Apple Pie - A New Hope

This has been a long and winding road. I first made apple pie (crust from scratch of course) in fall of 2005, and it was incredible. Every time I made it, it came out amazing. The crust was crisp, light, nice, the apples were nice, everything was amazingly tasty. Then apple season ended, and I didn't make any pies or pie crusts until fall of 2006. And I had forgotten something.

The crusts from then on for a long time were tragic. Every time, every time, I would try to follow the instructions, first in Pepin's Technique, since that's where I think I first learned the original nice crusts, then in Julia Child. But instead of pie crust, I'd get nothing but disappointment every time. For years. The apples would be nicely roasted, soft, the crust would, every time, look like it might've worked. And then we'd taste it and it would be atrocious, in some slightly different way from before. Typically they would be hard, mealy, undercooked in some spots and overcooked in some spots.

I mentioned it to the nurse at the dental office once, and she told me that she had foolproof crust recipes, and gave me 4! And I tried a few, and they didn't work. I eventually just stopped making pies altogether, except on very rare occasions when I'd get my hopes up, and then every time they would be dashed by the first bite. But from the bottom, the only way to go is up.

I watched Julia Child's videos, and I saw that she made Tarte Tatin, and that it was pretty easy actually. I made Tarte Tatin, and it worked! The crust was not absurd! It wasn't great, but it was edible, not repellent, perhaps slightly enjoyable. That was the beginning. So I made Tarte Tatin a number of times and was somewhat pleased with it. But Tarte Tatin is not, to my memory, as good as those incredible apple pies in 2005. (Once I remember I processed heavy cream with ice in my food processor and made the butter which I used for the crust, and again, it was incredible, more so than other times. Today I wouldn't dare do that, the butter that you get is soft and moist, which seems like a totally unpredictable thing to put into the pie dough. But it worked once, very well, the butter flavor was even nicer.)

Then in Marcella Hazan I found a recipe for an Asti-style apple tart which was unlike any of the classic apple tarts, and so I made it, and it also came out decently. It is pleasant, aromatic, (it has a lemon and orange zest), very nice. But not like those apple pies.

A few weeks ago I made an apple pie from Pepin, I think, and the crust as not absurd. Again, it wasn't great, but not absurd. From what I recall, it had something to do with limiting the amount of water. But the result wasn't great enough for me to keep track of.

2 pies ago, there was an apple pie in the oven, from Pepin's Cooking with Claudine. No improvement. Then recently we started going to an orchard and got apples. Made a crust using the blender from Julia's Way to Cook. No improvement. She mentions low-gluten pastry flour, which I got, and made another crust with, again no improvement.

Today I made the crust from a website, then I finished it from Pepin's Techniques. Improvement. Definite improvement. What was different?

Water.

Water.

I added more water this time. Up to now, I somehow got it into my head that there shouldn't be a lot of water in the crust, the dough should break apart. This time I added water until I could roll it into a ball. When I rolled the dough out, it was still a little crumbly, hard to handle. So next time there will be more water. When I made the butter myself, the butter was watery! You can only squeeze out so much water from home-made butter.

The bottom of the pie is a bit soggy, so I think a little blind-baking might be in order.

Here's the website.

And just to make sure Dana's recipe stays here, here it is again:

INGREDIENTS

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup butter, chilled and diced
• 1/4 cup ice water

DIRECTIONS

1. In a large bowl, combine flour and salt. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in water, a tablespoon at a time, until mixture forms a ball. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 4 hours or overnight.
2. Roll dough out to fit a 9 inch pie plate. Place crust in pie plate. Press the dough evenly into the bottom and sides of the pie plate.

So the key to why this worked for me is that Dana says to make crumbs, then add water until it forms a ball, then wrap and refrigerate. Afterwards rolling it out!

