• Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 241 other subscribers

  • Noshing on

    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

  • Recent Posts

  • Contents

  • Archives

  • Now Reading

  • The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It

  • See also my Book Reviews

  • Copyright 2008-2024Slow Food Fast. All writing and images on this blog unless otherwise attributed or set in quotes are the sole property of Slow Food Fast. Please contact DebbieN via the comments form for permissions before reprinting or reproducing any of the material on this blog.

  • ADS AND AFFILIATE LINKS

  • I may post affiliate links to books and movies that I personally review and recommend. Currently I favor Alibris and Vroman's, our terrific and venerable (now past the century mark!) independent bookstore in Pasadena. Or go to your local library--and make sure to support them with actual donations, not just overdue fines (ahem!), because your state probably has cut their budget and hours. Again.

  • In keeping with the disclaimer below, I DO NOT endorse, profit from, or recommend any medications, health treatments, commercial diet plans, supplements or any other such products.

  • DISCLAIMER

  • SlowFoodFast sometimes addresses general public health topics related to nutrition, heart disease, blood pressure, and diabetes. Because this is a blog with a personal point of view, my health and food politics entries often include my opinions on the trends I see, and I try to be as blatant as possible about that. None of these articles should be construed as specific medical advice for an individual case. I do try to keep to findings from well-vetted research sources and large, well-controlled studies, and I try not to sensationalize the science (though if they actually come up with a real cure for Type I diabetes in the next couple of years, I'm gonna be dancing in the streets with a hat that would put Carmen Miranda to shame. Consider yourself warned).

Halvah update–I think I’ve got it

Posted on January 4, 2013 by DebbieN

Just before we left for Boston (22 degree weather, anyone? anyone?–too much Ferris Bueller on the first week of school break), I revisited the Halvah Conundrum: how to make halvah that has the right texture when no one’s ever described it properly in a recipe. Last time’s attempt, which made use of a food processor, wasn’t too bad but the texture was still crumbly and tough–overworked, most likely.

Then I read a comment on another food site that recommended working the tehina/sugar syrup mixture like fudge by kneading the mixture in one direction as it cooled to get it to the right semicrystalline texture. I’d seen footage of a career fudge maker paddling the mass of chocolate and sugar syrup on a marble slab until it stiffened up, and thought the Syrian halvah manufacturing process (mechanized boxing glove in a vat of tehina and hot syrup) looked like a similar idea. So I thought kneading the mixture might strike the right balance between halvah that came out too limp and oily and the meringue-like stuff I’d produced last time–too aerated, and when pressed together, too tough and crumbly.

So  this time I skipped the food processor for blending the sugar syrup with the tehina and flavorings. I stirred the vanilla and lemon juice and powdered clove into the tehina while the syrup was cooking in the microwave. I’d forgotten to scale down the amount of lemon juice for a smaller amount of tehina–maybe this helped a bit, actually, because adding a small amount of water-based liquid to tehina stiffens it and makes it a bit doughy. Maybe that little bit of extra lemon juice helped give the mixture a start on developing the volume it needs without overworking or drying it out too much?

I stirred the hot, thickened sugar syrup into the tehina mix in thirds using a hand whisk, thinking that maybe not all of the syrup would become overworked if I did it in stages. After all the syrup was in the mixing bowl, I folded the limp oily brown mass (my heart was sinking when I saw this, but I bravely continued) back onto itself several times with a fork, essentially kneading it in the bowl, 10-20 turns, maybe half a minute worth of time, just until it turned a little lighter and stiffer, but not as stiff as meringues. I started with only a third of a pound of tehina, so for a full recipe, it would probably take a bit longer.

Then I pressed it flat into a container with a lid and stuck it in the fridge overnight. The next day I cut into it–I could cut thin slices! and it was almost like deli halvah! It’s still not quite as light and crystalline, it’s still a bit chewier, but it’s definitely closer. Next time: try the egg whites beaten in with the tehina, and then the hot syrup mixed in…

[April 20, 2014: A new question on halvah, with a few updates from me]

David S:

Debbie, I have been down a similar path in trying at times over several years to create halvah like Achva’s (my fave). But it has been textural failure after textural failure. Each time, the result is worth eating and tasty, but that elusive texture…can’t get it. So, I am thinking that the saponaria may be an important detail. The problem is, I have been unable to find it in reasonably small amounts (an ounce or two would prob. last a long time, but I see it for sale only by the 1lb container and it’s not cheap). And, if I did find some, it’s not clear how much should be used–1/4 to 1/2 tsp for a pound of halvah? If you know where I might buy small quantities, please let me know. I live in the San Fran. Bay Area, and usually about anything can be found around here, but saponaria (powder, I presume) is a tough one.

Oh–and the lemon juice: I don’t see that ingredient listed in commercial halvahs. Is it just for flavor, or is it a functional ingredient?

Achva’s ingredients for vanilla halvah: Sesame Seeds, Glucose Syrup, Sugar, Vegetable Fat (Palm), Natural Spice – Saponariae Root, Natural Identical Vanilla.

Btw, I have tried using glucose instead of regular sugar, and no luck. The Achva above is a mix of glucose and sugar. Odd that more fat is added!! It’s not as if sesame paste is a low-fat product to start with. I wonder if this is palm kernel oil, added for its solidity? I don’t recall seeing this ~10 years ago on their label.

Thanks for your detailed blog–it’s reassuring to know others are struggling with this too.

Hi David! Thanks–I’m never sure whether I fall into the “interesting experiment” category of foodieism or the “just plain weird”, but I appreciate it.

I’ve finally managed to find a YouTube video on a Turkish (I think) halvah maker who shows the saponaria root extract mixed in  with the hot syrup first–it makes a very white, thick ribbony foam like Swiss (or Italian) meringue (that’s probably why some halvah recipes I’ve seen use whipped egg whites, come to think of it) or marshmallow. Then they pour a large dollop of that mixture (in the half-gallon or 2-liter range) over a big working vat of tehina that must be 3 or 4 gallons (12-16 liters) and start folding it in with his hand–looks like a real workout for the guy doing it. He has a silicone hot glove on his mixing hand and keeps turning the work bowl as he mixes. It takes about 5-10 minutes for him to incorporate all of it gently and it starts cooling down to thick ribbons of stuff that dissolve back into the mass before the whole thing suddenly starts to look like bread dough.

