08.24.08
Posted in Cantonese cuisine, chinese, cooking, culture, food, non-casein, non-dairy at 2:27 pm by Hanne Blank
To celebrate my Belovedary’s recent birthday, as well as our 12th anniversary, and additionally to roll in the belated birthday celebration of a good friend of ours, I decided to make a Chinese-style feast for the four of us. Four is, to be honest, too small a number for a real banquet, as far as Chinese cookery goes. Chinese banquets usually run into the double digits in terms of numbers of courses, and are intended for large groups of friends or family.
Nonetheless, one can still have an awfully nice feast by following the general principles of Chinese banqueting, which is basically that one pulls out all the stops and acquires large quantities of meat, seafood, and poultry — sometimes very exotic things, or in very exotic preparations, depending on how impressive the banquet is to be. Meat is a traditional food for feasts and celebrations all over the world, and always has been, and it is surely the case in China. In fact, the focus of Chinese banqueting is so much directed toward the meat-fish-poultry end of the spectrum that in many cases, rice is not served at banquets despite its centrality to Chinese eating and culture, unless possibly at the end of the meal as a near-formality.
The message encoded in the absence of rice from the table is quite alien to a culture like ours where we are both very affluent and very fond of large slabs of meat as a central part of our eating (and don’t kid yourself that these aren’t related things), and unlikely to be perceived by Westerners who rarely eat rice anyway and for whom it does not occupy the same mental space as it does for most Asians and certainly for the Chinese. In China, you don’t ask a visitor if they are hungry, or if they have had lunch or dinner already, you ask “hee ca fan mai?” (Cantonese; the Mandarin is ni chi fan le ma?), which means, quite literally “have you eaten rice yet?” The same sentiment is a common greeting in other places too, notably Thailand. Like the word “bread” in the phrase “give us this day our daily bread,” rice is not just a food, rice is food.
When rice is absent from the table at a Chinese meal, it means that you are, at least temporarily, so prosperous and that you don’t have to think about the stuff — rice — that the common people use to fill their bellies. You can and in fact you are encouraged to do something that under normal circumstances has been almost unthinkable, both culturally and economically, for everyone but the highest of elites. You can eat your fill of meat.
(Yes, there are Buddhist banquets that are 100% vegetarian. Most are in fact vegan. And other Buddhist banquets that are vegetarian except for four or five types of seafood that are considered permissible. But even they are remarkably concerned with, and centered around, meat… albeit in the form of mock meats made from seitan, tofu, and various kinds of mushrooms and fungus. The symbolism of meat and prosperity, and meat and largesse, is insistent.)
It should thus come as no surprise that our four-person feast was a fiesta of animal protein.
Clockwise from upper middle: ginger-scallion oil for dipping, boiled dumplings with pork filling, white cut chicken, ginger-soy dipping sauce, roasted chili oil (in center), ginger-scallion explosion shrimp.
The least glamorous looking of these dishes is actually one of my favorites, white cut chicken. It is a Cantonese favorite, and the method of preparing it is one that makes many Western cooks look very worried indeed, although I have made it dozens of times without mishap. It is essentially a boiled whole chicken (you cut it into chopstickable pieces, with or without the bones still in as you prefer, to serve it), cooked with ginger and green onion. But what makes it special is that it is boiled only very briefly, so that it remains juicy and sweet and firm, rather than getting the stringy, cooked-to-death texture that is so common to boiled poultry otherwise.
I take mine off the bone, removing the meat in the largest pieces possible and then cutting them into chopstickable chunks, because I dislike the inevitable bone fragments that chopping through the bones (more traditional) generates. It is served with ginger-scallion oil and usually with soy sauce as well, for diners to dip the meat into as they like. It is a subtle and very pleasing dish, very treasured, and one of those traditionally served at ancestor worship rituals like Ching Ming and the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts.