Osso Buco Semplice

This is a nice dish, and not hard to prepare --- but you have to leave time, about 2.5 hours start-to-finish. I cooked it out of Hazan several times, but not often since the Osso Buco veal cut is pricey when it's even available. It's been mostly for special occasions. But today we went to the grocery, Whole Foods, and they had Osso Buco for $13/pound. Not bad. Still pricey, not as pricey as usual. And I thought, when am I going to make this anyway if not now? So I bought it. I thought I'd freeze it and use it one day for a special dinner...

When we got back I looked through Hazan and I thought, ah, well it's a little involved. Then I looked at Elizabeth David, and I thought, as usual, ah, the essential recipe. Elizabeth David understood that having the essence of the recipe meant you could then be creative with it. So I suppose Hazan's recipe might taste better, more complex, than David's, but it also doesn't show you the core of the recipe. Once you know the core, you can do what you like with it. The core of Osso Buco is an excellent dish, a marvel of simplicity actually. And Hazan isn't hard either, once you see what you're doing.

After reading David's recipe through carefully (as I do now and didn't do as a beginner,) I knew I could cook it tonight, even though it was getting late. Which would mean I didn't have to freeze and then thaw the osso buco, which makes it better. Freezing and thawing meat well makes a big difference, I'm beginning to think, in your final dishes. For example, we eat Korean bar-be-cue, and we buy American Kobe beef and freeze it. It's always been a problem thawing that, since if you don't thaw it well then the thin slices don't come apart nicely. So I started putting it down from the freezer into the fridge the night before, and now it's perfectly thawed, and I'm sure it tastes better than when I used to have to quick-thaw it in a Ziploc in warm water --- if nothing else it's more reliably thawed all the way through.

But when you have a nice piece of meat, then it's best not to freeze it at all. So here's what I cooked, based on David's recipe:

Osso Buco

2 ossi buchi cuts, good amount of butter, 2 peeled tomatoes, 1/2 cup wine. Use a pan that will fit the ossi buchi without crowding. Brown the ossi buchi on all sides in the butter. Toss in the wine, let it bubble for 10 minutes. Meanwhile chop the tomatoes. After 10 minutes, toss them in along with 1/4 cup of water. Cover. Simmer for 2 hours.

Great dishes don't get simpler than that. Osso buco is always served with risotto Milanese (do the Italians know how to live?) and gremolata. I didn't have a lemon to grate the peel of, and I didn't have Italian parsley, so I made up Jackson-o-lata, which was pretty good. I took 6 basil leaves from my plant (in the photo!), tore them, mixed them with some lime juice and a chopped clove of garlic. That goes on top of the ossi buchi and gives them a little extra flair.

The Siren Song of Ova

Eggs are one of the best items to have if you like fast, cheap cooking, and want excellent food. Eggs are the simplest excellent dish. You can make eggs just as well as some fancy Lyonnais chef can, here's the recipe:

Heat your iron pan. Put in 1-2 tablespoons of butter. Crack 2-3 eggs in a small bowl and mix, but not thoroughly. Wait until the butter just smokes and then dump the eggs in. It will sizzle, the clear albumen will turn white. Shake the pan back and forth over the heat as the eggs cook, this gives the eggs a little bit of fluff. Then slide out your omelette onto a plate, salt and pepper. Done. You could pay $300 for the same omelette.

There's all kinds of yakking in cookbooks about the perfect omelette and whatnot. There's nothing to it. The perfection of the omelette is that it's simple. Anyone can do it, easily. That's the perfection. It's not that someone who went to Le Cordon Bleu and then staged with some supercool celebrity chef like Susur Lee can make it any better. It's already perfect.

You crack the eggs into a small bowl, mix them up, dump them into the just smoking butter, shake the pan as it cooks. That's all.

There's also boiling the eggs. Put the eggs into room temperature water in a pot. Turn on the heat. Wait for it to boil. Keep the boiling very gentle, so the eggs don't break. Wait about 10 minutes (you'll have to do this by trial-and-error to find what consistency you like.) Dump out the water and fill the pot with cold water. Take out the eggs after a minute or so and peel the eggshells and the skin. Eat with salt and pepper. Perfection.