That said, I’ve also seen a few recipes lately with no saponaria or egg white and that use a blender or food processor and the pictures of the resulting halvah look fine with a lot less work–as did the stuff in “Aromas of Aleppo”, so I think they either found the sweet spot on how long to boil the syrup or they were lucky and someone showed them or they don’t mind if it’s not deli-perfect in texture. Or maybe they’re lying and bought their perfect 3-inch-high slabs from a local deli. (jealous, moi?)

What else–oh. The lemon juice is for flavor, so taste and see if you like it, I suppose. I think it tastes pretty good with the ground clove and the vanilla and keeps it from being too blandly sweet. It’s not detectable as “lemony” unless you double or triple the amount, which I have done just to see if adding a little more juice to the tehina and stirring would stiffen it and give it a little more structure ahead of adding the syrup. Even then, it wasn’t bad. The palm oil is a very inexpensive fat/filler ingredient that’s gaining ground in processed food everywhere, mostly in baked goods but sometimes in spreads as well. I disapprove on principle because it dilutes the tehina flavor, plus it’s high in saturated fat, even though it’s vegetarian. One reason (other than simple interest in playing with my food…) why I wanted to try making it from scratch.

— DebbieN

[December 9, 2013: This question came in too late to post as a comment to this page, but I thought it was worth adding here–DebbieN]

On 2013/11/27
Elena

Hi, Debbie!
I want to try a home-made halva too. and I have all ingredients ( include soapwort), but I would prefer to create some sugar-reduce variation. What do you think – is it possible to reduce quantity of sugar syrup in your recipe?

On 2013/12/9

Hi Elena,
I don’t know–I don’t have instructions for a version with soapwort (I’m impressed that you can get it where you are). I’m still struggling to get the texture of my halvah right even this much later, and I still haven’t tried a version with whipped egg whites folded into the tehina before adding the syrup. Without egg whites or soapwort, just sugar syrup and tehina and flavorings, I wouldn’t try substituting for all the sugar–something tells me you need some sugar there to create the microcrystalline structure. But on the other hand, the Israeli brand Achva does make an artificially sweetened version that sells in our local Armenian grocery alongside their regular halvah, the standard cans of Joyva, and the (to my palate) slightly-too-sweet Cortas and Ziyadi (I think?). So theoretically it’s possible to go lower-sugar.

One way would be just cutting down on the sugar proportion and perhaps cooking the syrup to a slightly higher stage (ie a little beyond soft ball)–though it might seize up when you stir it into the tehina, unless you heated the tehina somewhat before mixing. Some recipes do call for heating the tehina to 120 F, which might keep the hot syrup from “shocking” and seizing up hard. Or else you might cut down a little on sugar syrup for the amount of tehina and add artificial sweetener to the tehina mixture before stirring in the syrup.

With soapwort, you might get more structure with less sugar syrup, so you could probably add artificial sweetener more effectively, but I don’t have a recipe for it and don’t know how to work with it. If it’s not too expensive and you’re willing to risk it or you’ve made halvah successfully before, try reducing the sugar syrup by 1/3 and adding sweetener to the tehina, keeping everything else the same. I would do this for a sample recipe amount, maybe just half a cup of tehina and proportional sugar syrup. Don’t risk a whole pound of tehina and 2 cups of sugar!

One thing I have discovered (yesterday, in fact) is that if the halvah comes out too soft and sticky, like limp caramels, you can put it in a microwaveable bowl, microwave it a minute or two until it just foams up and turns a lighter creamier color, and then beat air into it a few times with a fork until it just begins to stiffen like mashed potatoes. Unfortunately mine seized up and turned to sandy crumbs just after that point, but it still came out closer to right once I packed it together and let it cool.

Best of luck–DebbieN

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Halvah update–I think I’ve got it

Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Posted on December 23, 2012 by DebbieN

Doesn’t that sound like the perfect title for an equal-opportunity holiday-themed kiddie book? Too bad my daughter’s too old for it now, and so are my nephews. Plus no one under 30 knows how to pronounce rugelach anymore. The “ch” always makes for Adam Sandler jokes because it’s so obviously Hard to Pronounce and even more obviously Not English–you use your throat to talk? Gross joke alert! The young and self-conscious have even taken to respelling Chanukah Hanukkah, just to avoid getting laughed at by their friends. Or their parents.

You may be asking what on earth rugelach have to do with Chanukah–and I’m a little late discoursing about Chanukah this week, since it just ended. However, let me warn you, they’re entirely relevant to the holiday treats vs. self-control dilemma.

Rugelach rolls slashed, baked and ready to be cut apart

Forming long rolls, slashing them partway before baking and then slicing them after is a quicker and easier way to form rugelach, especially with a very soft, delicate and hard-to-handle dough. It also lets the dough bake into crisp layers without letting the jam leak out. These two rolls are half the batch.

Fresh cheese (cream cheese, farmer’s or pot cheese) and sour cream are symbolic of Chanukah just as much as frying latkes or sufganiyot (doughnuts) in olive oil. During the war with the Assyrian Greeks in ca. 165 BCE that led to the rededication of the Temple (the event that sparked Chanukah), a Jewish woman named Judith invited the Assyrian Greek general Holofernes into her tent for what he thought was dinner and a movie–and she served him rich cheesecake (sometimes the story says “cheese pancakes”–maybe blintzes? who knows) to make him thirsty and then offered him a lot of undiluted wine. After that, the tryptophan got to him as she’d hoped (they didn’t have turkey back then) and he fell asleep. She chopped off his head (possibly to save the Jews, probably to stop the snoring) and Famous Western Painters from Rubens to Klimt have been painting her portrait ever since.

Puts another spin on the supposed tameness of homestyle baking, don’t it? Also serves as a warning on the more-is-more approach to pigging out. But old-style rugelach are designed to prevent both tameness and pigging out.

Now rugelach–the real thing–are what Pop Tarts never aspired to be (see Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop Tart joke in development at the New York Times online). That is, rugelach are self-limiting (an anti-commercial value) not because there are only two in the package but because they are serious pastry and taste like it.

The real thing is rich and flavorful enough that a few bites, one or two rugelach, are plenty even though they’re small. And before you ask why, it’s the use of cream cheese in the dough; the  tang makes the flavor seem a lot richer with a little less fat than an all-butter pastry dough. And it makes the dietary badness self-limiting: you really know when you’ve had enough.

