HOW FOOD WORKS: An Introduction to Tortes
Playing with baker's ratios to design the perfect torte.
Tortes are a strange thing. I assumed, naturally, it a French invention, but actually, we have the German’s to thank for this genre-bending dessert. The beauty of the torte is in the looseness of its definition, or really, lack thereof. It’s a cake with little constraint, a vague collection of suggestions, daring its maker to discover new ground.
To be a torte, is to be without (or with very little) flour. Instead, our cake finds its structure elsewhere. Nuts, chocolate, eggs, sugar - there is a vacuum of power, and these guys are vying to win it. How you pit them against each other causes shape shifting so seamless, it’s difficult to believe they all came from the same, humble beginnings.
The Breakdown:
Tortes are a dish of preference. Some like them dense and rich, some like them light and airy - you just have to decide what you like.
Because they are so personal, I will attempt to cover as many different options as possible. Starting with a baker’s ratio of butter: sugar: eggs: nuts/chocolate 1:1:1-2:1, we will delve into the role of our ingredients, the importance they play in texture, how altering affects the end product and how changing our ratio gives us room to play!
It’s up to you to discover the ratio you like best - it all depends on how you like your torte.
- The Butter
I start with butter because it isn’t, technically, essential. But, make no mistake, that doesn’t mean it’s absence won’t be felt.
Butter is a fat source, so it’s great for flavour and texture (remember our science of fat breakdown?), but also, for structure. As we know, it’s solid at room temperature, and so massively contributes to our tortes solid stature post-baking. Butter also isn’t 100% fat, ~18% of it is water, which evaporates during cooking, producing steam. This creates gorgeous pockets of moisture throughout our torte, both helping it rise and giving it a lighter, tender body. Thanks to the properties of fat, we owe a lot of our richness and decadence to butter, however, that’s not the only place we can source it.
Well, could we use oil?
Oil also contributes to moistness thanks to its liquid room temperature form, but in a different way. Oil is 100% fat, there are no steam pockets from evaporation, and so we get less aeration and altogether, a more heavy, fragile structure.
Is this a bad thing? Nope. You know i’d only encourage this kind of experimentation. Perhaps though, bolster your foundations a bit and consider upping the number of eggs.
Okay, well what about omitting it altogether?
Tortes like ‘Passover Cakes’ usually do this, and they do it well. How? They compensate. Yes, we can omit, but we have to call our other players off the bench - it’s all about balance. No butter means less moisture, less fat and thus less flavour and less tenderness. We lean further into dense, dry and fragile territory, which isn’t definitely bad, but it has the potential to be. More eggs for moisture and richness, whipping egg whites for aeration and tenderness, added flavour boosters and introducing alternative fat sources are ways we can help rebalance our torte.
So, what do these alternative sources look like?
- The Chocolate
Chocolate, although an ingredient, contains other ingredients. It varies further across chocolates (white, milk, dark). It’s mainly a blend of cocoa solids (cocoa butter and dry cocoa particles) and sugar, with milk and white chocolate also containing milk solids. I think i’ll do a deep dive on chocolate itself in the future because, frankly, it’s a lot.
We’re interested in the cocoa butter (A.K.A. fat) and the sugar components.
To get a true understanding of just how much fat and sugar is present, we want to look at our nutritional label:
Chocolate contributes to the torte very similarly to butter. It, too, is: solid at room temperature, fat containing, a flavour provider. Dark chocolate is firmest at room temperature and has less sugar, reducing the risk of an overly sickly sweet torte and holding up well during the cooking process. As the milk solids increase from milk to white chocolate, the structure weakens, and the solids are more susceptible to burning when cooking. Fat-wise, they’re not too dissimilar, ranging from 25-45%. Sugar wise, the higher the cocoa solids, the lower the sugar (so the darker the chocolate, the less sweet, as you probably already know).
Again, this doesn’t mean you can’t make a white chocolate torte, it just means you have to consider potential troubleshooting issues. I’ll go into this further in TK.
The higher the fat content, the less fat you need from other ingredients. The higher the sugar content, the less sugar you need. If you have a bar of 100g dark chocolate of 40% fat and 15% sugar, your baker’s ratio recompositions to 60g butter: 85g sugar: 1-2 eggs: 100g chocolate. Just keep playing this game until you create something that sounds good to you!
- The Nuts
Nuts are kind of the real OG’s of the torte world. They’re what you’ll find in most classic recipes, and it’s pretty easy to understand why. Not only do you have a plethora of flavour options, colours and smells, but they are, also, a fat source!
But not just fat! Oh no, they also bring protein, carbs and water. See, I told you they were the big guns!
The proteins, once exposed to heat, help form a tender crumb, and the carbs retain moisture, creating a soft and tender structure. The fat content can range from around 50-75%, that’s only 5% less than butter! This contributes richness, flavour and luxurious texture. They create very moist tortes, mimicking a ‘buttery’ sensation, with very distinguished taste profiles. Nuts can also be sweet, reducing the need for 100% sugar.
The nut world is varied - you need to think: How strong is its flavour? How naturally sweet is it? What is its fat content? How finely do I want to grind them (finer grind → moister cohesive crumb)?
Nuts can replace both butter and chocolate, completely. They have more than enough fat and moisture, and can support the structure of the torte with its good friend eggs, easily enough. You should consider increasing your egg ratio as nut oils are liquid at room temperature, unlike butter or chocolate. More eggs helps with firmness, but you’re still left with a tender, delicate torte as opposed to a richer, denser one.
- A Buttery Interlude
Okay so I feel like now’s the time I should address the elephant in the room - why does butter get it’s own place on the mantelpiece when really… its so… replaceable?
