reappears soaked in rum, filled with fruit and cream, or cut down into small molds under other dessert names later in the book.