Yesterday while I was making pies, Renée made the off-hand comment that I should do a video with some tips. The next thing I knew she was standing in front of me with her phone asking me questions. In light of this video ambush, I thought I might elaborate further in the tips I shared in the video.

Making great pie crust takes practice, but it’s not impossible. If you haven’t tried it, here are some tips that may prove useful.

1. As with other cooking, mise en place is essential. Be sure to have everything prepped, measured, and ready to go before you begin.

2. After you’ve prepped and measured, chill EVERYTHING, including dry ingredients and your pie plates or tins. Flaky pie crust comes from well-distributed pockets of fat in the dough. Working with cold ingredients keeps some of the fat in solid little chunks which melt when heated and act as steam pockets for the moisture that evaporates from the dough leaving a layered, flaky crust. If you’re using shortening, you may have to put in in the freezer for a few minutes; it just doesn’t get hard enough in the refrigerator.

3. Work quickly. This is why mise en place is your friend. It eliminates wasted time. The warmer your dough gets, the less flaky it will be.

4. Don’t over mix. You want to coat the fat with the flour, not blend them together like you would a cookie dough. When cutting the fat in to the dry ingredients you can use a food processor (pulse, don’t let it run!), a pastry cutter, or a fork. As soon as you have pea-sized pieces and a mealy texture, stop! You’re ready to add the moisture that will bind the dough.

5. Add the liquid slowly and stop sooner than you think you should. Add your liquid one tablespoon at a time. You may not use all the liquid specified in the recipe, and that’s okay! Each batch is different. At this point, rely on your eyes, not the recipe. If you’ve used a food processor to mix the flour and fat, this is a good time to dump the mixture into a mixing bowl and do the rest by hand. Use a fork to mix; don’t mash or stir. Mashing or stirring blends the fat and flour together so that is can’t absorb enough water, which means that little or no steam can form to expand the layers. If your dough crumbles as you try to gather it into a ball, add more water a few drops at a time until it becomes more cohesive.

6. Chill the dough at least 30 minutes. Most recipes call for forming the dough into a disk before chilling. I prefer to roll it out inside of a 64 ounce Zip-lock bag or two sheets of parchment before chilling. It makes the dough easier to work with after it’s chilled. Plus, then all you have to do is place it in the pan and form the edges.

7. Blind bake the crust. If your recipe calls for a blind or per-baked crust, as many custard pie recipes do, put your dough-lined pie plate in the freezer for about 10 minutes. This prevents the crust from slipping down the sides while baking. When the crust is chilled, line the pie crust with parchment paper, wax paper, or aluminum foil. Fill at least two-thirds full with pie weights – dry beans, rice, or stainless-steel pie weights. Bake with weights for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. Remove from oven, cool a few minutes and remove the pie weights. Poke small holes in the bottom of the pie crust with a fork and return to oven (without the weights) and cook for an additional 10 minutes. Be sure to cool it completely before filling. You may need to tent the edges of the pie with aluminum foil when you bake your pie, to keep the edges from burning.

What are your pie making secrets?

Fruitful inspiration?

If Beethoven were a baker–and who knows, he may have been–I think this is the banana bread he would have made. In fact, I’ll bet he made himself some banana bread one day and while enjoying a nice warm, buttered slice and pondering the wonderfulness that is the banana, recognized what a fun word banana is to say and began to playfully say the word over and over which culminated in the famous four note opening of the 5th Symphony. I have absolutely no facts to support this claim. It’s just fun to think about.  However, I will defend this as the best banana bread recipe I know. The fact that it’s my mom’s and I grew up eating this bread notwithstanding. You can try to argue for your favorite banana bread recipe, but unless it’s your mom’s, I’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Admittedly, there is nothing unique about this recipe. There are thousands of banana bread recipes to be had. But like other simple recipes, the art is in the execution.

Here are the players:

Allegro con brio

The first movement opens with the two-note motif of sugar and shortening. Cream them until smooth and fluffy. This is a critical step in this and many other recipes. In the creaming method you cream the sugar into the fat, add the eggs, then the liquids and dry ingredients. But what does it mean, exactly? Creaming simply means to mix sugar and fat together until you get a light, fluffy texture. Creaming is usually done with butter or shortening and white sugar, but you can also cream using brown sugar,  lard or even margarine (although never recommended). It takes about 10 minutes by hand; less with a mixer. Sounds simple, and it is, but there are a few things you need to know to get it right.

Why Is It Important to Cream Butter and Sugar Correctly?

When fat and sugar are creamed, the rough sugar crystals cut into the fat, creating air bubbles in the batter. These air bubbles serve as a concentration point for leavening gases and steam.