One silly thing I remember about boiled eggs --- I once went to Turkey for sightseeing. I wanted to see the remains of the Eastern Roman Empire --- being a classical history buff. So we were in Istanbul and we were served breakfast every morning at the small hotel we stayed at. And every morning it was hard to peel the skin off the eggs. We marveled that the Turks didn't know that you should chill the eggs right after boiling them to make it easier to take the skin off. The older lady who prepared the breakfast didn't speak English, and we didn't raise the point with anyone. So then we came back and we met a lady who raised chickens, and also my cello teacher raised chickens, and they'd give us their fresh eggs from time to time. When we boiled them and chilled them, the skins were hard to peel.... Turns out that the freshest, best, eggs, are hard to peel even if you chill them right after boiling. And so the Turkish breakfast lady wasn't the ignoramus, we were.

But anyway what's the siren song about? Eggs are attractive, a perfect dish, so simple, so easy, so fast, so flawless.... But there is a flaw! Eggs are pure protein, and they don't reach their highest until they are paired with a starch! How many times there were eggs in the fridge, and butter, and perfection awaited, but no, there was no bread! (Rubbing some garlic on toasted, sliced, French or Italian bread that has been drizzled in olive oil is the way to go. Bruschetta.) So now I keep potatoes on hand, but potatoes take a while to cook. And so the siren song of the eggs, ever beckoning, luring, leering.

Chocolate Cookies

I like chocolate. A lot. I got into cookies once when I watched the Matrix again (for the nth time)... The scene where Neo first goes to see the Oracle, and she's baking cookies.



So while I lived in Salt Lake City I went to Avenues Bakery --- they have amazing cookies. I got a bit addicted. Its a nice little cafe, but after paying $ for cookies a number of times, a person like me starts searching for a way to make them at home. As I made different cookies over the years, I kept some notes.

So then I moved away, and I didn't make cookies for a while. We had a child, there hasn't been a lot of time... So a few days ago I was looking through my copy of



which is an inspiration... I lived in Los Angeles for 14 years and the La Brea Bakery was one of my favorite spots there. Some of the recipes are a little over my head, but I've made several and everything I've tried came out very well. Silverton's chocolate chip scone is wondrous, as is the Crottin de Chocolate, and it was in the scone that I began dumping more and more chocolate.

I write pastry recipes that I work on or develop on the inside cover of my copy, and so when I wanted cookies a few days ago, I started following along the recipe I wrote there years ago. Its Tollhouse by way of Avenues by way of Silverton by way of... my chocolate obsession. I did a double-take when I saw how much chocolate I was adding, but I plowed on --- how bad could it be? So here goes... hang on to your hat. Frankly I don't even really claim the cookies taste like cookies should, nor that they're good in the way we generally want of cookies. They've got so much chocolate that I think they're kind of half-truffles, and extremely dark ones at that. So these are a bit about appreciating 99% chocolate itself, not sugar, not flour... baking chocolate and butter... everything else is secondary in this recipe.. And make sure you have a glass or 2 of milk... I can't eat more than 2 cookies in a sitting because of how much chocolate there is...

Chocolate Cookies

You will need 1C nuts, 2 sticks butter, 1.5C brown sugar/white sugar/honey/molasses, 2 eggs, 2C unbleached all-purpose... baking soda, salt, 1 pound of good quality 100% chocolate, 1/2 vanilla bean (optional), 1C rolled oats

Preheat to 375. Chop 1 cup of nuts (I like walnuts) and slightly roast them in the oven as it preheats --- from time to time check and take them out if they're fragrant. Chop and ``cream'' 2 sticks of butter (if they're from the fridge they will loosen up as you work.) Add 1.5 cups of brown sugar (white sugar works also), beat in the 2 eggs. Now take a tablespoon, fill it about halfway with baking soda and then carefully add water until its almost full, mix and put into the dough (normal people probably use a small bowl and don't try to save on dishes this much.) Mix in the 2 cups of all-purpose.

