This blog started with a quest for the perfect apple pie. It took a month to put it all together: hand-picking the apples on a Hudson Valley farm, scouring the Upper West Side for lard, starting from scratch after my early attempts failed for want of preparation or perseverance.

Want of preparation or perseverance. Maybe that's why I don't post like I used to. But now I have a few weeks worth of material stored up, so I suppose I really ought to get back to writing for you all. I'll begin where I began before. With apple pie.

When I started this blog, I didn't have a digital camera or a web hosting account, so I relied on words and stolen clip art to record my exploits in the kitchen. I wonder, has photography made me lazy? I've always tried to make my food blogging about more than just food, but starting each post with a picture of something I've made or eaten has made that difficult. And I'm the kind of person who would just as soon never start something he doesn't know how to finish.

Right now I'm not quite sure what to say about my New Year's apple pie that will take you beyond the photo above. I used lard and granny smith apples; I bought a pyrex pie plate just for the occasion; I held the pie, still warm, on my lap during my first trip to Staten Island, where Lisa and I spent New Year's with her friends from college. One of Lisa's friends is a vegetarian; we tried to loose the apples from their swine-tainted shell so she could share with us.

This isn't to say that the story of my apple pie has some hidden meaning; it's only to say that these are things that happen. We cook, we eat, sometimes we share. There are surely reasons we do these things. Me... I write about it afterwards.

Sometimes.

When I can think of a reason.

Posted by jeremy at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Always, always finish what you start.

It's over a month now since Lisa and I went apple picking. I was going to bake those apples into a pie when they were just a few hours off the tree. Now they're halfway rotten, shriveled and soft. Not at all suitable for pies. Not really suitable for anything. I had to throw most of them away - a lamentable waste, of which I am still deeply ashamed.

I'm back in Rhinebeck for the first time in weeks, and it's definitely apple pie weather. The air is clear and crisp, and the chill breeze carries a faint hint of wood-fires from the chimneys of the historic houses lining the streets around town. But waiting a month in between the steps of any recipe is going to take its toll on your ingredients. The lard I found at the beginning of my odyssey expired either two days ago or two weeks ago, and whichever it is I'm not taking a chance on rancid pork fat. The three pounds of flour Lisa lost to invading arachnids has not yet been replaced. And of course, our fresh-picked apples are on the way to a landfill on Staten Island. So I'm starting from scratch, which is the right way to do things, but this time I'm not sure I'll be able to find the best ingredients.

Off to the Stop-n-Shop, for flour, fat, and apples. The plastic-looking, waxed and polished granny smiths in the produce aisle are a far cry from the rugged native apples Lisa and I plucked from a local orchard a month ago, but they're crisp, tart, and generally unobjectionable (if not exactly exciting). A brand new sack of King Arthur Flour will go into a ziploc bag as soon as we get it home. And lard - where's the lard? Last time I was here I found it in the meat case, but it's nowhere to be found. I ask the butcher if he has any, and he walks me to the pork section, which I already know is woefully bereft of rendered fats. He assures me that he'll get some in stock in time for Thanksgiving, but that doesn't do me much good today. I'm forced to settle for that engineered oleomargarinian jack-of-all-trades: Crisco. Since I'm going chemical anyway, I go all the way and opt for the variety with the artificial butter flavor.

Back at Lisa's apartment, I mix two cups (1/2 lb.) of cold Crisco and a stick of cold butter with three and a half cups of flour and a healty dash of salt, like I've done before back at my place. Mix in a little ice water (more than I remember needing when I was working with the lard, but oh well), and my pie dough is ready to rest in the fridge. Meanwhile, I take Lisa's stamped serrated knives to the granny smiths. I peel and core, Lisa slices. She's very good at making thin slices with these knives; I'm used to my Henckels paring knife and almost stab myself several times. But soon enough we have a pie's worth of apple slices sitting in acidulated water (water with a squirt of lemon juice, to keep the apples from oxidizing and turning brown). When the pie dough has rested for about an hour, I take the apples out of water and dry them with a paper towel. To these four-to-five large apples' worth of slices, I add a healthy sprinking of granulated sugar (probably about 3/4 cup), about 3 tablespoons of cornstarch (to thicken the juices of the apples as they bake), and a few spices: a half teaspoon of cinnamon, a quarter teaspoon of allspice, and a dash of nutmeg. The apples are coated with an almost gummy paste as the sugar draws out their juices, which then congeal with the cornstarch. It's time to roll out my pie crust.

