Healthy Cakes? No longer a day dream thanks to Miele!

If you thought that delicious cakes were off the menu – think again. Miele has come up with a way to make baking healthier – as demonstrated by chefs at Steam Patisserie - the world's first patisserie where everything is cooked with steam.

The Steam Patisserie was part of a pop up event which took place in July on Regent Street. Rachel Khoo showed off some of her super healthy patisserie techniques using Miele combination steam ovens. Proving that baking doesn’t need to be unhealthy, she cooked up a delicious selection of cakes, brioche and tarts to show just how easy it was to steam cook sweet treats.

Cooking with steam means that there’s no need for cooking oil or fat and so the resulting cakes are much lighter. This method of cooking also helps to retain the nutrients in food that some cooking methods can destroy.

In combination steam ovens like the ones used at the Steam Patisserie event, the steam comes from the humidity setting, which can range from 0-100%. There are three ways you can use it:

• Keep the humidity at zero and use it like a conventional oven.
• Switch off the ‘oven’ function and only use the ‘steam’ function – making it into a steamer.
• Use both the humidity and oven functions to get a combination steam oven.

The resulting cakes and pastries received a vote of approval from the bloggers and testers, including Su-Yin from the Bread et Butter blog (well worth a look if baking is your passion) and Rachel was keen to point out that cooking with steam didn’t result in any loss of flavour – in fact she thinks that steam cooking can actually improve their taste. She explained;

'Steam ovens are perfect for delicious patisseries and breads - anything where 'rise' is important.

'The moisture injection function helps not only to create lift and rise, but also produces a lovely thin, light crust together with the lightest pastry imaginable.'

Miele’s marketing director, Dominic Worsley added that he thought cooking with steam was a real innovation.

'Steam is a powerful tool in the kitchen and it's not just for cooking your vegetables. There's virtually no limit to what can be cooked in a combination steam oven.'

(image from http://breadetbutter.wordpress.com/)

Two Kitchens Kate?

Two Kitchens Kate?
It’s a bit of an unfair name, but Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, has been in the news lately for deciding that she wanted two brand new kitchens in both her Kensington Palace apartment and at a completely new kitchen at her and William’s Norfolk retreat
The kitchen at the majestic Anmer Hall in North Norfolk was said to be worth a pretty impressive £38,000 when pictures were posted online by the couple who installed it in the mansion six years ago. Their dream kitchen featured £17,000 worth of gorgeous hand-crafted worktops along with a fashionable inset Belfast sink, an Aga costing £11,495 and a fridge that was worth over £8500.
There was even a state of the art espresso maker in the original kitchen, and a chopping block worth an eye-watering £200. We hope they went to a good home!
Royal sources have said that the kitchen at Anmer Hall will be ‘unrecognisable’ once Kate and Wills have redesigned it.
The couple seem to have a bit of a penchant for redesigning kitchens, given that they added a completely new second kitchen to their apartment in Kensington Palace recently, after already upgrading the existing kitchen, designed by Lord Snowdon. The couple said that they wanted to have their own family kitchen just for the three of them as well as the enormous 350 square foot kitchen they would use for entertaining. We wonder if Kate uses her family kitchen for microwave ready meals and Pot Noodles and the big one for ‘proper cooking’.
It’s hard to imagine just how luxurious the Royals’ new kitchens will be, but we can pretty much assume that they will be installing state of the art appliances and that everything will be high quality and absolutely bang on trend.
If you’re thinking about upgrading your own kitchen facilities, but like most of us, your budget is considerably smaller than the Cambridges, we’d love to talk to you. We stock high end appliances from manufacturers like Miele, Gaggeneau and Sub Zero, and we can cater for kitchens of all sizes with our fantastic designs and space-optimising storage options from SieMatic.
You don’t have to have a budget the size of Kate’s to get a top quality new kitchen from Paul James Kitchen Design…

Two Kitchens Kate?

It’s a bit of an unfair name, but Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, has been in the news lately for deciding that she wanted two brand new kitchens in both her Kensington Palace apartment and at a completely new kitchen at her and William’s Norfolk retreat.

The kitchen at the majestic Anmer Hall in North Norfolk was said to be worth a pretty impressive £38,000 when pictures were posted online by the couple who installed it in the mansion six years ago. Their dream kitchen featured £17,000 worth of gorgeous hand-crafted worktops along with a fashionable inset Belfast sink, an Aga costing £11,495 and a fridge that was worth over £8500.

There was even a state of the art espresso maker in the original kitchen, and a chopping block worth an eye-watering £200. We hope they went to a good home!

Royal sources have said that the kitchen at Anmer Hall will be ‘unrecognisable’ once Kate and Wills have redesigned it.

The couple seem to have a bit of a penchant for redesigning kitchens, given that they added a completely new second kitchen to their apartment in Kensington Palace recently, after already upgrading the existing kitchen, designed by Lord Snowdon. The couple said that they wanted to have their own family kitchen just for the three of them as well as the enormous 350 square foot kitchen they would use for entertaining. We wonder if Kate uses her family kitchen for microwave ready meals and Pot Noodles and the big one for ‘proper cooking’.

It’s hard to imagine just how luxurious the Royals’ new kitchens will be, but we can pretty much assume that they will be installing state of the art appliances and that everything will be high quality and absolutely bang on trend.

If you’re thinking about upgrading your own kitchen facilities, but like most of us, your budget is considerably smaller than the Cambridges, we’d love to talk to you. We stock high end appliances from manufacturers like Miele, Gaggeneau and Sub Zero, and we can cater for kitchens of all sizes with our fantastic designs and space-optimising storage options from SieMatic.

You don’t have to have a budget the size of Kate’s to get a top quality new kitchen from Paul James Kitchen Design…