One or two–delightful, blissful, they don’t do it like this anymore, it’s really Old School, my grandmother used to make these, how do you get them so flaky? Three–these are delicious, these are so evil, you’ve got to try the chocolate apricot one, I’ve already had so many! Four–klunk, groan (head hits knees in queasy stupor). It never fails.

Despite the Americanization and factory production of rugelach (even Starbucks sells a tame untangy version of them occasionally, or they used to), rugelach are a Jewish bakery specialty with a very simple dough that gives unbelievably rich, flaky, almost strudel-like results if you do it right. And luckily for me, it’s easy to do right. But it’s still too dangerous to do often.

And yet I’ve found myself making several batches this “holiday season”–one for my daughter’s piano recital, using the classic (and palming off the leftovers on the hosts so I wouldn’t have them at home), one for an experimental “lite” version that almost, but not quite, worked. It had flake, it lacked character. Sort of like the bland Americanized versions. What can I tell you? The lack of tang can’t be made up with salt and sugar–the tang is really what does it, which is why I went back to the classic and won’t revisit it again until next year.

…Although a woman in my congregation says she has a recipe that uses cottage cheese instead of cream cheese and is really good, I am choosing not to believe her.

Note on the dietary badness factor: If you go with either of these doughs and the fillings as directed in the recipe (i.e., you don’t double the sugar or use very sugary jam), a single rugelach comes out with about 6 grams total fat and 6 grams carbohydrate, about 65 calories, and about 20 mg. sodium. The degree of saturated fat depends on which recipe you use.

Classic Rugelach Dough (makes 44-48)

The classic recipe for the dough is:

  • 2 sticks (8 oz., 1/2 lb.) unsalted butter
  • an 8 oz package cream cheese
  • 2 c. flour

So basically equal and large amounts of butter and cream cheese. Soften them both and beat them together (a food processor is fine). Put the blended fats in a big mixing bowl and fold in the flour very gently with a wooden spoon, a couple of forks or the like, and don’t mix too thoroughly,  just barely enough for everything to come together as a very soft crumbly dough you can press into a ball. Put the dough in a plastic bag and pat it into a disk, divide it into four parts with a knife, and chill in the fridge or freezer about an hour until it’s firm enough to roll out. Easy, right?

Some people decorate the basic recipe with extra salt or sugar or, G-d help us, vanilla (Gale Gand puts in all three, why I don’t know). But really, the basic is the best. It gives you a nonsweet, very savory base for a sweet filling, and it’s anything but boring. It does NOT need jazzing up any more than French or Danish puff pastry does. And it builds character to make a pastry that doesn’t bow to middle-American excess. We have plenty of our own excess, thank you very much.

But cream cheese AND butter. A pound of fats for only two cups of flour, and almost all of it’s saturated. Yikes.

So I got to thinking (it had to happen sometime last week). Could I make the dough a little less rich and still great? Subbing in a reduced-fat labaneh from Karoun Dairies for the cream cheese? Maybe–but there’d be some water in it. Might not flake right. Hmm. Try it anyway, report back. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, Dairy, Desserts, history, holiday cooking, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Homemade Halvah

Posted on September 18, 2012 by DebbieN
Sesame halvah with pistachios

A little trickier than it looks–this one is nearly right and tastes good, but it was stiffer and more crumbly than professional halvah once it cooled. Next time!

I first tasted halvah at the age of six while visiting my cousins, who lived in my town but had been to Israel the year before. One afternoon my aunt shaved off a very thin sliver from this mysterious loaf of sandy light-brown stuff and handed to me with the caution, “Only a little piece at a time. It’s very rich.” Which it was, but the feathery impossible texture melted on my tongue and I wanted more.  When I got home from the visit, my father laughed when I asked him what my aunt had meant by “rich”–and explained that it meant “heavy”. That made no sense either–the tiny sliver was light and delicate. Then he said that once when he was twelve he’d eaten an entire pound of halvah in a single sitting and been extremely sorry afterward, because it sat in his stomach like a lead brick for hours…

I mention these things not just because they’re true of eating halvah, but they’re a good indication of the balance you need to achieve if you ever try making it.

Last year at Rosh Hashanah I made stuffed eggplants and onions with tamarind sauce from Poopa Dweck’s Aromas of Aleppo. I’ve enjoyed them enough to make the onions repeatedly over the past year, and I’ve also enjoyed the idea of making a new food for the New Year. Dweck’s book happens to have a halvah recipe, and the pictures look right, and the recipe looks really simple.

Well…the ingredients are incredibly simple–tehina, sugar, water, lemon juice, flavorings like a little vanilla, clove and cinnamon, maybe some pistachios or sliced almonds to mix in. The steps–boil sugar with a bit of water until it reaches 240°F on a candy thermometer. I don’t have one but she adds, helpfully, that it’s until the syrup coats the back of a spoon and is at the soft ball stage–shades of childhood reading through the Joy of Cooking‘s mysterious and dangerous section on candy recipes. Ahem! Boil the syrup and pour it hot over the tehina in the food processor, add the flavorings and blend. Take out the mass of halvah and press it into a pan to cool, then cut into cubes or slices and store at room temperature for a week or the refrigerator for up to 6 months…not that it will last that long.

Simple, right? So simple. I can probably microwave the syrup in about 2 minutes instead of simmering it for 20 on the stove, at least if I stir every 20-30 seconds and keep checking it…with the food processor handy, it’s like a 10-minute recipe if that! Simple.

The trouble with making halvah at home, as I discovered last week, three times, is that it’s not so simple. The first time I tried a proportionate miniature test version, with half a cup of tehina and about 3/8 cup of sugar, all measured and calculated down to the gram. The syrup cooked in a minute in the microwave and things were going really well…except the mixture seized up hard and crumbly the instant I mixed the syrup and tehina with a fork. And it was a bit too sweet and bland. Did something go wrong with the proportions? Did it need more of the oily tehina to make it flexible?

The second time I made it, the syrup was a little looser and the mixture turned a flat oily dark putty color and never really solidified past a thick paste. Nearly the same exact proportions, better taste (less bland, less cloying, more sesame). But I had made a soft sesame version of peanut butter fudge. You could slice it in squares, but it would sag like soft caramel.

So clearly it’s not that simple. I went to the web, thinking, of course someone will know what I’m doing wrong. And maybe someone does, but he or she is clearly not on the web expounding on the finer points of making halvah.

