This Changes Everything: DIY Pastry Kits

Photo credit: Foodcollection, StockFood

Any lover of Google docs, index cards, and color-coded file cabinets will be over the moon for this brilliant tip from Ronna Welsh, a cooking instructor at Brooklyn, New York’s Purple Kale Kitchenworks.

Welsh blew our collective minds this week with her dry-mix pastry prep kit—the DIY version of the pricey, often ugly “cookie kits" we’ve spied in a few knickknack-festooned, potpourri-packed shops.

“A kit-making session is a warm-weather activity that prepares you for cooler, nesting months,” Welsh writes. So spend one end-of-summer Saturday busting open every big bag of flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt you’ve got. Measure and sift together those dry ingredients based on your favorite recipes—one for apple pie, a second for biscuits, and yet a third for cookies—and package each one in a zip-top plastic bag. Label those suckers with their corresponding recipes (here’s the moment to use those aforementioned index cards!) and store them in the freezer, “where they take up less shelf space than balls of raw dough.” Truth!

So set aside the time and turn your kitchen into packaging center this weekend. Come October and November, all you’ll have to do is add eggs, oil, water and whatever fruit or vegetable looks good at the market.

This sort of thinking makes sense coming from a trained chef whose motto includes a line about “scaling down the systems of professional production to the home, distilling important general strategies of organization and suggestions for stocking a top-quality, versatile pantry.”

Yeah. What she said.