Get a cutting board, serrated knife (bread knife works well) and the 1 pound of chocolate (if its in a block... if yours is already chopped or chips then skip this step.) Gradually press the bread knife into the chocolate block, it should give and break. Keep chopping the chocolate until you've got chocolate pieces that are bite-size or smaller.

If you're adding it, slice open the vanilla bean and scrape the seeds into the dough. Take the chopped roasted nuts out add to the dough. Dump in the 1C rolled oats.

Now mix until the dough starts coming together. Try to make sure the butter pieces get somewhat mixed --- they don't have to be completely mixed, but they shouldn't be big chunks separate in the dough either.

From this dough, I pull off 4 cookies and bake for 15min in a small brownie pan (dishes again.) I divide the rest of the dough into 8 batches, roll each batch into a small log, saran wrap and freeze. These can be baked later, about 15-18 minutes at 375.

Bread and Muffins and Valrhona

Making bread is one the simple, cheap, and fast pleasures of cooking. I made my first breads --- focacce --- out of Dunaway's great book No Need to Knead.



I chose that book because I wanted to learn to make Italian bread --- the title make it look easy and fast. And its true, you don't need to knead in those recipes. But you do have to stir more vigorously than usual --- and I've since found that kneading isn't hard if you're just making a loaf for yourself. But anyway I've been delighted with every bread in that book that I've made.

But lately I've been making bread out of The Tassajara Bread Book by Brown.



This is a great book --- its all whole wheat. There's a decadence to white bread that whole wheat changes to worthiness. Whole wheat has a familiarity, an easiness. When I eat whole wheat that I baked, I feel good --- when I eat white bread that I baked, I feel a little celebratory.

Brown also also great muffin recipes. I was never a big fan of whole-wheat muffins, but I am a chocolate aficionado, and I've been dragging around several plastic containers of Valrhona cocoa that I bought from Surfas years ago and have always been saving ... So I put 2+2 together, and now I douse Brown's muffin recipe with Valrhona cocoa and some roasted nuts. In this recipe, by the way, Brown mentions mixing the dry and the wet ingredients separately and combining and mixing as little as possible. I used to skip that since it seemed like one of those fussy instructions that someone writes because thats how they always do it... But that one makes a difference in terms of the lightness of the muffins. I don't know why. Well this is the recipe I make which I've adapted from Brown's. Now I am also a fierce devotee of Elizabeth David's, and so I won't write out recipe in the ingredient/step1/step2 fashion, but more in her conversational fashion.

Preheat to 375.

So first the wet bowl, put in 1/4c olive oil (butter tastes better if you like). Use the same measuring cup to put in 1/2c molasses or honey (I found that when I reuse the oil-coated cup the honey or molasses doesn't stick to the cup.) Beat an egg in and then pour in 1 1/2 cups milk.

In the dry bowl, measure out 2C whole wheat. Mix in 2 tsp baking powder, a large pinch of salt.. And then the cocoa. I pretty much go all-out, I'd say about 1C or more, and I'm burning Valrhona.

Anyway, then grease the muffin tin. Now muffin tins are something else. I used to use the nonstick ones you get at the supermarket --- but as I said in the stocking-up post, I now avoid all nonstick. Nonstick wears off, and then you have to buy another pan while digesting some odd substance. So I got a heavy aluminumized steel muffin pan from Williams-Sonoma (before Lehman Brothers crashed.) It makes a big difference, and it was worth the money --- and its not nonstick and still it sticks much less than the cheap nonstick pan did. I think nonstick coating is just a way to sell cheap muffin pans that don't stick for a month or 2. I say avoid the nonstick, either use a disposable aluminum one from the store or get a good quality non-nonstick one.

So... grease up the muffin pan.

Now for the key, subtle step. Combine the wet and dry bowls into the larger bowl, and mix as little as possible to get a lumpy batter.

Hold the bowl over the muffin pan ``slots'' and very gently tip the bowl and pour the batter into the slots. First time or 2 will be a mess.

Finally, I chop some dried fruit over the muffins and pop the pan in the oven. I do the chopstick test: take a chopstick and see if it comes out clean, for me its 18min, but Brown says 15.