Oh, there are dissertations on halvah, but most of them are talking about the wide variety of desserts around the world that go by the same name–kinds that are based on wheat flour, carrots, sunflower seeds, and other main ingredients to mix with the syrup and pat into a pan.

Most of the (relatively few) tehina-based recipes are identical to Dweck’s, a pound of tehina, two cups of sugar, 1/3 cup of water, a teaspoon of lemon juice, a pinch of clove and cinnamon, maybe a spoonful of vanilla.

But the pictures show (and sometimes the rueful comments do too) that it’s not the ingredients at fault when the texture’s off. It’s the technique, which is usually missing from the recipe.

The videos I found on YouTube specifically for making tehina-based halvah didn’t really help. Iraqi halvah workers boiling syrup in an old–well, it kind of looks like a very worn-out steel bowl set over a trash can fire in an abandoned stairwell, and they’re stirring away with a wooden paddle before pouring in the tehina, which turns into curds that they then paddle and knead until they’re happy with it, but you can’t really see what it is that makes the difference.

Then there’s the Syrian halvah factory demonstration posted by Middle Eastern chef and cookbook author Anissa Helou–much cleaner, with an official halvah-kneading machine that Willy Wonka might have been proud of, pummeling the tehina/syrup mixture with what looks like a mechanical boxing glove on a stick, until it looks like hummus that’s Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, nuts | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on Homemade Halvah

Pistachio madness two ways

Posted on August 4, 2012 by DebbieN

(plus a handful of other frozen yogurt ideas)

Homemade pistachio frozen yogurt, very low carb

It’s over 90 degrees most of the day in Pasadena, and I’ve gotten tired of looking at the limited selection of Dreyer’s (Edy’s east of the Rockies), Breyers, Haagen Daz, and Private Selection flavors with my daughter. It’s starting to get tedious, and they’ve dropped many of the classics for the cheapest possible quality candy-plus-ersatz-vanilla (note: their real vanillas are better). The forgotten classics were better-tasting, less dependent on goo and sweetened brown wax parading as chocolate or (if salted) peanut butter.

No supermarket ice cream brand in the non-superpremium range today offers rum raisin or pistachio worth considering anymore. It’s easy enough to doctor your own version with storebought vanilla ice cream and the aforementioned rum and raisins, but pistachio?

Pistachio used to be a standard ice cream flavor, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just getting old? Naah. Even in the ’70s when I was a kid, most of the “pistachio” ice cream around was already fake. I want the real thing, not the artificially green, mostly-vanilla-with-a-tinge-of-synthetic-almond kind.

And I want it low-fat for me and my husband and low-carb for my daughter (and us too, why not?) And I want it to taste delicious despite all that. Tall order? Actually, it’s easier than you’d think.

David Lebovitz has a Sicilian pistachio paste-based gelato in The Perfect Scoop, and he blogged about it a couple of years ago as well. He made it sound delicious, but also expensive and hard to find the ingredients for. Not that I’m against a trip to Sicily, except in July when it’s about as searing as LA (been there, done that, got the sunburn and the Fellini moments combined with heat exhaustion).

About the same time, a local gelateria owner in my area took much the same position on the utter superiority of Sicilian pistachios versus California ones for an interview in the LA Times. Which is lovely if you have a good source of Sicilian pistachios or pistachio paste at a decent price, but what if you don’t?

Most of the home-brew pistachio ice cream recipes I’ve seen in magazines, blogs and cookbooks call for adding significant amounts of heavy cream. Or else they involve large amounts of sugar. Or both. Yes, those recipes will give ice cream-like results, but they’re completely offtrack for what I need.

In my universe, good taste on a hot day shouldn’t mean losing your svelte, your cool or your wallet.

The nuts themselves are okay–pistachios, like most nuts and seeds, are very low carb and though high in calories from total fat, most of that is unsaturated. If I can keep the rest of the ingredients low fat and low carb and the stuff still tastes good, I’ll have it. Right?

So okay. I’ve been playing around with California pistachios and–not gelato, that requires making an egg-based custard and blending it with flavorings. Done it once or twice, and it worked, but it’s more work than I want to do most days. Or it used to be. Nowadays I’ve got the microwave moxie to make custard without so much work, but it’s still not what I want today. I want easy.

Frozen yogurt made with real yogurt is too tart to work with anything much but fruit unless you mix in some milk–and then it’s icier and freezes harder.

However, this summer I’ve been playing around with fat-free Greek yogurt as the base for a couple of different ices in small quantities. Greek yogurt varies a bit in nutritional stats from brand to brand, and it’s expensive, which is why I took so long to try it out. But the cheapest all-real (no gelatin) stuff–Trader Joe’s O% fat plain version–while still twice as expensive as the regular plain nonfat yogurt ($5 vs. $2.50 a quart), has considerably less carb, maybe only 7 grams of carb per cup as opposed to 17 for regular. And it has about twice the protein–22 grams per cup. It’s a lot thicker and less acidic, so I’m assuming they drained out a lot of the carb in the whey. And it makes really easy frozen yogurts that taste like something and aren’t overwhelmingly tart.

Just mix in your flavoring of choice (preferably not too watery) with some sugar, and you can still-freeze it within an hour or two. If you think the tang needs to be tamed further, a little milk mixed in works okay and it stays thick enough to freeze fairly gracefully.

The texture is never going to be like ice cream, not entirely. It still mixes up pretty hard and a little icy if you still-freeze it, but once you’ve got it thawed out to the point where you can dig out a serving, it tastes good and changes to a creamy texture as you eat it, something like khulfi. Higher-fat yogurt would break the iciness up a bit but would defeat my purpose of lowering the saturated fat to something I can handle.

And the heavy fats and sugars mask any delicate flavorings. Think Italian gelato (the real kind you get on the street in Florence, not the overpriced stuff you get in pints in the supermarket here) and you know that a lighter base allows you things like rose or ricotta or apricot or kiwi, or hazelnut, or four different highly refined grades of chocolate. If you want to taste anything delicate in your ice cream, you have to get the fats and sugars down enough not to overwhelm it.

Not that I’m entirely subtle. My favorite icier-textured frogurt for when it’s broiling out is mint–Greek yogurt, a couple of drops of mint extract, if that’s strong enough without tasting like postage stamps, and a tablespoon or so of sugar. Divvy it up into 2-4 paper cups or popsicle makers (small is okay for this), freeze. On a searingly hot day it’s pretty good, intensely flavored and refreshing, and its popsicle-style texture is fine with me.