Working quickly to keep the fat from melting, I roll half the pie dough to about 1/8 inch thickness and lay it into the bottom of my (already buttered) pie pan. I prick the bottom and sides of the crust thoroughly with a fork, to give steam an escape route and prevent air bubbles from forming in the dough (food science at work). The apples go in in stages, each layer of fruit dotted with a few knobs of butter. There's just enough apple to peek up over the lid of the pie pan, which will give the pie a bit of an overstuffed look when it's done. I roll out the rest of the dough and lay it on top of the apples, pressing the two crusts together around the rim. Feeling adventurous, I try to flute the edges with my fingers, an effort that is only moderately successful when I'm forced to abandon it or risk melting the dough with the heat of my hands. I cut a few vents in the top crust (slashes radially out from the center, plus a little diamond-shaped hole right in the middle). This is also to let steam escape, but this steam isn't from the dough, it's from the apples; and it won't create air bubbles in the dough, but it could cause the pie to explode in the oven if it doesn't have a way out.

The pie is ready to bake. I put it in the fridge to wait until dinner is ready, both to make sure it's still warm when we're ready to eat it and to prevent it from melting in the interim. When dinner is done, I set the oven to 375 degrees, put the pie on a baking sheet (to catch any spillover) and place it in the oven. After 20 minutes or so, when the crust begins to brown, I turn the heat down to 325 degrees.

Lisa has informed me that it's very important for the top crust to be sugary. Ordinarily I would accomplish this by brushing it with an egg wash halfway through baking and sprinkling it with sugar. Unfortunately the eggs in Lisa's fridge, like the lard I bought a month ago, are past their prime. I sprinkle the top of the pie with sugar anyway, hoping that the heat of the oven will be enough to caramelize it. It isn't, and when the pie is done there's still a sprinkling of loose sugar sitting on the top crust. It's sweet, at least, and Lisa doesn't complain (she's a real sweetheart like that).

The pie rests for 15 minutes, by which point Lisa and I have polished off both dinner and a bottle of wine. It's time for dessert. I cut into the crust, which is - to my great satisfaction - both flaky and tender. The apples - hard granny smiths - remain stacked in place, held together by just a hint of their gooey thickened juices. Lisa thinks there's not enough gooeyness; next time I make her a pie I'll mix in some apples with a higher water content. Most importantly, this pie - unlike any I've ever made before - holds together when sliced. The crust is flaky, but still moist enough to yield without shattering under a knife, while the apples are softened enough to be tender but still firm enough to give the pie structure. On the whole, I consider this a triumph. With this practice run behind me, I think I'll be more than prepared to bake one or two Thanksgiving pies.

Posted by jeremy at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Fat, flour, water, and salt. Everything I've been told leads me to believe that this is all I need for a perfect pie crust. I just don't know how much of each I need, or how I'm going to put it together. I went through about eight different pie crust recipes, and they all disagree, so I'm going to wing it and hope for the best.

Pie crust, unlike most baking, does not appear to be a matter of strict formulas. The fat-to-flour ratio in the recipes I looked at ranged from 2-to-3 to nearly 1-to-1 by weight. And pie really is a creature of the home kitchen, where the baker's scale gets less props than the coffee-can scoop. Fannie Farmer would not weigh flour for her pies.

I settle closer to the 1-to-1 end of the spectrum, using just over 3 cups of flour with a half-pound of lard and a stick of butter. I sift the flour with a healthy pinch of salt into a stainless steel bowl. I cut up the cold fats into rough chunks and toss them into the flour. I wash my hands in cold water to chill them, and set myself to working the flour into the fat. You're supposed to use your fingers as much as possible when mixing pie dough, because allowing the fat to rub up against the palms (which are warmer) can melt it, preventing you from creating the odd-sized lumps of fat that will eventually create the flaky layers in the pie crust.

Maybe I've never had a really good pie crust before, but I'm not so clear on the whole "flakiness" thing. My guess is that it works basically like puff pastry, which I think I understand. These doughs take advantage of two scientific principles: (1) oil and water don't mix; and (2) water expands as it is heats up and converts into steam. In puff pastry, a water-based dough is wrapped around a block of butter, and then folded into hundreds of alternating layers. As the puff is cooked, the water expands, but each layer of dough is prevented from breaking through to the next layer because there's oil (butter) in the way, and oil and water don't mix. The fat, held in place in its solid state by the structure of the dough, eventually melts and goes whither it will, and the steam rushes in to fill (and even stretch) the void left behind. In the process, the layers (which get lightly browned in the melting fat) get pushed apart by the pressure of the steam, and you end up with mille-feuille, a thousand layers of golden flaky pastry expanded to several times their original height.