Incorrectly creaming the fat and sugar could have adverse effects on the final results. When fat and sugar are creamed, the rough sugar crystals cut into the fat, creating air bubbles in the batter. These air bubbles serve as a concentration point for leavening gases and steam. If the fat and sugar are creamed well, the entrapped air is more evenly dispersed among the fat leading to more even rising and a light, airy texture. It’s like yeast making bread rise.

Leaveners like baking powder and baking soda act to  enlarge the air bubbles that already exist in the batter; they do not create more.  Leaveners release carbon dioxide when moistened and heated which gravitates to the air bubbles and expands them like tiny balloons causing a cake or cookie to rise. Uneven bubble distribution causes one side to rise more than the other or puffing  then falling resulting in a flat cake, bread, or cookie. During creaming, sugar particles are coated with a layer of fat. When the batter or dough piece warms in the oven, the fat layer melts away enabling water to mix with the sugar and go into solution. As the sugar changes from solid to liquid, it causes the batter or dough to flow or spread.

Shortening or lard creates and holds air bubbles the best but butter is good, too, and also adds flavor. Margarine doesn’t hold air as effectively, while vegetable oil doesn’t at all. And make sure to use room temperature butter, shortening, or lard. It the fat is too hot or too cold it will not form air bubble as well.

Sugar crystal size also affects creaming; the smaller the air bubbles formed during mixing, the more fine and dense the texture. Superfine sugar is often used in delicate cake recipes where a fine texture is desired. The sugar crystals are super small and create tinier air bubbles than when using regular crystalline sugar.

Creaming Using a Mixer

Slice the shortening into small chunks and put it into the mixing bowl. Turn the mixer on low until the shortening gets soft then turn it up to medium for about a minute. When the blades get clogged, scrape them off and start again. Mix until the shortening is smooth. Then, add the sugar a little at a time, pouring it into the side of the mixing bowl. Stop periodically to scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl. Keep mixing until it becomes light and fluffy, similar in texture to whipped cream, but more dense.

Creaming By Hand

Creaming by hand is the traditional way to do it, but it can be tiring. Remember, machines are your friends. The process is the same as above. Begin with room temperature shortening cut into small chunks. Beat it with a wooden spoon until is becomes soft. Add the sugar a little at a time and keep mixing until the light fluffy texture is achieved.

How do you know for sure when it is creamed correctly? Here are some things to look for:

• When the mixer starts to form ridges, it is a sign that it is done.
• When the color becomes a pale cream (if using butter).
• When it starts sticking to the sides of the bowl.

Andante con molto

Emulsification occurs when one liquid is evenly dispersed into another. Examples of emulsification include vinaigrette, mayonnaise, and milk. Mixed properly, the emulsion will hold and the parts will not separate.

The second movement, in egg flat major, is a lyrical work in quadruple variation form. The goal here is to get the eggs completely incorporated into the butter one at a time, mixing in between each egg addition. Here comes our question again: what does “completely incorporated” really mean? We can recognize that the mixture is thinner and you can’t see any egg any more, other than the color, but what actually happened here?

Shortening, like butter, is a combination of water and fat, which don’t harmonize well with each other in the wild. Emulsions are mixtures of two or more liquids that are normally un-blendable. Emulsification occurs when one liquid is evenly dispersed into another. Examples of emulsification include vinaigrette, mayonnaise, and milk. Mixed properly, the emulsion will hold and the parts will not separate. To get them on-key, you need an emulsifier. Our friend, the egg, contains water and fat of its own, as well as lecithin in its yolk which acts to complete the triad. You want to eggs to be completely mixed with the shortening and sugar, completely dispersed.  By adding eggs one at a time, you help to ensure that the eggs mix with the other ingredients rather than just mixing with each other.

Scherzo Allegro

The third movement is in ternary form, consisting of a scherzo and quintet. Add the bananas to the wet ingredients. Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and add it a little at a time to the mixing bowl until just smooth. Don’t over mix! By slowly adding the dry ingredients, the proteins in the flour won’t have much chance to combine with the water to form too much gluten. Less gluten means more moist deliciousness. Split the mixture between two 8 x 4 x 2 1/2 inch bread pans. Pop it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 50 minutes.

Allegro

The triumphant and exhilarating finale begins when you remove the bread from the oven. Check for doneness by inserting a toothpick in the center. If it comes out clean, it’s done. Allow the bread to cool for 10 minutes then remove it from the pan to cool further on a wire rack.

Now, the best part: slice it, butter it, and EAT IT! And make sure you say, “Ba-na-na-na!” Beethoven would be proud.

