Thinking about Pie

OK, I’m riffing on a recent post (see below) by a friend, but I found her thoughts with me this afternoon as I made pie dough for this week’s Thanksgiving festivities. As I happily measured and patted the stickiness that I hope to turn into two lovely pumpkin pies, I realized that my pie journey had been a long one and that, while my pastry skills are still just OK (and that I am, in turn, quite OK with OK), both my baking and my life skills have really changed since the dark days of the boxed Jiffy pie crust (baked with love and fun, but zero skill), frozen pie crusts (just yuck), and the gloppy par-baked goo that went right into the trash (looking back, no love for pie or self in that mess).

I have learned that making pie requires achieving some minimal inner peace and an acceptance of oneself. For me, I needed to accept my own imperfections, acknowledge I needed help, ask for that help, and then trust my own hands and instincts to make it happen. At the same time, I had to learn that pie dough is not perfection, a ragged mess might actually be a step in the right direction, mistakes can be fixed, and – at the end of the day – it’s just a pie crust.

Regardless of what experts will tell you about baking being a science (and it normally is), to make a pie crust, you need to surrender yourself to the Pastry Gods, take a breath, and go with what feels right, even if it doesn’t seem so at the time.

Here’s hoping that the lovely round discs in the fridge will turn into something tender and flaky for Thanksgiving.

For much more eloquent recent pie musings than mine:

Zen pie by Love and Onions -
My friend and pie teacher becomes the student.

GIVE THANKS! Caramel Mascarpone Pumpkin Pie by Confections of a (Closet) Master Baker
This will certainly be next year’s pumpkin pie filling attempt. Super-detailed photos and notes on from a professional baker on her version of pie dough take a lot of the mystery out of the process.

Banana Nut Muffins

Long-awaited rainy day. Quiet with a kid off to a birthday party, and here I am avoiding most of the to-do list. Perhaps because of the bananas. A neighbor bought 40 (yes, 4-0, forty) pounds of bananas the other day for $2. We graciously accepted some of her frugal bounty.

Two days later, we've had banana-yogurt smoothies and sautéed honey bananas. And another pound still sat on the kitchen counter, begging to be useful. Well… there’s always the peel, freeze, and forget about them option.

Cool, wet weather and quiet afternoons tend to make me think about baking. For some reason, muffins have been on my mind. And then I thought, OK, muffins are quick and easy.

Presto! What I did with my weekend:

This recipe can be found in the Joy of Cooking as Banana-Nut Muffins. For giggles, I swapped out the AP flour for whole wheat pastry flour and the walnuts for toasted pecans. And since 3 people cannot (should not?) eat a dozen muffins within 24 hours, I used vegetable oil and baked in muffin liners to keep them a moist for at least a day or two. Leftovers will be frozen and, hopefully, not forgotten.

Summer Kuchen

Once again, an abundance of summer fruits called to me and inspired to me to just do something already with them. This time, I had plums, peaches and still more blueberries. Since I have not mastered savory fruit dishes, my mind turned to baking... even with the record-setting 100+ degree heat we’d been suffering.

The cake itself is somewhat closer to a Tortenboden – a tart crust – than an American yellow or pound cake. It’s a bit dry and crusty, relying on the sweet juiciness of the fruit to make it all work. However, calling it cake seems so much more accessible and summery than a torte. You can bake this in a regular cake pan and plunk the fruit right on top of the batter without any need for fancy tart pans and glazes or neatly arranged fruit pieces.

The original version of the recipe called for peaches, but any combination of your favorite summer fruit will do. I tweaked it a bit to soften and sweeten my fruit ahead of baking and to up the nuttiness of the cake. My cake may have been a bit drier than the original recipe, but it worked well. And leftovers became even more moist as the cake absorbed the fruit juices. At the same time, the almond flavor was more pronounced a day later, tasting a little like marzipan. If you don’t have almonds in the pantry, it is fine to use 1 cup of all purpose flour.

Served with a lightly sweetened, loose whipped cream, this is absolutely perfect and harkens back to all kinds of childhood memories of summertime and the endless wait for the grown-ups to decide it was time for Kaffee und Kuchen.

Summer Kuchen
Adapted from The Joy of Cooking’s “Fresh Fruit Kuchen”

You will need:
• A 9” round cake pan and butter to grease it.
• ¾ cup AP flour + ¼ cup ground almonds
• 1 ½ tsp baking powder
• 1/8 tsp salt (1/4 tsp if using kosher salt)
• 1 tsp + a dash of cinnamon
• 8 tbsp (1 stick) of unsalted butter, room temperature
• ¾ cup + 1 tbsp sugar
• 2 eggs, room temperature
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/8 tsp almond extract
• 2 to 2 ½ cups fruit (peeled and sliced if necessary)

Move one oven rack to lower third of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees.

Liberally grease a 9 inch round cake pan.

Combine fruits in a bowl with 1 tbsp sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon. Let macerate while oven heats and butter softens.