Presumably, pie dough works on the same principles, only on a smaller scale. Flour particles are surrounded with blobs of fat. A little water is added to hold the mess together. As the crust is cooked and the water expands, the flour is kept from absorbing it by its protective layers of fat (with which the water cannot mix). As the blobs of fat melt away (browning the flour in the process), steam rushes in to fill the empty space left behind. The result is lots of little air pockets in the finished product. And when two pockets of steam press against opposite sides of a fat-shrouded bit of flour, the result is a thin layer of golden pastry surrounded by air - in other words, a flake.

Puff pastry is just fine by me, so I'm guessing a flaky pie dough will be plenty good too. I make sure to leave lots of blobs and streaks of fat interspersed throughout my dough. When the fat and flour are mixed in to my liking, the result looks like wet, clumpy white sand, streaked here and there with little swaths of yellow and white. I have a glass of ice water at the ready, which I drizzle in a few drops at a time, trying desperately not to shatter the delicate balance of textures I've worked so hard to achieve. When the dough feels like it's just starting to hold together, I toss it in a ziploc bag and stick it in the fridge. The flour will continue to absorb the water for a while, so it isn't necessary to have a solid mass of dough at this stage. After it rests for an hour, it'll be cohesive enough to roll out and fill with my stash of hand-picked apples.

Posted by jeremy at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From our half-bushel, Lisa picked out about ten apples to keep as snacks for the week, and I brought the rest back with me to Manhattan. There's more than enough here for three or four pies. The lard remains in Lisa's fridge, however, which means it's back to market in search of congealed fats for my pie dough.

I read a fair amount about food, and if there's one thing I've learned about pie dough, it's that everybody thinks they have the secret to the perfect crust. I've read Gourmet, Saveur, Steingarten, Friberg, Julia, Jacques, and Betty Crocker. You can make it in a food processor - no, you should use a pair of forks - no, you need a pastry cutter - no, it's heresy to use anything but your hands. It should have the consistency of sand - no, it should look like cornmeal - no, it should have pea-sized lumps - no, the lumps should range in size from peppercorns to large olives. Add vinegar - no, lemon juice - no, eggs. Use shortening - no, butter - no, lard - no, all three. Add sugar - are you mad? no sugar! At least they all agree that ice water is a must.

I've settled on lard for several reasons. First, I believe it when I read that butter, which has a lot of water in it, can't be the only fat in a pie dough because it throws off the moisture balance. Besides, butter costs about three times as much as lard or shortening. I'll add some butter for flavor, but I also need either shortening or lard. Second, shortening doesn't taste like anything. It's hydrogenated vegetable fat - chemically altered to remain solid at room temperature. It coats your mouth with that greasy, cottony feeling but doesn't add any flavor. I've never used lard before, but lard comes from pigs, and pigs are yummy. Advantage: Lard. Finally, when the entire medical community tells you eating a certain food is very bad for you, but respectable chefs and foodies do it anyway, there's got to be a damn good reason. I'll take my chances.

Now, where in Manhattan can one acquire lard? Rendered pig fat is out of vogue these days, the Atkins Diet notwithstanding. I live right around the corner from Fairway and Citarella, which is usually great, but they don't carry anything so gauche as lard (I asked). I've stumbled on the rare instance where the Stop-and-Shop on Route 9 was better stocked than my beloved Upper West Side gourmet grocers. So I try the Upper West Side's grocery-shopping equivalent of slumming. Gristede's just opened up a new suburban-style megamarket under the Ansonia, on Broadway between 73rd and 74th. Their produce feels plastic, their meat is pallid, and their fish looks a little past its prime, but on sheer selection they beat the highbrow outfits hands down. I check in with them before I commit myself to a borough-wide quest for pork fat. Sure enough, crammed into the bottom right hand corner of the meat case, there's about a dozen green and white one-pound boxes of good old Armour brand lard. I'm probably the first person to buy one from them (I make sure to check the expiration date).

Armour's lard is labelled in both English and Spanish (in Spanish it's called "manteca"), which leads me to believe that it could probably also be found in bodegas with a respectable grocery section. Now that I know I can get it around the corner, though, I may just start using it for all my cooking needs. Pork-fried doughnuts, anyone?

Posted by jeremy at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Greig's it was back to Lisa's apartment in Rhinebeck. Lisa is clerking for a judge upstate this year, and I like to think of her apartment as my weekend country house, which I guess makes my apartment her pied-a-terre. Rhinebeck is a calculated blend of quaint country charm and trendy pretensions, and Lisa's apartment is a block from the center of town.