Method for White Cut Chicken:
Take a small to medium-sized whole chicken, very fresh and of very good quality, plucked, drawn, cleaned, and well washed in plenty of cold water, and put it in a large pot. Fill the pot with cold water until the chicken is submerged to the depth of about 2 inches. Add a large bunch of green onions, cleaned and pared, and a three-inch chunk of peeled fresh gingerroot cut into thick coins. Place the pot over a brisk flame and bring to a full rolling boil. Let boil for about 5 minutes, then remove the pot from the heat, cover, and let cool until the chicken is cool enough to handle.
Note: this takes some time, usually several hours, but it depends on how warm or cool the room is. However, this is part of the cooking process! Residual heat helps ensure that your chicken is completely cooked. Don’t try to rush the cooling artificially, in other words. Just let it happen.
When the chicken is cool enough to handle, lift it out of the broth (this cooking liquid makes a wonderful base stock for many soups, as well as for congee, so don’t throw it away!) in a large wire scoop, or using two large slotted spoons. Put it in a shallow pan to let the liquid drain off. When it is no longer dripping wet, either cut it into manageable-sized pieces bones and all using a cleaver (remove the wings and legs, chop them crosswise into chunks, then cut along either side of the spine and flatten the torso, then cut it up), or else remove the meat from the bones in large pieces, then cut the large pieces into chopstick-ready ones. Generally, if you cut the bird up bones and all, you should leave the skin on. This is not possible when you are removing the meat from the bones.
Serve at room temperature or chilled.
A note about the above method: some cookbooks will tell you to place the chicken into a pot of already-boiling water, return it to a boil, and proceed from there. Sometimes they will not only do this but will also tell you to remove the chicken from the pot before it has cooled down as much as it should. I have tried this method and have never ended up with satisfactory results. All too often, plunging a raw bird into boiling water merely means that the outer margins of the bird get cooked instantaneously and come up to heat quickly, and the boiling water thus returns to a boil rapidly, but the water does not get hot enough for long enough to thoroughly cook the bird. It is very discouraging to start to cut up the chicken for serving only to find that it is still raw at the thickest bit of thigh or breast, and recooking, while possible, tends to dry out the meat. Putting the chicken into cold water and bringing it up to a boil ensures that the whole contents of the pot, including every cubic centimeter of that chicken, will come up to boiling temperature together. Likewise, having it stand in the hot water until the water and the chicken are cool enough to handle is part of the cooking process. This is not a dish to attempt if you don’t plan to be knocking around the house most of the day. The actual time you spend doing hands-on cooking is minimal, but the cooking time, strictly speaking, is extensive.
You serve white cut chicken with plain soy sauce, but also with what I think of as “mad scientist” or “magic” oil made with lots of ginger and green onion to complement the perfume of green onion and ginger from the cooking liquid.
Method for Ginger-Scallion Oil:
Combine 1/3 cup minced fresh raw ginger and 1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh raw green onions or scallions in a largish heatproof nonreactive bowl (ceramic or stainless steel are usually best). Heat 1 cup peanut, canola, corn, or other neutral-flavored oil (not olive oil) until it is just at the smoke point. Pour the
hot oil over the ginger and green onion: it will foam up and seethe and billows of fragrant steam will erupt from the bowl like the stereotypical mad scientist’s lab flasks or witch’s cauldron. Give it a gentle stir with a chopstick or a spoon and let it stand until it cools to room temperature, after which it should be covered. Leftovers should be refrigerated.
Leftover ginger-scallion oil can be used in a variety of ways, not least to flavor congee, plain rice, eggs, or tofu.
Tomorrow, if I get a chance, I will post again and write out my recipe for these:
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08.18.08
Posted in Uncategorized, cooking, culture, food, food allergies, non-casein, non-dairy, politics, salad dressings, salads, vegan, writing at 2:00 pm by Hanne Blank
Upon discovering my dairy allergy, one of the categories of things that immediately vanished from my food options was the category of the creamy dip or dressing. Mayonnaise, of course, was still an option, as were creamy-textured dips and dressings that had a mayonnaise base, since mayonnaise is an egg emulsion and not made with dairy products. But since it is frequently impossible to tell visually whether a dressing or dip that one is served at a restaurant or party is exclusively mayonnaise-based or whether it is dairy-based or as is often the case, made of some combination of dairy and mayonnaise, I quickly learned to just avoid anything that looked creamy.
