As I drove up to Bouchon Bakery in Yountville on the Thursday morning that I was in Napa, it occurred to me that I’ve been going there for two years now, which means that I’ve been following their cheese danish for the past two years, as well. Yes. Two (2!) years on the Bouchon Bakery cheese danish trail…
The first time I wrote about it on January 19, 2006, I was in love with the rich, muscular dough and bright, tangy flavor.
The second time on March 12 of 2006, the love continued, this time with Chad’s enthusiastic approval and comparison of it to a cloud… A dreamy cloud (ok, I added the “dreamy”).
The third time, in January 2007, (in the “edit”), I was incredibly saddened by a bland flavor and superfluous coarse sugar crystals. My perfect cheese danish was… gone.
But this time, I fell in love all over again.
The pastry has changed, in fantastic and even surprising ways. First of all, it’s a little smaller, a little rounder… Compact and elegant. The slightly lemony cream cheese filling is piped on top, and there’s a kind of almond filling in the middle (perhaps ground almonds mixed with the cheese fillings?) I normally think that nuts can overwhelm a pastry, and make it heavier, but this works. There’s more dimension to this danish than every before…. AND it’s a cloud again. So light. The dough was not as muscular as before and I was ok with that — it was the definition of a perfectly airy laminated dough, just slightly softened by eggs (which separates the danish from the croissant)
Looking back at my pictures, it looks like there’s less powdered sugar on top, which might be another reason why it’s so strong and true now… I generally dislike powdered sugar because it hurts my teeth upon initial contact and leaves a funky aftertaste in my mouth and a trail of dust on my clothes. Without much of it in the way, the flavor is dead on. There are visible grains of coarse sugar on top, but oddly, I didn’t feel their texture.
I have to admit — I usually don’t finish pastries, and almost never in one sitting. But this danish was gone in no time… and even made me come back from Sonoma county a few hours later so that I could get two more — one for a friend to try and one for the road back to LA.
I think that this could be made at home, and if you’ve ever considered making a laminated dough (croissant/puff pastry/danish), I urge you to try it. It’s fun and just challenging enough, and the results are amazing. Seriously, I wouldn’t go on and on about a cheese danish if it wasn’t – fresh, hand-crafted danish garnished just how you like is nothing like the sad swirls of sugared, greasy dough that danishes often exist as today. A great thing, too, is that you can make the dough and freeze it so that you can bake off just as many as you want fresh at a time.