Whisk together in one bowl the flour mixture, baking powder, dash of cinnamon, and salt.

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until pale yellow and fluffy. Beat in one egg at a time and then add vanilla and almond extract.

Stir flour mixture into butter/egg mixture until just combined. This will yield a very thick batter. Spread evenly into bottom of prepared cake pan. Top with an even layer of the fruit. Some cake may remain uncovered, which is fine.

Bake about 40 to 45 minutes until top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the cake only comes out clean. Cool before serving.

Berry Good Times Today

Ah, it's still blueberry season! The grocer is practically giving them away, and that has led to blueberry crisps, pies, muffins, cereal toppings, and plain ol' handfuls while passing through the kitchen. Good times.

I never did make that Father's Day berry pie (although the butter was yummy), but I think taking the time to think it through makes up for the lack.

My pie-making is much improved from last summer, and we had a truly lovely blueberry pie last weekend.

See?

This morning, it was some quickly made muffins eaten al fresco. Did you know it takes less than an hour to go from opening a cookbook to eating fresh blueberry muffins? Alas, the butter on hand was store-bought. Can't ever seem to make all the cooking projects happen all at once!

Can she bake cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?

I’m certainly not a young thing and long ago left my mother, but am delighted to report my very first, unassisted pie-baking success.

The backstory: I can cook reasonably well, and pie fillings turn out great, but homemade pie crust has been my Waterloo. The results have not only been unappetizing, but often inedible and sometimes un-bakeable. This has been known as Tania’s Annual Pie Attempt around here and there have, at times, been tears.

This year I sought help. The talented Jen, who demonstrated sourdough bread earlier this year, invited me over to watch/assist her with some pies while our children went forth and played. Heaven – cooking, adult conversation, and my child safely occupied elsewhere. Thanks to Jen, I went home armed with the best blueberry pie ever


...and a round of dough to try baking myself.

For my solo attempt, I went with this peach and crème fraîche pie. Last year’s try resulted in a gloriously peachy and light filling inside of a dense, hard, greasy pie shell. I scooped out the middle and threw out the crust. This year I rolled and chilled and parbaked and… ended with a decent crust that somehow went short. For some reason, I lost the edges and the thing looked more like a very rustic tart. Frustration.

Do you see a crust? I don't.

Weeks passed and we found ourselves prepping for a small dinner party. It’s still peach season and I decided to try again. Braving record-setting high temperatures, my family sweltered at the farmer’s marker for (and I wish I could type out the drawl) “sweet peaches” from West Virginia. Huge, soft, and so juicy-they-can-only-be-eaten-over-the-sink, I felt the need to put them in a pie.

Enter Cook’s Illustrated and their Foolproof Pie Dough and Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Pie and Pastry Bible.

CI, with my tips from Jen, gave me a workable dough. Rose is my new hero and her meticulous, multi-step process for both the crust and the filling (wow – what a filling!), yielded my very first, very good, double-crust peach pie… that disappeared immediately.

Here it is before it vanished:

Happy 3rd!

Not sure where June went, but *I* went on vacation. Now that life is getting back to what constitutes normal in the summer, it's back to housewifery as usual. Ideas on the brain are my need to get the child on some kind of schedule, "emergency dinner," my new obsession with New Mexican food, and the transcendental pie I ate today.



My friend Jen attempted to teach me the art of pie crust. It's possible that I learned nothing -- though there's some pie dough in the fridge waiting for a solitary attempt this week -- but the fun was in the learning and the talking and the total enjoyment of all things food related. And this is some damn good pie. Perfect for the Third of July and Independence Day Eve.

Homemade bread!

Last Thursday, I finally got my act together and attempted a homemade loaf of bread. Recently, someone on We Love DC wrote about baking no-knead bread during our latest blizzard. What struck me was her amendment of some supposedly famous quote about how there are people who make their own bread, and people who don't. The DC blogger added that, there are people who make their own bread, people who don't, and people who make their own pizza dough.

Well, I make my own pizza dough. I always have yeast in the house, and I'd seen and read a lot about this supposedly easy bread recipe that's been making the recipe rounds forever. Like here.

I dug out my Le Creuset, my January 2008 issue of Cooks Illustrated, and got to work.

The initial dough ball, after an 18-hour rise, did not look promising:



But it did look so happy in my favorite red pot, and the house smelled great:



Sadly, we then lost power for the rest of the day and I didn't actually get to taste my lovely bread until the next day, when I had to cobble together dinner with electricity, but no fridge (victim of power surges). It seems I may have over-baked by a couple minutes, despite taking the loaf's internal temperature. Or maybe you really have to eat it that day. The inside, the crumb, was lovely -- airy-yet-dense and with a faint, almost sourdough flavor. The crust was a tad tough in the darkest places though.

I will, however, try again and shave some time off of the baking. And am eagerly looking forward to a possible lesson on bread-that-you-knead from the talented Jen, of Love & Onions.