For something like coffee frogurt, I really do want a creamier texture if I can get it. I finally figured I should just brew a little bit of triple-strength coffee so I can mix just a few spoonfuls into a cup of Greek yogurt, maybe with a few spoonfuls of milk, and still get strong enough flavor.

A spoonful or two of alcohol-based flavorings like rum, amaretto, even just vanilla extract can soften the hard-freeze effect, since the alcohol freezing point is lower than that for water.

Or you can add something protein or starch to the mix–egg custards and cornstarch are the usual route for gelati and standard commercial ice cream, but silken tofu and nonfat powdered dry milk also work to break up the ice crystals. Greek yogurt is providing most of the protein here and little water, and the carb is a lot less than for the powdered dry milk.

The last thing on my list, and it sounds either weird or completely obvious, is to add a fat–but I want something unsaturated. Oil? Yuck (though I have seen some olive oil ice creams flavored with basil or the like). But what about nut butters? Those, don’t laugh too hard, work pretty well and give the frozen yogurt a richness that feels like ice cream, only without big saturated fats or modifiers or xanthan gum or corn syrup solids or whatever. Plus they’re interesting flavors.

Halvah: I started with my trusty jar of tehina–sesame paste. It’s got almost all its fat in polyunsaturated form. A tablespoon in a cup of Greek yogurt, plus a tablespoon of sugar, stir, freeze, dig out a chunk–not so hard! And the flavor–kind of like frozen halvah. Very rich, though. Maybe I could get away with less tehina or more yogurt?

Chocolate halvah: I tried a chocolate version–also not bad–by adding two tablespoons of cocoa powder and an additional spoonful of sugar to the tehina/yogurt mix. Pretty good, but the tehina taste was definitely still there alongside the chocolate. Like chocolate marble halvah. You have to be a fan.

Peanut butter? Probably more Americans would like it than the tehina version. Go easy on the peanut butter; a good-tasting mix I once made with half a cup got way, way way too rich very quickly once it was frozen. Stick with a tablespoon or so per cup of yogurt. I’d use natural peanuts-only peanut butter, preferably the crunchy one, for the purest taste, limit the sugar and add a pinch of salt.

But really. I started out wanting pistachio, and that’s where I’m still going with this. Because I ended up with two, count ’em TWO, really good, really different variations on pistachio, and both of them were really easy, really low in saturated fat, and REALLY low-carb. And actively delicious, which is definitely the point.

California pistachios may not be the Sicilian ideal, but they taste pretty good for what they are.  TJ’s sells 8 oz of roasted unsalted ones for about 5 bucks. Not exactly cheap. Still, the shelling’s been done, and for a pint of finished frogurt, you only need an ounce of pistachios. Will that be enough to taste like something? Oh, yes. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pistachio madness two ways

Baking with “Inside the Jewish Bakery”

Posted on June 20, 2012 by DebbieN

A few weeks ago I reviewed Stanley Ginsberg and Norman Berg’s new book, “Inside the Jewish Bakery” for my local Jewish book festival committee by testing out the key recipe: bagels. Ginsberg and Berg give the inside scoop on what bakeries do and don’t do to make things work better than you usually can at home. Along the way–and the most interesting part for me–they give a huge helping of Jewish Bakery history. Not just nostalgia (“Weren’t those marble ryes worth wrestling over?”) but the fascinating cultural developments that gave rise to such things the Bagel Maker’s Union (local 338 [number corrected thanks to Stan Ginsberg]) in Brooklyn, and they’d break your legs if you tried to make nonunion bagels, at least through the 1960s.

Ginsberg’s the son of a baking family and Berg is a professional baker; between them they tell the story of Ashkenazi baking and the inside story of what it’s like to start work at 10 pm and head for home around 7 in the morning, all the while giving what turn out to be great technical baking notes.

And yet the recipes themselves are full of errors–and yes, this is the print edition we’re talking about, not an advance reader’s copy. The authors have a 6-page correction sheet (errata) up on the book’s web page, so if you’re going to get to it and try it out–and why not, if you’re ambitious about baking–check it out carefully against the recipe in the book, read everything over very carefully first, and then get to it in a way that won’t send you scurrying for specialty ingredients. NOTE: per Stan Ginsberg (see comments below) the 2nd edition’s recipes have been corrected so things should be easier.

If you can read between the lines and have some experience with bread under your belt, you’ll find the recipes do work (once corrected). My bagels came out very well, with that crunchy crust and dense, chewy bite all of us ex-New York types have missed for decades out here in California (actually, I’m posting this from Montreal, where the bagels are lighter and sweet? have to try, probably won’t love them).

I do have pictures to post (once I can get home and edit them down) of the bagels proofing slowly overnight in the fridge and one of the last remaining survivors–my daughter still had it in her bookbag when we came east this week. Ten days, obviously not still fresh, but not spoiled either. As tough as the dough it came from (which, again with the asides, is very tough compared with regular pizza or challah doughs, and you have to knead it by hand unless you have the dough hook of the century. If not, you’ll develop the right hook of the century.)

So here are my notes to the local Challah Club, which was interested in trying out some of the other recipes. Good luck and eat nice!

Notes for the Challah Club members up for a challenge:

1. Read all the instructions several times first and double-check the errata sheets. It’s 6 pages of corrections for the whole book and it’s up at the Inside the Jewish Bakery web site under a top menu link on the right (Errata). Hopefully we can get the second edition in soon.

The book web site also has lots of info, interviews, links to other related stuff.

Also check notes on special ingredients in the front for unfamiliar names–diastatic malt in the bagels and elsewhere is defined up front; it’s just malt. I think they get a little technical on flour grades–they’re tied in with an aggressively technical bakers web site/forum (NY Bakers, you don’t expect them to be laidback, do you? but most of it’s just futzing around with professional stuff). Chernushka seed is nigella seed–available here at the Armenian groceries. And then do whatever makes best common sense and doesn’t have a huge cash layout just for one loaf!

2. The recipes in this book are weighable on a food scale in grams, which is how I did the bagels (just this once, just to see if it needed me to be that nerdy). Some of the flours are technical grades beyond what you can easily get in the grocery store; you can mix flours to get the right consistency. For example, bread flour is 13% protein, but I added a teaspoon of vital wheat gluten to bring it up to the 14% protein specification for the bagels, and for something that really needed stretch, like rye, maybe, I would have added a little more. Don’t know that you really need to, but if you’re gonna be nerdy, a food scale and a calculator are handy tools.

