When we mentioned using our pastry brush to clean our coffee grinder, we called it a "rarely-used" kitchen tool. But the more we thought about it, the more we realize how often this little paintbrush comes in handy!
Besides brushing the coffee grinds out of all the nooks and crannies in our grinder, here are a few more ways our pastry brush gets used:
• Basting Meats - We don't actually own a turkey baster, so we use this brush instead. The bristles do a great job of soaking up pan juices and distributing them over the roasting meat.
• Adding Glazes - Along those same lines, a pastry brush is our must-have tool for brushing richly flavored glazes over foods right at the end of cooking - be it ribs, baked tofu, or Thanksgiving turkey!
• Working with Sugar - We keep a pastry brush and a little bowl of water handy whenever we're boiling sugar to make any kind of candy. We use it to brush down the sides of the pan so sugar crystals don't form that might keep the sugar from melting properly.
• Brushing Butter - We like brushing the tops of dinner rolls and pies with a little melted butter or egg-wash before putting them in the oven to give the crust a lovely golden color. A pastry brush helps us get an even layer with no drips.
•Soaking Cakes with Syrup - Some cakes, like fruit cake and pound cake, are improved by saturating them with flavored syrup after baking. Once again, a pastry brush is the right tool for the job.
Maybe we don't use our pastry brush every day, but it definitely deserves a place in our drawers. Look for brushes with real bristles (that look like a paint brush). We've tried silicone brushes, but they don't hold the liquid nearly as well or coat the food as evenly.
What other ways do you use your pastry brush?
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I'm not a barbecue fan so I use mine almost exclusively for brushing butter, on puff pastry or over the tops of biscuits. It's also handy to get the every little bit of lemon zest out of the zester.
I have a silicone pastry brush (dishwasher safe!), and I usually use it to brush melted butter onto a chicken before I roast it.
Oh, brilliant point on the lemon zester application!
I also have a silicone brush precisely because I can put it in the dishwasher--I *hated* trying to wash the butter or oil out of a regular pastry brush by hand. I use it a lot more than I ever would have expected--many of the uses mentioned above, and also for spreading oil on a grill pan and brushing melted butter on my waffle iron.
Every pastry brush I've ever used has always shed their bristles. Do the silicone brushes spread evenly? I may go that way.
@GreatFriend - in my experience, the silicone ones don't spread as well as the non-silicone ones, so I have both: silicone for messy jobs where easy cleanup is the priority, and a few non-silicone ones that are task-specific and therefore don't need to be cleaned that often/thoroughly, e.g. one that is always used for cleaning out the coffee grinder.
I love making chicken-stuffed wantons, and always use a pastry brush to "paint" water on the inner edges of the wanton wrappers so they'll stick together nicely.
i just made the switch from the traditional pastry brush to the silicone one and i have to say "what have i been waiting for?" i haven't found an experience where the silicone one worked better than the traditional one.
My traditional pastry brush shed it's bristles. It's very difficult to safely pluck a bristle out of a pan of bubbling caramel. And no amount of washing ever seemed to convince me that the bristles were not slightly rancid. I'll admit that silicone does not spread as well as the traditional brush, but for me it's a fair trade for convenience and cleanliness.
I've never really taken to the two different silicone brushes I have but I keep them around since they won't melt (or burn) if used in hot pans. As for the bristle brushes, they're cheap enough, so I buy a few of them and write what they're for on the handle with a sharpie (ie. "pastry only" etc.). For some applications they really are best. Love the zester and grinder cleaning ideas!