This wasn’t a huge problem. I’d never been devoted to creamy dressings and dips. Then again I certainly had been known to enjoy roquefort or ranch salad dressings now and then, and once or twice a year would get a horrifyingly intense jones for the Lipton onion soup sour-cream-and-onion chip dip and would eat a whole pint of it over the course of a couple of days. It didn’t seem like so much to give up. Still, not having the creamy-dip/dressing option got annoying after a while, particularly after I started to realize just how many vinaigrette-style prepared salad dressings also contained ingredients I couldn’t eat, most commonly in the form of small amounts of cheese.
Oh, I know from vinaigrettes and egg-based dressings, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been making my own salad dressings on a fairly regular basis for years. I can coddle an egg or two for a Caesar salad with the best of them (I just leave out the parmesan, and add extra anchovies). But… well… sometimes you want something with a nice creamy mouthfeel. And you don’t necessarily feel like being bothered to coddle eggs to get it.
Enter Hollyhock Dressing. The recipe was given to me by my wonderful friend and darned good cook, Liza, who warned me, not a bit hyperbolically as it turns out, that the stuff is addictive. It really is. Hollyhock dressing is fantastic stuff. It’s garlicky. It’s savory. It’s vegan. It keeps well. It’s easy to make, providing you’ve got a blender. And it’s creamy.
Seriously, this stuff is so good that I rarely make less than a double batch at a time. Often, I make a triple batch.
The ingredients are simple and few.
For a single batch, you will require:
- 1/3 cup water
- 1/3 cup tamari (you can use soy sauce but the flavor isn’t as good)
- 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar (you can use red wine vinegar or cider vinegar or whatever vinegar you like, but the flavor will be accordingly different, and balsamic is so yummy I rarely mess with anything else)
- 1 cup olive oil
- approximately 1 bulb worth of peeled raw garlic cloves (I usually just use 15 cloves because I peel large quantities of garlic ahead of time)
- 1 cup nutritional yeast
The method, likewise, is a complete and utter cakewalk:
Whiz the liquid ingredients together in your blender with the garlic until the mixture is as smooth as you can get it. Add the nutritional yeast in thirds, whizzing it together in the blender each time, and scraping down the walls of the blender jar after each blending. At the end, blend the mixture for an additional minute or so, just to make sure everything is completely combined and completely smooth.
Note: if you make a double or triple batch, make each batch separately in the blender, to avoid overloading your blender jar. Pour them out into a large bowl and stir them together as you finish blending the batches, to ensure a uniform consistency and taste.
Store, refrigerated and covered, for 3-4 hours before serving, or preferably overnight. Let come back up to room temperature before you serve it, as the olive oil will thicken quite a bit when it’s cold.
One of the best things about Hollyhock Dressing is how versatile it is. It’s great on salad, of course, and brilliant as a dip for crudites. But it’s also a wonderful dip for hard-boiled eggs, and anything you might be prone to dip into aioli or anchoiade you can certainly dip into this, a list which very much includes good crusty bread. Additionally, Hollyhock Dressing has an amazing affinity for potatoes. Pour it over your baked potatoes, or, if you want your mouth to think it died and went to heaven, use it instead of butter/margarine/milk/faux-milk in your mashed potatoes.
Try it. You can thank me later. Or better yet, thank Liza, who gave me the recipe and thus brought great joy into my culinary life… and made it commonplace for my Belovedary, not normally much given to salad-eating, to request a big plate of salad with his supper.
I told you it was good.
(Full disclosure: This photo is of the salad I had for lunch… mixed greens (several lettuces, rocket, parsley, a couple kinds of basil) plus Corno di Toro pepper and two sliced Brandywine tomatoes. My Belovedary, poor thing, is allergic to raw tomatoes, so this is categorically Not His Salad.)
