“Now I understand that you are tough as a quince.” With these words last night Alba Carrillo started the technical test of the latest installment of ‘Bake Off: Celebrities in the oven’. On the eve of Valentine’s Day, the contestants had to make a rose-shaped cake from the workshop of Damián Betular, judge of the program along with Eva Arguiñano and Paco Roncero. Although drawing the petals with the pastry bag seemed like the most difficult part of the test, there was one ingredient that almost all aspiring pastry chefs got stuck on: quince.
To prepare the pink cake, the ‘Bake Off’ participants had to make a sweet shortcrust pastry, a cheese mousse, a whipped vanilla ganache and a quince jam. And it is in this step that the viewer was able to verify that more than one famous person had not touched a quince in their life. Below, we explain how to treat this ingredient properly.
Whether you are going to make a jam like the contestants or you simply feel like making a homemade quince candy, the first step is always the same: peel the quinces. To do this, don’t do like Pablo Puyol and take a knife to cut meat. Better yet, follow Marc Clotet’s example and use a short-handled peeling knife, which is much more manageable and will undoubtedly save you a lot of time!
The recipe forced the ‘Bake Off’ celebrities to cut two quinces into small cubes—Paco Roncero scolded Yolanda Ramos for breaking it up too much. Here you should use a cutting knife, since the quince has a cuticle inside that is a kind of hard capsule where it keeps the seeds, where the knife tends to get caught. In fact, Damián Betular had to intervene at this point to help Ana Boyer.
Furthermore, this seed core that we have talked about must be eliminated in the cut if you do not want to spoil the jam. At last night’s anonymous tasting, the judges drew attention to some cakes that had quince seeds inside. Once you have the quinces cut into small cubes, you simply have to cook them in a saucepan with 150 grams of sugar—for 300 grams of quince—and 260 milliliters of water over medium or strong heat to make the jam for Damián Betular’s pink cake.