As I mentioned in Another Squash, Another Sunday, I’d never made a pecan pie before and had heard murmurs that it was like some double secret probation magical mystery tour concoction that was hard to make. This recipe from the Williams-Sonoma Holiday Favorites cookbook will give you a peaceful, easy feeling and you’ll never fear pecan pie again. 

Get the Upper Crust

You can use any pie crust recipe you want, but after experimenting with many variations I think I’ve found a go-to recipe: Cook’s Illustrated’s Foolproof Pie Dough. This dough rolls out easier than any I’ve ever made and is flexible without being delicate. And it consistently bakes up flaky and tender. The secret is twofold: the butter contributes to the flavor while the shortening adds tenderness since the it contains no water; and since gluten cannot form in alcohol the vodka adds moisture while balancing gluten development. The recipe below makes one 9-inch double crust pie. Halve the recipe for a single crust.

Here’s what you’ll need: 

Process 1 1/2 cups flour, salt, and sugar in food processor until combined, about 2 one-second pulses. Add butter and shortening and process until homogeneous dough just starts to collect in uneven clumps, about 15 seconds (dough will resemble cottage cheese curds and there should be no uncoated flour). Scrape bowl with rubber spatula and redistribute dough evenly around processor blade. 

Add remaining cup flour and pulse until mixture is evenly distributed around bowl and mass of dough has been broken up, 4 to 6 quick pulses. Empty mixture into medium bowl. 

Sprinkle vodka and water over mixture. With rubber spatula, use folding motion to mix, pressing down on dough until dough is slightly tacky and sticks together. Divide dough into two even balls and flatten each into 4-inch disk. Wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 45 minutes or up to 2 days. 

For the filling:

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Roll out the dough into a 12 inch diameter round and transfer to a 9 inch pie plate. Trim the edges leaving about 1/2 inch overhang and fold the edges under and crimp decoratively. Blind bake the crust until pale gold, about 15 minutes. (Line the crust with parchment paper and fill with some dry beans to retain the shape of the crust while baking.) Cool on a wire rack and reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees F.

While the crust is baking, whisk together the eggs and brown sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Add the maple syrup, butter, lemon juice, vanilla, nutmeg, and salt and whisk to blend. Mix in the pecans. After the crust has cooled, pour the filling into teh bakes pie crust. Bake until the filling os puffed and set, about 35 mintues. Cool completely on a wire rack before serving.

This recipe was easy and fast and brought lots of compliments. Best of all, I actually look forward to making pie crust now that I know I can count on a consistent flavor and texture.

I decided to make this on a whim and I’m glad I did. I now have another home run recipe in my dessert arsenal. So no matter how you pronounce it, don’t fear the pecan. Or the pie crust.

“My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M’s and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.” – Dave Barry

Celebrated every year on October 28, National Chocolate Day is another reason to eat chocolate. Like you need one.

Many restaurants are known for their chocolate desserts. One of my favorites was a White Chocolate Gelato with Raspberry Sauce I had at California Pizza Kitchen about ten years ago.

Morton’s, the steak house of steak houses, is praised not only for their steaks, but for their Morton’s Legendary Hot Chocolate Cake. Morton’s serves over thirty thousand pieces of this cake a month around the world. Served with vanilla ice cream, and raspberries, the real prize of this dessert is the soft chocolate center. To get the consistency, you must bake small, individual cakes; for these, you need 6-ounce soufflé dishes or ramekins.

 
Procedure
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Generously butter six 6-ounce soufflé cups and sprinkle each with granulated sugar. Tap out the excess sugar.

2. In the top of a double broiler set over barely simmering water, melt the butter and chocolate together. Remove the top of the double broiler pan from the heat.

3. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and set on low speed, beat the egg yolks and eggs for about 2 minutes, or until light and smooth. With the mixer running, pour the melted chocolate into the bowl and mix for about 2 minutes longer.

4. Put the confectioners’ sugar and flour in a fine-mesh sieve and sprinkle into the chocolate mixture. With the mixer on medium speed, beat for 30 seconds, or until well mixed.

5. Pour the batter into the prepared soufflé cups, leaving about ¼ inch of space below the rim. Set the soufflé cups on a baking sheet and bake for 18 to 20 minutes, or until puffed and about 1 inch higher than the rim. The centers will be soft but not sticky.

6. Remove the cakes from the oven and immediately invert each onto a serving plate. Remove the cup and garnish each plate with three raspberries and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

I say you make this anytime you feel like it. Why wait for October 28th!