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08.03.08
Posted in allergy, cooking, food, food allergies, main dishes, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes, pasta, salads, vegan at 7:16 pm by Hanne Blank
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m allergic to casein, the protein in milk. So I’ve had to work out some ways to achieve the same culinary effects one can get from milk products without poisoning myself.
This recipe for what I call Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce is one of my favorites, because it is one of the most successful texture and mouth-feel replicas of the comfort-food original that I’ve yet come up with . A sauce based on nutritional yeast will never taste like a cheese sauce, not really. But if it’s creamy, smooth, savory, a little salty, and rich, it definitely pushes all the right buttons. The flavor provided by the yeast and Marmite (a yeast product), plus garlic and onion and plenty of mustard, is perhaps not quite cheeselike but it’s not quite not cheeselike, either.
As a bonus, it’s vegan, so there’s no cholesterol to worry about. And all the yeast means it’s bursting at the seams with B vitamins. It will keep reasonably well, although it doesn’t reheat quite as gracefully, texture-wise, as dairy mac and cheese does. (Still tastes good, though.)
I like to pair Mac and Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce with a particularly bright and somewhat acidic side dish to help cut the richness. Today I made an impromptu cucumber and cilantro salad in a spicy Asian marinade.
Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce
2 small onions, minced
3 cloves of garlic, crushed or minced very fine
10 Tablespoons vegan margarine
1 cup unsweetened, unflavored faux-milk of your choice (I usually use almond), thinned with 1/2 cup hot water
2 Tablespoons prepared mustard
4 Tablespoons creamy-style almond butter, cashew butter, or tahini
1 Tablespoon Marmite
1 1/2 cups nutritional yeast
1 Tablespoon ground dry mustard
Measure out the nutritional yeast and ground dry mustard in a bowl, and stir to combine. Set aside.
Melt the vegan margarine in a saucepan and add the onions. Saute the onions in the margarine until they are transparent, then add the garlic. While the onions are cooking, stir together the faux-milk/water mixture, the prepared mustard, the nut butter or tahini, and the Marmite until thoroughly combined. After you have added the garlic to the hot fat and onions, let it cook for about a minute, then add the liquid and stir everything well. Reduce heat to barely a simmer.
Add yeast/mustard mixture to the liquid slowly, using a whisk to combine. Once all the yeast/mustard mixture is added, whisk over low heat for about 2 minutes, then remove from heat and let stand for 5 minutes, stirring once or twice.
This provides enough sauce for a pound of elbow macaroni. Cook the macaroni until it is quite well done, or it will absorb too much liquid from the sauce and the sauce will lose its texture. Reserve a quarter cup or so of the pasta cooking water when you drain the pasta, and add it back into the dish a tablespoon or so at a time if this begins to happen.
Serve hot with plenty of freshly-ground black pepper.
Note: if you don’t like the slight lumpiness introduced by the onions, feel free to omit them, but they do add some dimension to the taste that I enjoy.
I love a good marinated salad, and I also love the southeastern Chinese (and indeed, pan-southeast-Asian) combination of cucumbers and cilantro and chiles — it is bright and sprightly and summery and delightful. Although, yes, probably not a dish for those people to whom cilantro tastes of perfumed soap. Of whom I am not one. Which is why I like to make a salad that goes a little something like this…
Spicy Cucumber and Cilantro Salad
5 Kirby cucumbers, small Asian cucumbers, or other firm-fleshed variety with few seeds (if you must use another variety, consider removing the seeds so the dish won’t get watery), peeled and sliced about 1/4 inch thick
2 teaspoons kosher salt
3 cups cleaned and dried cilantro (coriander) leaves
3 Tablespoons rice vinegar
2 Tablespoons Asian sesame oil
1 teaspoon Chinese chili paste (in oil) (or less if you do not care for a lot of heat)
Sprinkle sliced cucumbers with the salt and toss with your hands to combine. Let stand 15 minutes, then rinse well in several changes of water, and drain well (use a salad spinner if you have one). Toss the cucumbers with the cilantro leaves and add the vinegar, sesame oil, and chili paste. Toss well to combine, cover, and refrigerate for an hour or so before serving.