3. If you go for the pastries, some have a mix of butter and shortening-plus-butter-flavoring. I’m not a shortening fan; I’m just not; I prefer butter or margarine. The laminated doughs add these things in stages, so read the errata pages and double-check the recipe instructions for how much fat to put into the pastry dough when. Gets confusing occasionally.

4. One thing that’s not in the corrections pages: watch the salt. You do not need as much as they throw in for the breads–not for flavor, not for texture. The bagels I made with only half the salt in the recipe because the original would have been 400-500 mg. of sodium per bagel, which is getting up into Campbell’s Tomato Soup territory (or half a South Beach Diet frozen microwaveable “lunch”). And they tasted fine without it and did most of the right things without me having to join the bagel-makers’ union.

Filed under: baking, books, breads, cooking, Desserts, history, holiday cooking | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Lightening up homemade scones

Posted on May 22, 2012 by DebbieN

Blackberry scones for brunch

I’ve been wanting to post my favorite scone recipe for some time, but it seems to me that most food blogs start out with good intentions and end up maxing out on the desserts-and-starches end of the food spectrum.

The reason is pretty simple: if you’re a food blogger,  a baking recipe and a pretty picture (or any picture of an aggressively-frosted cupcake) will never put you wrong, even if the real result tastes kind of blah. I mean, cupcakes? Isn’t that what Duncan Hines is for? But if you do feature cupcakes, somebody’s sure to repost it or call it awesome, particularly if you figure out how to add bacon to it. Somehow people just don’t flock to posts about green beans in droves unless you’re redoing the Thanksgiving-straight-from-the-can classic, complete with canned fried onions.

There are way too many variations for every kind of baked good, none with a clear and permanent advantage, and people take them all literally (see under, my New Year’s apple pie insecurities).

So as I say, I’ve been reluctant to put up too many baking posts. Scones, though they’re not exactly the staff of life, are very easy to make and actually taste best when you make them from scratch–much better than buying them in a store and definitely not at your local Starbucks. The question I have is whether it’s a good idea to do it very often–I usually don’t, even on the weekend, but partly that’s because I live in southern California and heating the oven for more than five minutes in my little galley kitchen is often a Very Bad Idea. The other reason is that I keep remembering something Valerie Harper once said (maybe in the role of Rhoda Morgenstern; can’t remember): “I don’t know why I bother to eat this piece of chocolate cake. I should just apply it directly to my hips.”

Most quick breads (i.e., raised with baking soda or powder, or beaten egg whites, not yeast) do fine in a microwave as long as you don’t need them to brown. So lemon-poppyseed cake is okay, as is gingerbread. Scones, which to my mind require a deep and crunchy crust, need a regular oven to do well, but I make the sacrifice (90-degree weather makes it a genuine sacrifice) once in a while on Sunday mornings, because they taste terrific and they’re not exactly rocket science to make.

So if they’re that easy, should I really be posting about them–haven’t you already seen too many wide-eyed, “Look, Ma, I made SCONES!” kinds of posts?

Let’s face it. You can make great scones in a food processor from a very short list of ingredients for cheap, in about half an hour including baking time, and flavor them simply or exotically. Fruit or chocolate chips or chiles and herbs and cheese–all optional. I stick with berries and turbinado sugar, which makes the crust crunchy and glittery. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, breads, breakfast, cooking, DASH Diet, Desserts, Food Magazines, frugality, haute cuisine, history, nutrition, Revised recipes, shopping | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lightening up homemade scones

The heady scent of new-crop oranges

Posted on May 1, 2012 by DebbieN

Orange peel in syrup with orange blossom flavor

I’ve posted on making impromptu microwaved marmalade before. It works beautifully–5 minutes total!–with sliced kumquats, but I haven’t had as much success with standard navel orange peel–until now. This week my local Trader Joe’s had big bags of organic oranges and when I brought one home I discovered something I’ve never come across before.

It must be the new crop, I think. I don’t have a great sense of smell out here in Los Angeles, but even I can tell something’s really different about these oranges. Southern California is specialty-citrus country, with five or six varieties of tangerines parading through the grocery stores and farmers’ markets all winter long, and beautiful, strange “Buddha’s hand” citrons appearing in December. With all that going on, not to mention the blood oranges and pomelos (which I actually don’t like) and cara caras and key limes and ugli fruit (sumo tangerines, huge and bumpy) and so on and so on, you’d think that ordinary navel oranges would come bottom of the exotica scale. Even if they are organic.

The flesh of these oranges was pretty good but not really remarkable–I actually like them a little tangier and more acidic. But the peel! In addition to the usual bitter-aromatic orange peel scent, the oranges all smelled strongly of orange blossom, even after washing them twice. I didn’t know oranges could smell like orange blossom. The peel even tasted like orange blossom water.

So of course I decided I had to take advantage of this oddity by trying the old microwave marmalade trick and making candied orange peel with them.

Like rose water, orange blossom water or essence often seems to me as though it would be better suited to cosmetics than food flavoring. A little is exotic and mysteriously elegant; a little too much, which could be the difference of a couple of drops, can be distinctly soapy.  The essence is sold in tiny opaque blue French bottles in upscale markets like Whole Foods for several dollars apiece, but it’s also sold in 12-oz bottles for 2-3 bucks at my local Armenian grocery, presumably because most of the customers use it so much more often in all kinds of fillo or almond- or pistachio-based desserts.

But here I was with orange-blossom-scented oranges, the native article, organic no less. If they were awful as candied peel or marmalade, at least the microwave method meant I wasn’t going to be wasting tons of time or effort, and only a little sugar. So I washed two oranges well, took the outside layer of the peel off with a sharp knife and sliced it into thin shreds.

I find that skinning the navel oranges with a sharp knife and taking only a little of the white pith with the peel is better than peeling first with my fingers and then shredding the whole peel with tons of pith attached–somehow they cook through better in the microwave method, absorb the syrup better, and gel a bit better as marmalade.

