MK Unigroup article

Canelé: How Leftover Egg Yolks Became a Hit Pastry

09 Mar 2021

Written by: MK Unigroup team and managementSupplying, planning, installing and servicing professional bakery and food machinery in Thailand for more than 20 yearsAbout the team

Canelé: How Leftover Egg Yolks Became a Hit Pastry

What Is a Canelé?

The canelé's full name is canelé de Bordeaux, as it is the signature pastry of Bordeaux, a French city famous for its vineyards and wine production. Interestingly, this pastry was born from food waste in the Bordeaux winemaking process of old. Egg whites were used to clarify the wine, leaving the yolks as surplus. The winemakers donated the yolks to nuns at a convent in the city, and the canelé was born there in the 15th century, or possibly the 18th century, with leftover egg yolks as its key ingredient.

The recipe therefore combines egg yolks with milk, wheat flour, sugar, vanilla and rum, which give the pastry its distinctive aroma. The batter is poured into copper moulds and baked until the outside is crisp and almost burnt, giving the canelé the unique shape it has had ever since. It is a time-consuming bake, which gives it its crisp outside and soft inside. The canelés were given to the poor or sold to raise money for charity. By the 20th century, the canelé had become a famous pastry made by professional pastry chefs through the generations, and it is now easy to find throughout France.

The Canelé's Journey

The canelé has been popular across France for centuries, but the real excitement came more recently, when French pastry houses such as Ladurée, Fauchon and Pierre Hermé created new flavours. Japan, which has embraced French pastry culture, also gave rise to a specialist shop called CANELÉ du JAPON, a famous Osaka shop that sells only canelés. This sparked a wave of change, with creative flavours beyond vanilla, such as grilled corn, sakura, yuzu, chestnut and pumpkin, and the canelé's popularity in Japan soared.

In Thailand, specialist canelé shops have begun to appear, though the flavours are not yet very varied. Most are the original flavour, but basic, easy-to-enjoy flavours such as chocolate, green tea and Earl Grey are available for first-timers who want to give canelé a try.

What Makes a Good Canelé?

A thin, crisp outer shell with a soft, moist inside.
For the original flavour, the distinctive aroma of vanilla and rum.
If a shop's canelé is chewy, the shell isn't crisp and there's no vanilla or rum aroma, you might suspect, on the negative side, that old stock has been re-baked for sale. On the positive side, it may simply be a special house recipe, for example using brown sugar, which gives a softer, less crisp shell than canelé made with regular sugar.