I've struggled with Lisa's kitchen for about a year now, and it'll be another year before I'm finally free of it. The electric stove has three burners; the corner of the range where the fourth burner should be constitutes the majority of the kitchen's counter space. Due to some quirks of electrical engineering which are apparently beyond me, the burners can only be used in certain combinations and at certain temperatures. There's no manual, but I've discovered some unacceptable combinations through simple trial and error, resulting in a few undercooked meals and at least one call to the landlord.

Lisa doesn't cook; that's why she's dating me. I like this, because cooking for her is one of my favorite things to do, I get to do a lot of it, and I always get a rave review (even when I screw up). However, every time I prepare a meal in her apartment, I have to buy a new piece of equipment. I'm not talking about food processors or mandolines or pressure cookers. I'm talking about sauté pans, stock pots, and kitchen knives. When I met her, her cookware consisted of three one-quart aluminum pots (with two lids), a cookie sheet, and a loaf pan. I covered the loaf pan with aluminum foil to braise osso bucco the first time I cooked for her. It came out great.

Lisa doesn't have a pie pan or a rolling pin, so these are on my list as I head up Route 9 to the Stop-and-Shop outside of town. (Rhinebeckers don't stand for the trappings of suburbia inside their storybook village. They're still protesting the CVS that set up shop on Market Street two years ago - but the parking lot is always full.) I also need a lemon, some allspice and nutmeg (cinnamon we've got already), and some fat for the pie dough. I'd have settled for Crisco, but I found lard in the meat case, and that was the end of that (more on lard tomorrow). Lisa has a five-pound bag of King Arthur flour in her pantry, so I check out and I'm on the way home to bake as many pies as I can before I have to leave town.

Back at Lisa's apartment, I unpack the groceries and head to the pantry. She has three different kinds of sugar, all sealed in ziploc bags, and the flour ... not in a ziploc bag. I already know what's going to happen when I open the bag - I should have known it before I went grocery shopping, but like I said yesterday, I was sure I had everything under control right up to this moment - SPIDERS!!! Not just flour beetles, but honest-to-god spiders, wriggling their little black legs around in the flour like they were making eight-winged snow angels. I've never seen spiders in flour before; maybe they went after the flour beetles which are, ominously, nowhere to be seen.

Baking pies is now out of the question. I could head back out to the Stop-and-Shop, but I have to leave soon, and I'd rather spend the time with Lisa. There will be no pies for her tonight. But at least she got a rolling pin and a pound of lard out of the deal.

Posted by jeremy at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As is true of most food subjects, I know just enough about apples to convince myself I have everything under control right up to the point of culinary catastrophe. It's October, and I want apple pie. And since I've wholeheartedly bought into the cliché that everything tastes better when you make it yourself, from scratch, using only the freshest ingredients, a craving for apple pie necessarily implies a trip to the nearest orchard.

Dutchess County got its first frost recently, which means the clock has started running on apple season. This weekend my girlfriend Lisa suggested we go apple picking, so we made our way to the Greig Farm in Red Hook, which is apparently the county's third most popular tourist attraction. My friend Tony - a fairly skilled cook and equally ambivalent attorney - always says "you need spies for pies" - northern spy apples, that is - and the TV chefs tend to go with granny smith. When we roll into the Greig Farm, I think I know exactly what I need. But the Greigs have complicated what would seem to be an easy mission. There are red delicious, empires, ginger golds, jonagolds, macintoshes, and macouns; but no spies, no granny smiths. I'm now adrift.

Lisa and I made our way from row to row, tasting each variety. I try to think about the characteristics of granny smiths and spies that might make them suitable pie apples, and mostly what I recall is how much I dislike eating them. Both varieties are rock hard and puckeringly sour, and they tend toward mealiness more than most other apples in my experience. So as Lisa tries to pick her favorite (it's macintosh, by the way), I'm looking for the most unpleasant apple Greig has to offer.

No luck. The apples are all really good. We ate about half a dozen of them out of hand between the two of us, and picked as many as I could carry around the orchard without compromising my pretensions at manly strength. And although later research has revealed that red delicious and jonagolds are both perfectly suitable cooking apples, when we left Greig's orchards I had resigned myself to the prospect of baking a less-than-ideal pie. Though I hate to admit it, for a second I considered dropping by the Stop-and-Shop on the way home, with a half-bushel of fresh-picked apples in the back seat, to see if they had any spies.

Posted by jeremy at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)