The polka was born as a popular dance that adapted the waltz so that ordinary people could have fun dancing without the enchantment of the nobles. Basically, it introduced a more lively rhythm that invited you to twist and jump without rhyme or reason, like those caused by listening to the start of the playful Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka composed by Johann Strauss Jr. The polka alters the track and fills it with air, of people jumping, pumping oxygen from the legs to the head, making whirlpools, even going crazy, and perhaps that is why it is extremely happy. The pastry chef Ángel Blanco was right at the beginning of the last century when he chose the Polish dance to name the cake that would make him famous: thin sheets of puff pastry covered with a layer of royal icing.
Puff pastry, like polka, is also air, joy, and a flutter of pleasure; an aristocratic-looking delight. One of those products that confer ancestry to a pastry shop because they need a mathematical adjustment. A cake built with infinite patience for its swelling with the heat and its subsequent perfect disintegration in the mouth, but remaining whole in the hands. Puff pastry is a pastry-and-oven crescendo that, like Strauss's dance, quickens the appetite and elicits a final burst of drums and cymbals. Trades that make the public stand up.
However, polka, let's talk about dancing or handmade puff pastry, seems to belong to another era. "This is over," Juan Blanco solemnly announces in the workshop that his grandfather opened in 1898. Really? It's hard to believe as you ask with your mouth full, looking for another delicate polka in the box, which always falls short. Almond puff pastry cakes, puff pastry torrijas, puff pastry popcorn, cocadas, volovanes and a hundred cakes parade by your side, everything that the skill of the Blanco masters is dispatching. People queue at the door, watching dozens of sweet specialties as he approaches. Why should such a festival end? "The problem is that now there are no apprentices," laments Juan, who tells how he got into flour when he was still in school. “I always wanted to be a confectioner.But now the kids don't want to ”.
The puff pastry, blessed puff pastry. DAVID REMARTÍNEZ
The White Confectionery of Torrelavega is history, not only because of its antiquity or because of the invention of its signature cake, but also because it has given this Cantabrian city a hallmark. Torrelavega is puff pastry thanks to the Blanco family, whose business served as a school for many pastry chefs who later opened their own businesses and made Torrelavega synonymous with pastry crafts. Grandfather Ángel was the pioneer, the first to prepare an exceptional puff pastry and the first to buy a cold room, after discovering ingenuity at the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona in 1929, when preserving butter in summer was an odyssey. Although his grandson Juan insists that puff pastry does not keep any secrets, this fragile and ethereal dough needs two of the most scarce ingredients for its correct preparation:time and patience. The fate of our times is that we don't have time. We are always late, we are always chased by the rush, the days hit us.
The puff pastry requires flour, water, butter, and all the calm in the world to go stretching the dough and folding it on itself. With each fold, you puff the cake, like a nineteenth-century dress that rotates to the rhythm of Strauss, turning a flat plate into a building of delicate plants, brittle but sustained, thanks to the precise finishing of an oven that has to slowly heat the dough so long folded. “It has to be 160 degrees. You put your hand in the oven, and if it has mordant, it is ready ”, says Julián Argumosa, the master pastry chef, who has been in Blanco for fifty years and who, despite his disconcerting advice, keeps both hands. Juan entered the workshop as a teenager, with just 14 years old, like José González Bengoechea, who has been in the confectionery for 42 consecutive years.No one has known another trade or other pastry shop. They move calmly and without pause, without looking up from what they are doing when they speak to you, handling cakes and pastries with the ease of a woman in labor when carrying babies. There is no time to follow them with the camera while they cover with cream, bathe in chocolate, cut or decorate.
Almedra cakes like this one parade through the pastry shop every day. WHITE CONFECTIONERY
In Blanco you see the workshop through a glass window behind the counter. From which you choose the cake or tart, you observe how they enter the oven, how they are prepared, the aromas that are released around. What you see at the entrance is hungry and also what you sense in the background. It is one of those places where you feel especially young. In 120 years, only the machines have changed: where before it was kneaded by hand, with a roller, now simple sheeting machines are used so as not to end up with ground arms. The butter still barely passes through the chamber, since from the one that arrives, it joins the table. The preparation continues to require hours, early rises, starting at five in the morning to work, and exceptional ingredients because the simple intervention of the pastry chef does not allow to hide any defect. And here they are not tolerated.Apart from a centuries-old experience, Blanco is distinguished by another unusual quality in this 21st century: everything is prepared at home, nothing is bought, be it doughs, fillings, toppings, decorations or creams. They do not know the term prefabricated, nor the colorants or preservatives. If something shines, it has an egg. If it tastes like strawberry, bring strawberries. The buttercream is superb, an Antarctic sculpture in a metal bowl. The spun egg and the angel hair are real. There is only cardboard in the boxes.an Antarctic sculpture in a metal bowl. The spun egg and the angel hair are real. There is only cardboard in the boxes.an Antarctic sculpture in a metal bowl. The spun egg and the angel hair are real. There is only cardboard in the boxes.
Juan sees his job dying, despite the fact that “if you learn to be a confectioner, you have a job for life, anywhere”. However, his pessimism spoils him two advantages: his nephew José has joined the workforce, and his daughters, María and Lara, have created a company, Maestros del Hojaldre, to market family products beyond Cantabria. Since last year's confinement, they serve some cakes online, the ones that best withstand the transfer, those with slightly moist ingredients. Moisture is the worst enemy of puff pastry, so they only dispatch in the peninsula how much can arrive at your house in perfect condition, ready to dance. “A palm tree, an almond tree and a polka are super well preserved,” says María. "But we make them every day," says maestro Julián with pride.
Juan with his nephew Jose behind. DAVID REMARTÍNEZ
María and her sister studied which boxes were suitable for the shipments and launched themselves, with a dozen specialties in the online menu of the many that they sell in their confectionery: “We have a maximum of thirty shipments a day. And we have very happy customers, ”he says about the addiction generated by his centennial puff pastry. They produce only what they can with their familiar formulas. “They called us from a cafeteria to order 400 cakes a month and we said no, because we can't do more. We want to continue working on this product because it is what differentiates us ”. You can't buy handmade polkas in a supermarket. “The problem is that now all of Amazon is going to sell it,” Juan adds. This product costs what it costs because it contains high quality raw material. And that is paid. When I started, the raw materials chapter was one more,now it is the main one ”.
However, consumption has changed: "Before, cakes were bought by the dozen, then by half a dozen, now they ask for one or two." Not only that: we don't know what the cakes are called either, we choose them with the index finger, pointing behind the glass:
Give me that one and that one
, they are still a pionono and a petisús, but now you see. You eat them without knowing their name or their history, and it's a shame, because the food is appreciated twice as much when you know the origin and the effort behind it. Among the many old and new cakes, in Blanco the "Nuri", a foam sponge cake with whipped butter cream, topped with chocolate and hazelnuts, especially triumphs. Like puff pastry, it melts in your mouth. Good baking is air, and it is applauded with licked fingers.
Apart from “using a good product and taking all the breaks you need, the secret of puff pastry is to get up early and that's it,” Juan insists.
Deep down, he enjoys making fun of himself in front of his daughters, focused on the business and their future.
The imposture of the father falls when I ask the age:
"How old are you, Juan?"
-79.
-No!
It's a lie, he's 73. He tells everyone that he has more so they can tell him he's fine!
—Shorts his daughter Maria.
And Juan smirks, obviously satisfied.
In the Product of the month section we tell the story of edibles that excite us because of their quality, their taste and the talent of the people who make them. No producer has given us money, jewelry or Mercadona gift vouchers for the publication of these articles.