Today was all about food. Our plan was to begin with a great diner breakfast at Jim’s Open Kitchen (checkout fellow Cleveland food blogger Nancy Heller’s post about Jim’s and you’ll see why we love it!) and then explore The Mustard Seed Market for a few specialty items before hitting the discount grocer for the regular stuff.

We had a lot on our food agenda today: I wanted to test a recipe for “pouched” salmon that I’m going to demonstrate on Fox 8′s That’s Life with Robin Swoboda in a few weeks (more on that in another post); Renée wanted to make some roasted beets to go along with my salmon dish as well as put together an eggplant Parmesan for later in the week; and I felt like making a rhubarb and peach cobbler. Oh, and I also bought a small roaster chicken to de-bone because I needed to make some poultry stock.

I knew the salmon wouldn’t take long, but I also knew I had to time everything right because of the different things that would need to go in the oven. Renée’s beets wanted to be at 275 for two hours, but my chicken bones were going to be roasting at 350. The cobbler needed to go at 375, and my stock, although starting on the cook top where Renée was going to be frying the eggplant, needed to be at 180. I also wanted to test the salmon with one piece going in the microwave and the other going in the oven at 425. I should have taken some pics of the kitchen, because it felt pretty commercial with all that prep and cooking going on! I did take some of the cobbler, so here’s what I made:

The flour, 1 oz sugar, lime zest, and teaspoon of salt go in a food processor and get pulsed 3 to 4 times. The butter and lard (I used shortening) are added and pulsed until the mixture just becomes crumbly and starts to climb up the side of the work bowl. Add the ice water a little at a time and process just until the dough holds together when squeezed in a ball. Then place the dough into a 1 gallon zip top bag, form into a disk, and place it into the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.

The filling consists of 1 cup of sugar, cornstarch, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt stirred with the rhubarb, peaches, and lime juice.

One third the dough gets pinched into pieces and distributed evenly in the bottom of a buttered  9×9 or 8×8 baking dish.

The remaining dough gets rolled out to a sheet large enough to cover the top of the dish. Pour the fruit mixture into the dish and top with the dough pressing the dough into the corners. Bake, uncovered, for 60 minutes or until the dough is cooked through and starting to turn golden.

If you want it a little more golden brown, put it under your broiler for about 3 minutes. Be sure to let it stand for 15 to 30 minutes before serving. Great with a scoop of good vanilla ice cream! Sweet, tart, gooey, and crunchy all at the same time!

As for the rest, the salmon was a winner, the beets were terrific, the eggplant is in the fridge, and the stock is still in the oven.

Just a typical Sunday in the kitchen!

Growing up, pizzelles were always part of the seemingly endless variety of Christmas cookies that were baked at our house.

We had a cast iron hand-iron that Mom or Dad would hold over stove burner. It had a well-seasoned patina that was a tribute to its many years of service. Of course, my sisters and I made sure all the broken or terribly malformed cookies were disposed of properly. As we got older, we were allowed to place a dollop of dough on the hot iron or be in charge of the iron itself. These days, Mom has an electric, as do I. I think my Villaware pizzelle baker falls into the category of “perfect kitchen tools”: it’s small and easy to store when not in use, it’s easy to clean, and it’s idiot-proof to use. If you can plug it in and follow the second hand on your watch, you can make some darn good tasting cookies in no time.

Matt and I had some time to ourselves last night, so I pulled out the pizzelle maker and mixed up some dough while he finished his homework. The great thing about these cookies is that you can easily alter the recipe to your particular tastes giving you a wide variety of flavors, colors, and textures from which to choose.

The standard recipe is

Eat them as cookies or shape them into homemade ice cream cones

Beat the eggs and sugar, then add cooled melted butter, vanilla, and anise. Sift flour and baking powder and add to egg mixture. The batter will be stiff enough to be dropped by a spoon. Before mixing, I turned on the iron to let it heat up. Before making the first cookies, spray a little cooking spray on each side and you’re ready to go.  Drop a teaspoon sized dollop on each side. The cookies only take about 30-45 seconds to cook. Use a spatula to remove them from the iron. Before you know it, you’ll have 2 1/2 dozen light, crisp cookies. Serve them plain or dust with a little powdered sugar. While they’re still hot, you can also shape them into homemade ice cream cones.

Matt doesn’t like anise (it reminds him of some cough medicine he had to take once), so I omitted that from the recipe and substituted orange juice instead. Other variations include adding rum and orange peel, adding cocoa, and adding Amaretto or almond instead of anise. You can also divide the dough and add a little food coloring to one half. Then drop a half teaspoon sized dollop of each dough and you end up with swirls! Quick, easy, and fun!