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07.31.08
Posted in Uncategorized, chinese, cooking, food, how to, ingredients, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes at 1:23 pm by Hanne Blank
I did a sort of scary thing last week, namely, I improvised a Chinese dish using a rather non-Chinese primary vegetable, the beet. It turned out well, so today I reenacted it, made a few measurements, and took a few pictures so I could share it.
Now, I am a big fan of beets, and so is my Belovedary, so I figured that even if it didn’t taste very Chinese it would probably be edible, and pleasant to us. But I spent a little while thinking about it, and doing my best to think through the properties of beetroot from a Chinese culinary perspective, and here is what I decided:
To the qualities sweet, dense, fibrous, and resilient I decided it would be good to add fibrous, bright, and hot in the form of ginger, and slippery, smooth, and pungent in the form of onion. (It’s no accident that these are often paired with beets in non-Chinese cooking, too!) I chose pork for the meat because it was what we had, and pork is also the fallback meat of Chinese cooking so it made sense from that perspective as well. Pork also has an enthusiastic affinity for sweetness that some other meats (seafood and beef especially) can lack. To ground it and bring it all together, I chose brown bean sauce, which is made from the lees of the soybeans fermented to make soy sauce, thinned with Chiankiang vinegar, a dark brown/black rice-based vinegar with a taste a lot like the more familiar grape-based balsamic vinegar.
The lineup of ingredients. Left to right, bottles: chiankiang vinegar, brown bean sauce, rice wine, soy sauce. On cutting board, clockwise from upper left: beets, onion, pork, garlic clove, ginger root.
Wok-cooking beets posed a problem. Because beets are so dense and fibrous, they take a fair amount of cooking, more than most vegetables that are traditionally wok-cooked. But I needed to be able to stir-fry them, with a minimum of needing to leave the beets sitting around for long periods in the wok, and I really didn’t feel like pre-cooking (although blanching small pieces would certainly have been another option, it was one I did not want to take).
Chinese cooks usually solve these kinds of cooking time problems via the expedient of knifework, and so I did the same, and simply peeled and julienned the three beets.
For the ginger, I thought a little trompe l’oeil was in order. Beets stain everything, and since it was obvious from the get-go that everything coming out of my wok tonight was going to be red, I figured it would be an amusing thing to have the ginger be visually indistinguishable from the beets. So I julienned a five-ounce piece of fresh ginger, making sure the pieces were of roughly similar size to the beets. As is probably obvious, ginger, in my house, is sometimes a vegetable, not just an aromatic flavoring. Those with Ginger Fear, be advised.
I wanted to highlight the slippery, smooth, yielding texture of the onions as a contrast to the firmness of the beets. I peeled and halved them, then sliced them pole-to-poleways into slices that were thin but not paper-thin, the better to have the heat of the wok soften them quickly, but so they’d still retain some tooth.
The pork I sliced against the grain into thin slices and marinated in 1 Tablespoon Xiao Xing wine, 2 teaspoons soy sauce, and a crushed garlic clove (this, to the Chinese tastebuds, clarifies the taste of meats, and almost all meats are marinated before cooking in some mixture involving wine/liquor, soy, and either ginger or garlic).
Last, I stirred together two Tablespoons of brown bean sauce and the same amount of Chiankiang vinegar and set it aside.
As the last step before I started cooking, I made sure my mise en place was all ready to roll… and then I fired up the wok and stopped taking pictures, because you can’t stir-fry and hold a camera at the same time.
I stir-fried the beets and ginger together, on the principle that the hardest vegetables go into the wok first. When the beets were getting to the crisp-tender stage and didn’t taste raw any more (this took about 3-4 minutes of cooking, I would guess), I put in the onions and tossed them well. The onions gave off some liquid which helped steam the beets and ginger quickly, and about two or three minutes later I removed the vegetables to a dish and reheated the wok to cook the pork.
