Pineapple Tarts for CNY 2012

The Chinese New Year is just round the corner, so it's time for us to pool together for our yearly pineapple tart-making get-together.

In former years, I was able to participate full-time in this activity. This year, however, with both kids around, especially Curious Christopher, most of my time was spent in the role of "baby-sitter". Or, more appropriately, as my friend Jack puts it, "parenting". Yes, to the typical 2-year old, it must appear very exciting and irresistible to see everyone "playing with some gooey stuff", that appears like Play-Doh. So, while my wife was busy organizing the production, I was quite busy keeping Christopher away from the kitchen table / workstation, until he got bored / tired and went off to the living room to look for Barney on the TV screen.

This year, Charmaine was old enough to help. Sort off. In order to best optimize our available human resources and equipment based on the manufacturing process flow, we set up a pipe line as follows:-

1. Roll pineapple jam into ~1cm diameter balls
2. Load piping
3. Extrude dough and roll jam into correct package
4. Glaze with egg yolk and load to oven
5. Packing

My mother-in-law had already taken care of the raw material preparation - namely, the pineapple jam itself. If I'm not mistaken, we used up 18 or so pineapples. The dough was mixed today, to start of production. Only the butter needed some thawing time at room temperature, until it was soft enough to knead with the rest of the ingredients.

Equipment-wise, we had 4 plastic pipings (not sure what's the actual name for this) - 2 smaller ones which came with plungers, and 2 larger ones which you use your thumb instead. From our experience last year, baking was the bottleneck operation, so we set up a total of 3 ovens to balance our production loading. This year, kneading the dough was done by hand, as opposed to using an automated breadmaker. Perhaps given the large amount of dough, it would have required several rounds through the small breadmaker, so by hand was probably the fastest way. Just have to ensure the mixture was homogeneous....

The 1st and 2nd operations were relatively easy, thus the junior members (including Charmaine) were assigned to this. Just like playing "masak-masak", except this was for real. Rolling the jam into balls was not difficult, but it was essential to keep the ball sizes consistent. There was some drift in this process, so after a while, there was an upward trend in tart size, until I mentioned it and reset the size back to small again.... :)

Loading the extrusion tools left the downstream process to concentrate on consistently dispensing the dough out in an even manner. A steady but firm pressure had to be applied to squeeze the dough out the shaped end of the extruder, and at the same time it had to be moved backwards. The speed has to be the same. Move backwards too slow, and the dough becomes wavy as it pushes up against itself. Move backwards too fast, and the dough breaks in midspan.

The first batch of dough was quite viscous. My niece had a hard time squeezing with her fingers until she was forced to take a break to rest and recuperate. To offset this, my wife modified the formulation for the 2nd batch. Unfortunately, I think that she over-shot the target, as the new batch ended up with very low viscosity that marginally passed our lower spec limit, in terms of usability. With the dough now extra soft, and resembling something I choose not to to describe here (trust me, it will spoil your appetite! :) ), it was now easier to extrude. Which meant that my niece was quickly back on the workforce. But now, it was also harder to get a consistent flow of dough without breaking. Additionally, the soft dough was now easily deformed and we had to take extra precaution against "mis-handling".

Even with enough trays serving as buffers, the 3 ovens were running at 100% capacity as we managed to fill up the trays for loading as fast as the previous trays were coming out of the oven. As the ovens were not calibrated, the temperature and timer served merely as a guide. My sister-in-law, between glazing and packing, had to "eye-ball" the tarts baking in the ovens to ensure they were loaded out once they turned a delicious golden-brown, and not go beyond to resemble the stuff roads are made off. Speaking of glazing, this is done using the egg-yolks only, so before-hand, some effort has to be spent separating the yolks from the egg whites. The glazing is applies with a brush, just a bit on the top. This is what gives the baked tarts the delicious color and appearance.

With our combined effort, we managed to complete production (which started around midday) by evening. Originally, we allocated 2 days, but we finished ahead of schedule. With the ovens cleared of any backlog, we switched them over to baking cashew nuts instead.

Well, at the end of the day, we were really tired but happy to have completed our objective. Working together was a good social event, as the family got to spend some quality time together in the process. Meantime, Charmaine was already showing interest in helping out in the kitchen. By next year, I think she can be "promoted" to handle more complex tasks. As for Christopher, still young this year and still like a "Mat Kacau". Next year I hope that he will better behaved, either to help or to stay clear (either suits me fine!).

Haha! I just realized. Reading what I wrote above, I think I have been working in a factory for far too long!