I always have room for more of Mom’s pumpkin pie. I’d never baked a pumpkin pie, let alone one from real pumpkins, and I always wanted to try it when I saw pie pumpkins stacked up in stores. As I went through the checkout at the grocery store, the cashier looked at my selections and said, “Making pumpkin pie from scratch? It’s a curse, once you do it this way, you’ll never want to do it any other way again!” I knew I was in for a treat.

I like to bake as much as I like to cook, but baking offers a unique opportunity: baking requires precision. The measurements, proportions, and temperatures have to be right or you don’t get what you expect. That means I can get a recipe from Mom and hope to duplicate her results.

Mom makes her pie using a brand of canned pumpkin called Lake Shore Pumpkin that’s solid pack pumpkin, not pie filling. It is distributed out of Western New York, so it’s readily available in Northwest Pennsylvania, but alas, like Yuengling beer, it’s not to be found in Northeast Ohio, so Mom gave me a can. Lake Shore comes with a handy recipe right on the side. I also bought several pie pumpkins and set out to find a good recipe.

Online searches resulted in many recipes, all similar, using canned pumpkin. The few that I found that specified pie pumpkins varied only slightly. I narrowed my selections to two recipes and went to work.

Cooking the pumpkins is simple: cut them in half, remove the seeds (you can roast the seeds just like you would with your jack-o-lantern field pumpkin)  and strings and place them on a baking sheet cut side down. Bake at 350 F until fork tender, about an hour, hour-and-a-half. Once it has cooled, scrape the pumpkin from the skin using a spoon or ice cream scoop and puree it until smooth. After you remove the pumpkin, raise your oven temp to 400 F to prepare for baking the pies. Your puree can be used in recipes calling for canned pumpkin or pureed winter squash. You can also boil or microwave the pumpkin, but that just seems wrong to me. Bake them. While you’re waiting you can watch a couple of episodes of a good cooking show.

Baking tip:Don’t turn the oven up to your required baking temp until you put your to-be-baked item in the oven

The pies will need to bake at 425 F for 15 minutes, then for another 45-55 minutes at 350 F, until a knife or toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Here’s a good baking tip: Don’t turn the oven up to your required baking temp until you put your to-be-baked item in the oven. Ovens cycle to maintain the set temperature. If you set it to 425, you may catch your oven in mid-cycle, plus you will lose 10-25 degrees when you open the door, so by the time you put the pies in it may not cycle up to 425 for several minutes. By turning the temp up when you put your items in, you force the cycle, providing a kick start to baking at the beginning by heating up to the proper temp quickly. Watch your oven thermometer; you’d be surprised how much heat you lose by simply opening the door for a few seconds.

Here’s where reading the recipe, I mean really reading it, comes in handy. The first recipe I tried had the following ingredients:

I thought, “Hey, looks good to me!” And I forged ahead. But there’s a glaring omission in the recipe: sugar! As I reviewed my searches, many of the fresh puree recipes omit sugar. Those must be some sugary pumpkins! My pies were not sugary, maybe it was the pumpkins, I don’t know, I may have to try it again with different pumpkins. The mixture was pale, even when cooked and it was not sweet at all, in fact, it was pretty disgusting. While I wouldn’t use this recipe again for pie, with less salt and maybe a dash of vanilla, it would make a pretty good pumpkin custard. This demonstrates one of the things I love about cooking: you can usually eat your mistakes.

Back to the kitchen with recipe #2:

This filling mixture turned out wonderfully. It was darker and richer in color and the addition of clove and allspice placed this filling firmly in the grasp of the sense and taste memory that held Mom’s pie. (I learned something about allspice while reading The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook: Allspice is not a mixture of spices. It is the dried fruit of the Pimenta dioica plant. The fruit is picked when it is green and unripe, and traditionally sun dried then ground. When dry they are brown and look like large brown peppercorns.) I made two of these and took one to Mom’s for Thanksgiving. It was a hit!

I also tried a recipe for sour cream pumpkin pie that Renée got from Readerville:

As expected, this pie turned out darker and heavier than the standard pumpkin recipe. The sour cream and brown sugar added to its rich, luxurious flavor. The filling was much thicker and required a little coaxing to fill out the edges when poured into the crust. This pie comes with a Ginger Whipped Cream topping consisting of

Whip this mixture until stiff and refrigerate it covered until ready to serve.

Some tips for choosing and using fresh pumpkin:

These pies were so easy to make, and turned out so deliciously, that I wonder why more people don’t use real pumpkins. The extra time to prepare the pumpkin puree was well worth the effort and the will be further rewarded with pumpkin soups, breads, muffins…all made from fresh pumpkin puree.