This is more of a baker’s ratio thing than anything else.
Butter is our baseline. Baker’s ratios are rooted in historically standardised, classic ingredients. They are intended to be reference points that are clearly measurable and reliable. ‘Chocolate’ or ‘nuts’ is so vague. Look what happened when we addressed chocolate earlier - it prompted a whole other deep dive!
The key goal of this deep-dive is to help achieve confidence and understanding. By learning through butter, you can create with anything.
- The Sugar
Sugar isn’t just for sweetness, it’s a structural player too. Sugar LOVES water, remember? It retains moisture, keeping tortes tender and fresh. More sugar → more moisture → more tender crumb. It also binds with eggs, fats, and any proteins or water present, forming a stable network during baking so when the torte cools, the sugar crystallises and stiffens, resulting in firmness and stability.
Not all sugar crystals are created equal. Different sugars have different structures which can affect the crumb and mouthfeel of the torte. Liquid sugars give denser, moister textures, finer sugars a more tender crumb, and larger sugars tend to mimic the liquid sugar outcomes with a denser, chewier texture (due to their higher water content, e.g. brown sugar is a lot wetter than granulated).
As discussed, it’s already introduced into our little ingredients circle as a byproduct of other ingredients (nuts, chocolate). So, how to decide how much to include?
Sugar is an integral structural component, but it also impacts flavour. Too much sugar can create an overly sweet, unpleasant dessert, that ironically, is at risk of structural collapse from too much moisture. If you don’t have much of a sweet tooth, you can reduce the sugar, but you must substitute with another structural element. Too little sugar can weaken the structure, making our torte overly fragile, crumbly or dense. The torte becomes dry from lack of water retention and also won't last as long. We therefore need to compensate with, you guessed it, eggs.
- The Eggs
I’m sure you’ve noticed a pattern - eggs are our ride or dies. If you make any changes to any other ingredients, chances are, you’ll compensate with eggs.
Eggs are arguably the most important structural component - I am yet to see a no-eggs torte. They are a God’s gift bundle of water, fat, protein and emulsifiers, bringing structural benefits and textural goodness to every torte. Eggs also sort-of go hand-in-hand with sugar, like the two actual best friends in a 4-man friendship.
The beauty of eggs is in their versatility. You can use them whole, but also separately as yolk and white, honing into their special qualities and using them in the best way:
The Meringue Method:
Egg whites contain proteins called ovalbumin which unfold when whipped, creating elastic style structures that are very good at trapping air. If we introduce our sugar whilst the egg whites are still liquid, the sugar dissolves in the water present. It stabilises and strengthens the proteins bonds, creating thick meringue structures, perfect for light and airy tortes. If we introduce the sugar too late, once the meringue is quite developed, it will struggle to dissolve, introducing a grainy texture and a too stiff meringue that’s hard to work with. You can mix the leftover egg yolks into the batter to give richness!
The Emulsion Method:
Egg yolks contain fat and emulsifiers. Sugar dissolves when vigorously mixed in yolks creating a thick and creamy emulsion, brilliant for richness. The emulsion is stable and smooth and great for rich, custard-like tortes. Using a large amount of sugar with a small amount of egg yolks is like fitting a litre of water into a coffee mug - no matter what you do, it won’t all go in. The sugar that doesn’t dissolve will leave a grainy texture and aeration possibilities will be thwarted by the inundation of heavy sugar crystals. You still use the whites here! You can whip them up separately and then fold them in to introduce some aeration in your torte!
The Sabayon Method:
Whole eggs can also be used by whisking vigorously with sugar until thick, pale and creamy. The sugar dissolves slowly, and the proteins and emulsifiers trap small pockets of air, giving a balanced texture. There is risk of the sugar not fully dissolving and the mix being grainy, and the success is also dependent on how much sugar is being used with how many eggs. Just like the emulsion method, how much sugar to eggs you use, matters.
So, what do you do?
I like to avoid using more egg yolks than egg whites in a recipe and vice versa, because I like to avoid waste. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn't, especially if you can find use for the leftovers. You can play with increasing the number of egg whites you’re using in contrast to the egg yolks. Egg whites gives you a light airy structure, so if you’re after a mousse-like torte, this would be a good option. If you want a more custardy, rich and moist torte, you may consider upping the egg yolks instead.
I have tested just whisking whole eggs with sugar, and I know a few recipes that do this. For me, I think if you use this method, you end up with an extremely dense torte with little to no aeration, and so you can get away with it. The texture is so packed and firm that even if your sugar doesn’t fully dissolve, you don’t really notice it. If that’s not what you want, i’d choose one of the other options depending on your final desired texture.
Just remember, bakers ratio + desired final texture + experimenting!
- The Bake
How you bake is wholly dependent on everything else you’ve done up to this point.
There are three main options:
Bain-Marie
Low and Slow
High and Fast
What you should choose depends on the kind of torte you're creating.
Rich custardy tortes, high egg white levels, high milk solid levels, soft-set tortes → go bain-marie.
Chocolate-rich tortes, nut-based tortes, dense and moist tortes → go low and slow.
For intense browning and caramelisation, crisp edges → go high and fast.
To read the recipe with step by step explanations, subscribe to receive ‘TEST KITCHEN’ where we will also go over the comprehensive cheat sheet for this technique, troubleshooting, key details, graphics and science backed flavour pairings.
Happy eating and thanks for reading!
Fiona :)
Any questions, let me know below!
Will definitely be trying the chocolate, ginger and orange torte 🧡 After seeing the video on instagram I’d planned to make it for Mother’s Day - before remembering I’m on a budget and had to use ingredients I already had in the house.
But it will be my next bake, I’ll let you know how it goes!