So anyway–I poured a bit of water on the shreds in a soup bowl, covered the bowl with a saucer and microwaved a minute. The water I poured off was greenish yellow and smelled like orange blossom–tasted like it too.  But the peel still smelled like it as well, so not all was lost. I covered the shreds with about 1/3 c. or so granulated sugar, drizzled on a little water to wet it down and squeezed half a lemon over it all. Covered the bowl with a saucer and microwaved about 4-5 minutes. Very heady scent and beautiful flavor, and somehow not soapy, thank goodness. Might have the lemon juice to thank for that, actually.

The shreds sat in their syrup in a covered container most of the day (for me it was forgetting all about it for a couple of hours while letting it cool, but I’ve discovered that it’s also standard marmalade-making practice that helps the syrup gel; who knew?)

The bonus question, of course, is how does it go with chocolate? (that should almost always be my bonus question)

Answer: knockout with dark chocolate. Also very good on toast as marmalade. Something to savor, and the syrup, if I don’t finish it along with the shreds, might go to flavor some almond-paste fillo fingers later this week. Because with something this good, it just seems right to be decadent in small, appreciative doses.

What good is a recipe for this marmalade, though, if you can’t stumble on orange-blossom-scented oranges of your own? I suspect it’s kind of an accidental find, but the fact that orange blossom tastes so good with actual orange peel means that you could make candied orange peel or marmalade and add a drop or two–no more!–of orange blossom to the peel and syrup once they’re already cooked. Don’t forget the lemon juice or a small shake of citric acid (sour salt) to help the preserves last in the fridge. I think the bit of acidity definitely cuts the possibility of soapiness.

On a fresher, lower-carb/lower-cal note, a light (LIGHT!) sprinkling of orange blossom water goes very well on orange slices you intend to use on green salads. One I sometimes make for parties: sprinkle cross-wise slices of several oranges with a tiny bit of orange blossom water. Let them sit a few minutes, then arrange the orange slices on a bed of oil-and-vinegar-dressed romaine and other greens on a large platter, and distribute thinly sliced red onion, red bell pepper, basil and Greek pitted olives  over it all.

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, Odd food, sauces and condiments | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The heady scent of new-crop oranges

Whif? Whaf? The Wonka of breathable food faces FDA review

Posted on February 21, 2012 by DebbieN

It looks like a sleek, avant garde  lipstick or  a purse-sized cologne atomizer–one designed by Halston or Calvin Klein. Atomizer is the right word. Only these AeroShot canisters, which got their start at Harvard’s The Laboratory Art/Science project under David Edwards and became available in the US last fall, are packing “breathable caffeine” (plus a couple of B vitamins).

The previous model, aka “le Whif”, packs “breathable” chocolate powder. It was a moderate success in Paris, where Edwards’ Bauhaus-like other lab center (named Le Laboratoire) produced and promoted the experimental chocolate inhalers as an aesthetic experience at celebrity events, and in London, where its spinoff company Breathable Foods now holds court.

Where did this strange, possibly ludicrous idea come from, that it’s a better aesthetic experience to inhale a shpritz of caffeine (please note: flavorless though with a kick, and definitely a drug-I-have-worked-with-in-the-lab-because-it-blocks-G-protein-coupled-receptors) than drink a long, hot cup of intense coffee while reading this blog and contemplate the degree to which your barista still favors you by regarding the temperature and the decoration in the steamed milk foam served on top? Why is it better to puff a little chocolate-flavored powder on your tongue than eat actual chocolate? Somehow, I don’t think the “calorie-free” argument really plays into the decision very strongly, so what’s driving this?

Do we not still have taste buds? Do we not long to extend our coffee break as far from our cubicles as it will stretch? Do we really want our hearts to suddenly kick into overdrive after we have to get back to the office, just when we’re stuck behind the counter, attempting to explain that glitch in the irate customer’s bill? For that matter, do we really want to ingest B vitamins with our caffeine? Or figure out which recycling bin the little plastic aerosolizer goes in when it runs out? Will the aerosolized flavors or food components even still be interesting if we have a stuffy nose?

Do we want to miss out on the gustatory satisfaction of real food?

In the public demos for Le Whif, (according to Edwards’ book, anyway) the French surprisingly enough didn’t mind the fact that many of the chocolate inhalers didn’t work well, or that they started coughing whenever the chocolate powder went the wrong way. They didn’t mind being used as impromptu guinea pigs–or perhaps realize that they were–despite the fact that these products were being tested informally and some of them demonstrated the adverse health risks right away, and that just possibly breathing chocolate-flavored particulates into your lungs might not be all that smart, particularly if you have asthma.

These things obviously didn’t bother the French too much. The packaging was chic, the concept ultramodern, and the activation gestures analogous enough to lighting up a (now-forbidden) cigarette with one’s coffee at a sidewalk café table. And, so the company promised, it was a calorie-free chocolate experience.

Even more surprisingly, it didn’t really matter what kind or quality of chocolate was in the little gadgets, or how it actually tasted in comparison with ordinary solid chocolate. This was closer to participating in Modern Art, or at least in fashion’s idea of modern art. Like a visit to the now-closed El Bulli, which paired some dishes with a side beaker of aromatic vapor, only much less expensive, disposable, and with a simple popular flavor everyone understands. Molecular gastronomy for the common man. Or woman.

Americans of my generation–which also happens to be Edwards’–are a little less sure than the French about the chic value of shpritzing odd substances onto one’s tongue, much less as a high-class cultural or intellectual activity. Our references include tacky mouth spray breath fresheners (made fun of in numerous movies and tv shows over the decades), Bic lighters, Pez dispensers, and asthma inhalers. Kind of low on chic.

So Breathable Foods found the right marketing paradigm–“buzz”–for its target audience:  college students cramming at exam time, athletes who want that Continue reading →

Filed under: books, Desserts, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, haute cuisine, Odd food, Oddities, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Paula Deen and the diet that bites you back

Posted on January 18, 2012 by DebbieN

This week’s “revelation” that Paula Deen, “the Butter Queen” is now a Type II diabetic was a surprise to nearly nobody. Deen, who revealed a harrowing backstory in her memoir of a bootstrapped career in catering, has enjoyed a surprising rise to fame on television. Two weeks ago, following in Emeril Lagasse’s footsteps, she appeared as Grand Marshal for the Rose Parade right here in Pasadena.

Of course, her otherwise ordinary “Southern Cooking” has been exaggerated out of all recognition with extra excess butter and sugar and mayonnaise, and so for years now cads like Anthony Bourdain have called her a scourge on the culinary scene (well, actually, he called her a lot worse than that, but he’s Anthony Bourdain. I’m paraphrasing politely, even though I kind of agree, at least foodwise).

