For a few years of this decade, there was an outrageously stylish café located in the women’s fashion section of the Bon Marché department store in Paris. It was called Délicabar and the fellow in charge was pâtissier Sébastien Gaudard. I first visited it about six months after it opened, and loved the sweeping hot pink banquettes, the stark white counter, and the innovative and delicious cakes and other creations.
In 2006, three years after opening the café, a book by Gaudard hit the shelves: Sébastien Gaudard : Agitateur de goût. It looks very much like a vanity work, with the rather handsome Gaudard visage and his very blue eyes staring out at you from the cover. Inside there are many, many photos of Gaudard-with-little-dog shopping together, laughing with friends, and sometimes Gaudard by himself cooking with his team or staring meaningfully at a computer screen. But alongside all this are a wide range of recipes for some pretty delicious treats.
Alas, Gaudard and Délicabar shut up shop in November 2008, and that was that. The café space now contains some Italianesque lunchery, and Gaudard’s website is devoid of content.
Among the hits at Délicabar was the range of exquisite sablés (shortbreads), such as hazelnut, rosemary, or olive oil. Gaudard’s book reproduces some items familiar from the old menu, plus other interesting dishes. I’ve found the recipes less than reliable, but the inspiration is there.
I loved the sound of the sablés noisette à la fleur de sel (hazelnut shortbreads with fleur de sel). They are an utter bugger to make. The final result, however, is something close to nutly heaven.
The problem is that the crumbly mixture doesn’t readily adhere to the non-stick surface of a hazelnut. Moistening the surface doesn’t help. Below is the recipe, slightly modified in the hope of making them marginally less difficult to put together. If you find a further tweak that makes things easier, do tell.
240 g hazelnuts with skin
90 g butter, softened
240 g caster sugar
110 g plain flour
ca 1-1.5 tsp fleur de sel, crushed lightly
This makes about 90 balls.
Preheat the oven to 150C and then roast the nuts on a tray for about 20mins until well coloured. Take care not to burn them (the skins will blacken; it’s the nuts themselves I’m worried about).
Reserve 100 g of the hazelnuts with their skins. – (A)
Reserve another 40 g of the hazelnuts with their skins – (B)
Remove the skins of the remaining 100 g of hazelnuts by rubbing the nuts between your hands or in a tea-towel. – (C)
Allow the nuts to cool completely before proceeding.
Grind hazelnuts (A) to a powder. Take care not to work them too much (or two fast) or you’ll end up with an oily paste. Not a disaster, but a bit messier.
Crush hazelnuts (B) to small pieces.
Mix butter, sugar, hazelnuts (A) and flour together. Add hazelnuts (B) and salt to taste (the mixture is quite sweet but should have the tingle of hidden salt crystals). The final texture of the mixture should be a bit like a pâte sablée (crumbly shortcrust pastry). It won’t hold together well. Chill for about an hour.
Preheat the oven to 160C.
Make small balls of the sablé with a whole hazelnut (C) in the centre. This isn’t easy, as the mixture doesn’t like to hold together. I find cupping my hand and applying a lot of pressure to the mixture helps keep it firm enough while encasing a hazelnut. You might also like to try scooping up some of the mixture in a measuring teaspoon, pressing a hazelnut into it, then packing more mixture on top and then knocking the whole thing into your hand for a final squeeze. I promise frustration and occasional despair, and perhaps a little boredom.
Place the balls on baking paper on a tray. Bake the whole batch for 10-15mins, until they’ve developed a little colour.
They keep very well in a sealed container (assuming you and everyone around you don’t gobble them up in an instant).
This article was prompted by the loud moans of pleasure from Hannah, Kaye and Kelly (assisted by milder expressions of delight from a number of other lovely people).
Shame about the patisserie! Hopefully it resurfaces someday (perhaps with a more manageable size?).
I’m not sure this would help, but perhaps rolling the whole hazelnuts gently on the surface of a rasp will create enough traction for the mixture to stick. Probably the mixture’s refusal to cohere is the bigger problem. Maybe a touch more butter wouldn’t hurt the texture. A single egg white is a little riskier but it could pay off!
Oh yum! I loved those!!!
xox Sarah
@Manggy: I sort of rejected the idea of making the surface of the nuts a bit rough, basically for aesthetic reasons.
The egg white idea might be viable, thanks! But much less than one egg white to start with — I’m concerned about the sugar in the pastry starting to dissolve.
These sound delicious – especially with fleur de sel. I’m addicted to using it this month. What a shame that delightful patisserie closed. But in Paris, there are so many fabulous places.
I just had to try these. I had a go this afternoon and I must say, they are indeed divine, but what’s more I had no problem at all “assembling” them !
What I did differently, I ground the nuts (A) together with about half the flour (I used french all purpose flour ; what is best for sablés ?), I stirred in the rest of the flour and the sugar with a spoon, then I added the butter, roughly cut up and ICECOLD, and pulsed (literally) no more than a few times – to obtain very very rough crumbs. I first mixed the salt with the chopped nuts (B) and then added this to the dough with a last pulse (to reduce manipulation of the dough to an absolute minimum).
I put the (very rough) crumbs in the fridge for an hour or so.
I put a little (cold) mixture in my handpalm, patting it a bit with my finger to bring the crumbs together and form sort of a circle, I put a nut in the middle, covered it with the circle of dough and that was number one – ready in a matter of seconds.
I repeated this procedure about fifty times and had batch one ready in under fifteen minutes !
(I have mixture left in the fridge for another twenty balls or so).
I’m really not that handy and certainly not very quick, I think the key is in minimal manipulation of the dough and keeping the temperature low.
I baked the balls for 15 minutes at 160 °C (conventional electrical oven) and they were perfect – except for the shape that is ; they did not stay completely round. Oven too cold ? Too hot ? I think my layer of dough around the nuts may have been a bit thicker than Duncan’s cause I certainly could not make 90 balls, I think no more than 70.
Next time I want to try and grind the nuts with the sugar instead of the flour – the more logical thing to do, but that would be the same as using icing sugar and I didn’t want to tamper with the recipe first time.
Also I want to try and reduce the amount of sugar, I find them very sweet and think they could be even nicer, tasting more of nuts, with less sugar.
One more thing : after roasting the nuts for 20 mins at 150 °C the skins simple fell off, it was impossible to keep enough with skins on, but skin on or off didn’t make a difference in the assembly.
Welcome Hilde! Your feedback is valuable, thanks. I probably process the butter further, but otherwise our approach has been similar regarding chilling etc. It’s true that they don’t stay perfectly round. I don’t think there’s any way they can (and the coarser the butter, the more likelihood of deforming, I guess). I’ve tried reducing sugar, but I must say that I found the sweet-salt contrast quite lovely in the original recipe. And finally, I think keeping some skins is good for the flavour.