So there I was in a Portuguese cooking class …
… and that’s a sentence I have NEVER written in 40 years of columns for this newspaper.
Both are true. Let me explain. I recently took an 11-day trip to Portugal with some of my buddies, and within hours of arriving, we were told we had to try a local pastry called pastel de nata, which means, “You can’t make this, don’t even try.”
No. Pastel de nata actually translates to — get this, fancy linguists — “cream pastry.” Wow. But let me tell you, a pastel de nata ain’t no Dunkin Donut.
This is such a delicious, light, flaky puff pastry filled with sweet egg custard and dusted with cinnamon that after one bite it makes you yell, “Wow! Let’s go take a cooking class and bring these babies back to Detroit!”
At least it did with me.
You see, I have this character flaw. Years ago, in an effort to increase fundraising to our Say Detroit charities, I got an idea to bring Philadelphia-style Italian ices to Detroit. We could open a shop here, I thought, and give all the profits to charity.
And thanks to generous instruction from some Philly-area ice masters named Jon and Adriana Adams, we did exactly that. It’s the Detroit Water Ice Factory on Woodward Avenue, and it’s now celebrating its 12th year in business, selling, in my humble opinion, the best Italian ice in the city.
Unfortunately, that success created this character flaw. I now think any time I taste a delicious dessert that isn’t easily found in the Motor City, all I have to do is figure out the recipe, start making it here, and let the doors swing open!
Over the years, I have tried this with gourmet rice pudding from New York, special crepes from Belgium, a phyllo-dough-and-melted-cheese pastry from the Balkans called a burek, and countless other delicacies that made me yell, “Oh, man, we gotta bring this home,” as if all you had to do was stuff the recipe in your carry-on.
Suffice it to say, none of them worked out. But you know what they say. If at first the pastry crumbles, fry, fry again.
Something like that.
Flavors of fancy
So there I was in a Portuguese cooking class …
… and so were my buddies, crowded around a stainless steel table in a basement kitchen, sharing the class with a lovely German couple, who looked at us with that universal expression that said, “Can we still get our money back?”
And the teacher.
She was a young, energetic Portuguese chef named Terresa who wore her hair in bangs and an apron over her blouse and would occasionally, with her thick accent, break into singing an American disco song while churning her hands which made me feel like I was in that “wild and crazy guys” skit from "Saturday Night Live."
But she was funny, and who am I to criticize? The fact is this was my first cooking class. Ever. That’s how bad I am in a kitchen. But I was certain all I had to do was take this two-hour lesson, get the recipe down, and soon Detroit would be enjoying pastel de natas up and down the QLine.
And I clung to this idea right up to the moment when Terresa brought out the eggs.
“Separate them,” she told me.
From who? Their mothers?
“The whites and the jokes.”
The jokes?
“The yellow.”
Oh. The yolks. Right.
I forced a dumb smile, the universal language for “Forgive me, I am a spoiled American and I have never done this before” and I caught a glance from the German couple that roughly translated to, “Look at this spoiled American. I bet his parents disowned him.” And finally, Terresa showed me a maneuver to break the egg in my hand and somehow cajole the yolk until it transferred to the other hand, which I tried, and transferred the egg directly to my shirt.
Then someone else showed me you can pour the white and yolk into the shell, back and forth, like juggling a slinky, until they separate. I stunk at that, too.
Then came the flour, then the corn starch, then the milk, all combined in a bowl, and then a whisker, which Terresa handed to me and said, “No lamps.”
No lamps?
“You make smooth ... no lamps.”
She took one look at my blank expression, then took over, deftly whisking the sugar and milk, while singing a disco tune. Then she winked, which is when I figured out that 1) “lamps” meant “lumps,” so she wanted no lumps, and 2) this was already too challenging for my skill level — and we hadn’t even started on the pastry yet.
Egg on my shirt
So there I was in a Portuguese cooking class …
… already hopelessly behind the curve. The German couple, who probably own a bakery back home, were miles ahead of me, as were my buddies, as they pushed the pastry into the tins and made a nice smooth surface — no lamps — while mine looked more like the Play-Doh animals I made in kindergarten.
I had planned to film the whole process so I could show everyone back home when we opened our pastel de nata shop downtown, but between the eggs in my hands, and the sugar and water and cinnamon stick and lemon peel, my phone ended up somewhere across the room and the lesson flew past me like Secretariat down the home stretch.
Eventually, I had something that looked like custard, and I scooped it into the pastry and tried to make a nice smooth surface, as Terresa had instructed. I thought I’d done pretty well. Then I glanced up at one of my buddies whose custard was flat as glass, and at the German couple whose custard was also perfect and who smiled and whispered a few words to each other, which I imagine went something like, “Forget the money. Make sure he doesn’t touch our coats.”
And my custard resembled the lunar surface.
“Now we bake!” Terresa exclaimed, doing a little cha-cha.
And we all went to a table and had some snacks and coffee and Porto wine, and eventually, our pastries came out, and we all got to taste what we made. And to be honest, mine wasn’t bad. Then again, when your ingredients are sugar, flour, egg, lemon, cinnamon stick, milk and a puff pastry shell, you can pretty much throw it against the wall and it’ll still be yummy.
What it wasn’t was easy. The sifting, the whisking, the temperature, the time, all of which had to be perfect — lest the pastry sunk into itself — clearly left me in the dirt, and my dreams of a Detroit pastel de nata shop in the dirt with me.
Then again, while “nata” is Portuguese for the creamy custard, “nada” is the word for “nothing.” So if I changed a singled letter, I was right on target.
Pastries of Nothing!
I don’t think I’m gonna be able to sell that.
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates on his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow @mitchalbom on x.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Mitch Albom: My attempt to bring new flavors home didn't go as planned