With the revelation that she’s Type II, which everyone knows and fears due to their own increasing girth, Deen is bound to be the butt of predictable jokes this week and next, or until the next big Kardashian “revelation” that newspaper readers apparently care deeply about, or at least they do according to the reality TV networks footing the ad bills. (Even the New York Times has wasted column inches on this kind of drivel this year. Journalistic standards are dropping all over the place, I tell ya.)

But tell the truth, y’all: she ain’t the only one responsible. Not by a long shot. Read any “major” chef’s cookbooks and magazine offerings, other than perhaps those of Nobu, who deals mainly in raw seafood unadorned by carbs or noticeable layers of fat, and you’ll quickly realize that MOST of them exaggerate the salt, sugar and fat content of their dishes well beyond reason. Very few of them deal out plain vegetables on the plate. Very few deal out meats or fish without big sauces.

The other big, big feature stories on food in the New York Times this week:

1. Mark Bittman doing a quasi-deep bankruptcy commentary on Hostess that manages to recount his entire childhood consumption of Twinkies and co. in loving, fine-grained detail. He still attempts to sound self-righteous about it by the end because the ingredients include “ultra-processed flour”.

2. David Tanis of Chez Panisse, waxing lyrical about French lentils (du Puy or Die) as a salad with vinaigrette, hard-boiled eggs (so far, so good), some lettuce and….big fatty slabs of pork belly on top. Five or six of them per plate.

3. “The Miracle of Bo Ssam”–which turns out to be David Chang of Momofuku’s recipe for pork shoulder slathered in salt and brown sugar–twice–and cooked down for six hours in the oven. Caramelized barbecue. In fact, “crack” barbecue, to match Momofuku Milk Bar’s world-famous (to bloggers, anyway) “crack” pie made with most of the same ingredients.

Now people. With all of that going on, with Thomas Keller still boiling his vegetables in brine and poaching his lobster bits in butter, with the Culinary Institute of America instructing its naive young students to salt, salt some more, and salt yet again to achieve that perfect degree of salting in each dish (Coronaries ‘R’ Us), and with Congress sucking its collective thumb about local schools’ move this year to exclude french fries and pizza from the “vegetable” categories in their cafeterias—–

Does anyone really think that Paula Deen is NOT a woman of her time?

She’s nowhere near the worst–she’s just not as fashionable as all the tatted-up young bucks who get picked for Top Chef. She’s also not dishy, like Nigella Lawson, whose cookbooks, which started out about 10-15 years ago emphasizing lighter fare like Vietnamese salads with chiles, have also drifted drastically in the direction of high-calorie “indulgence” foods–some of them utter unmitigated goo-fests (avocado, mayo, roquefort? peanut butter, corn syrup, marshmallow fluff, chocolate bars? puff-pastry chicken pot pies-for-one?). Lawson makes the national news, at least in the UK, when she comes back out in public looking svelte again after puffing up too far past the point where male reviewers are still drooling. Will her next book of recipes slim down commensurately?

Unlike the more fashionable TV chefs on her network, Paula Deen is middle-aged and looks it. She’s fat, she’s gray though beautifully coiffed, she’s politely made up and decently dressed–no orange signature clogs–and she smiles. Maybe a little dippily, but if you didn’t know who she was, Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Magazines, Food Politics, Food TV, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Paula Deen and the diet that bites you back

What do you make on New Year’s Morning?

Posted on January 2, 2012 by DebbieN

Apple pie for New Year's Day

If you’re me–as I was, this morning, and will be until I can find someone better and clearly cooler to be–you make pie to take for a brunch at the house where a childhood friend is visiting. We had a great visit at her mother-in-law’s and my daughter got to meet my friend’s kids and trade rolled eyes while us uncool parents hung out and swapped tales of child-raising woe and pride–all the usual things.

But this morning–there’s no denying it–was a little rough. I got up about two hours later than I’d hoped to, after worrying much of last night about what kind of fool was I to offer to bring apple pie for 15 when I’d never made an actual apple pie before, just pumpkin pie and various apple cobblers–which probably wouldn’t add up to the same thing. And my friend and her husband are the “accomplished cook” sort of couple that makes such a gambit even riskier. Sort of like going to that 30th class reunion, only crossed with a cook-off. I’m not southern enough to enjoy the prospect very gracefully.

So at 9 a.m. I was up, cranky, and snarling (effectively, as it turns out) at my nearest and dearest that if they wanted breakfast they were on their own; I had pie to figure out and only about 2 hours or so to do it in before we had to leave, and maybe I could be convinced to brew coffee after the pies were in the oven, but until then they were cordially invited to seek out the Starbucks and leave me to my fate. Which was about a pound of flour, 3 1/2 sticks of butter, 3/4 cup of sugar, some cinnamon and cloves and 11 huge Granny Smith apples.

I think I made more dough than I’ve ever made before in one recipe–double crust for two pies. Only other double-crust pie I’ve ever made was the medieval tart for my daughter’s class a month or so ago (and I was panicked enough that she had to remind me that it had worked out fine, so what was the big deal?).

When you scale up like that, will your recipe still work? will it be too tough or uneven? too dry? too stretchy? will it roll out right? –too much worrying for one morning before benefit of caffeine, I’ll tell you that.

I had actually checked out about 5 different baking books to compare notes on dough and apples and how much sugar for how many apples–and on and on. You will say–correctly–that I probably shouldn’t have bothered. Apple pie has got to be one of the big basics, and despite the fact that every one of the books had about the same ratios, none of them were exactly alike, and they all looked fine.

I don’t usually get like this, and if it had been an apple crisp, I certainly wouldn’t have worried about any recipes at all. But pie. Pie is a standard, and apple pie even more of a standard. Everyone knows what it’s supposed to look and taste like. It’s the only food Americans really get French about.

There’s nothing to do about that, except to take the chance and pick your friends wisely, so they’ll be thrilled you brought a homemade pie or two. Which is what I did. And it turned out much better than I had any right to expect. So if you’ve never tried it, and you actually like apple pie–this is not bad. Not bad at all.

The only other hidden wisdom in this post is how to schlep your pies, still hot, across Los Angeles at noon on New Year’s Day. Think Priority Mail ™–the Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, cooking, Desserts, haute cuisine, holiday cooking | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »