Pavlova quest part V

A long time between pavlova posts, but as I've changed techniques quite a lot in the last year or so, I thought I should make some notes!

The biggest change is to use the same initial technique as used in swiss buttercream to get the sugar dissolved in the egg white, that is, to use a double boiler to gently heat the egg whites and beat in the sugar by hand until the temperature reaches around 70 degrees Celsius. this is a sure fire way of making sure all the sugar is dissolved, meaning that the mix can be whisked at full speed. I havent done a comparison to really compare if this affects the final volume of the result, but it does give a beautifully stiff mix quite easily. Of course heating the mix has the advantage of basically pasteurising the eggs too! 

The rest of the recipe is unchanged, with the sugar to egg white ratio still being 1:1.65

I've had pretty good success with this technique, getting well risen pavlovas with none of the possible under cooking problems I had before (oozing syrup) but still some cracking.

Some sites prefer to use a long slow bake rather than an initial high heat, so that's what this trial is about. Previously I've always had the interior marshmallow part shrink, so there's a gap at the top of the pavlova, indicating that it was cooked for too long (water evaporates, shrinking the marshmallow). Temperatures higher than 100C are likely to make the pav crack, but the exterior doesn't brown. I'd really like to get a snowy white pav, so I'm going to try a long slow cook at 90C for around 2 hours.

I'm also going to use my probe thermometer - we're aiming for 80C in the middle. As per this site, I can always give it a quick hot blast again after the initial baking if I really want to brown the exterior.

So here's the latest trial notes:

• I used ~240g of egg whites to 390g of caster sugar
• After whisking egg whites and all of the sugar over a double boiler, beat on a stand mixer (max speed 8 after slowly increasing speed from 2 over the first 5 mins, for a total of 10 minutes (exactly)
• Add vinegar (1 tsp) and cornflour (1tsp/4 eggwhites) as normal
• Despite being a big pav (~6-7 extra large egg whites), it was about the same height as I would normally use, but a bit broader at ~23cm diameter
• Preheat oven to 90C. I've recently added an oven thermometer which confirms my oven temp is pretty much what it says on the dial, albeit with some hot spots
• Place probe thermometer in the pav. A bit tricky as the pav isnt really solid enough when raw to hold it above the sheet pan, but I sort of jerry rigged it
• Bake on 2nd lowest shelf (the pav is then in the middle of the oven) for approx 120 mins

And how did it turn out?

The pav as baked, with holes from probe thermometer

And voila!

Some notes:

• nice shape and pale colour, with a little cracking, but not too badly (better than previously)
• the marshmallow has shrunk away from the crisp crust quite a bit, indicating the pav was cooked for too long
• there is clear/yellowish syrup leaking from the base, which also suggests the pav may have been cooked too long (when the marshmallow shrinks, it squeezes out water)
• the temp never really got above 75-77C, and the egg whites should be above 80C to be fully cooked and stable. It reached this temp at about 60-70mins, and then never really got any higher. I suspect this might be because the foam is such a good insulator, its hard to make it rise without a higher oven temp

Next steps...

• try a marginally higher temp of 100C, but a shorter cook time to try to get the middle to come up to over 80C without resulting in later weeping