Cooking meat separately, then adding it back into cooked (or mostly-cooked) vegetables is another classic Chinese technique. It is usually only with shellfish that the meat is added to the stir-fry wok when the vegetables are still in it. This makes a lot of sense: meat and vegetables require different cooking times, and meat also releases a lot of water when it cooks. Both the difference in cooking time and the additional water can ruin vegetables, so it is quite useful to do them separately.
Many recipes call for pre-cooking the vegetables until they are almost, but not quite, to the point of doneness that is desired, then cooking the meat, then adding the vegetables to the meat when the meat is 95% cooked, briefly stirring the two together to heat everything up evenly and finish the cooking process, then tossing with whatever flavoring or sauce finishes the dish. This allows the meat juices to become part of the dish without adversely affecting the cooking or the condition of the vegetables.
This is what I did tonight, adding the beet mixture back in when the pork had all become opaque and whitish. Then I poured in the brown bean sauce that I had prepared earlier, tossed it to combine everything properly, and we were done. To finish the dish off, I tossed in a small handful of cilantro leaves. You could use very finely diced green onion, if you prefer. The point of these little last-minute additions, in Chinese cookery, is to add color, a little bit of textural contrast, and brightness of flavor.
It was very tasty. The ginger masquerading as beets is very successful, both surprising (hey, that’s not a beet!) and a good partner with the beets, the heat of the ginger making the beets more exciting and the sweet earthiness of the beets standing up just fine to that amount of ginger. The onions were voluptuous. The sauce was tangy and salty and savory.
A plus: it turns the rice in your bowl BRIGHT RED! Which is exciting, and in a Chinese context, meaningful, as red is the color of happiness and prosperity and success.
Ingredients for Ruby Pork with Three Roots
- 3 medium beets
- 1 largish onion
- about 5 ounces by weight fresh ginger root
- about 4 ounces boneless pork (I used pork loin because that’s what I had, use a lean cut)
- 1 clove garlic
- marinade for pork: 1 crushed garlic clove, 1 T Xiao Xing wine or sherry, 2 t soy sauce
- sauce for dish: 2 T brown bean sauce, 2 T Chiankiang vinegar
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07.21.08
Posted in american, cooking, desserts, food, fruit, how to, ingredients, kitchen learning, original recipes at 8:08 am by Hanne Blank
I can’t be the first person who has wondered why the “forbidden fruit” of the Garden of Eden has always been assumed to have been an apple. I mean, apples aren’t exactly native to the Fertile Crescent. But more to the point, I think that if one takes as writ that the no-no-berry was an apple, it may mean that one has never properly reveled in the seductive virtues of cherries. Not that apples aren’t wondrous things. They are (and believe you me you’ll hear about them plenty when apple season rolls around). But really good fresh cherries, well… they’re just a whole different mouthgasm.
It may be that I inherited my love of cherries from my maternal grandmother. She is, in fact, the reason I started canning cherries every summer. She loves cherries, and especially sour or “pie” cherries, enormously, and eats them with huge enthusiasm in virtually any form: fresh, frozen, dried, canned, in syrup, as jam, as ice cream, whatever she can get her paws on. When she was younger and I was quite a bit younger still, she always seemed to have home-canned cherries on hand because she put some up every summer during the brief window when they were at their best. But by and by we both got older, and she eventually stopped canning as her house got emptier and her kids’ and grandkids’ lives got busier, and, I suspect, as she got to feeling less willing and able to haul around big pots of bubbling fruit and spend hours ministering to huge steaming cauldrons, glass jars, and a thousand and one jar lids.
Knowing how much she loved cherries, my mother and I would always try to remember to take her a big jar of Greek cherry preserves when we visited her — the Greeks use tart enough cherries, and not too much sugar, the way my grandmother prefers her cherries. But really, boughten is never quite the same as home-canned, and you can’t get the people at the factory to tailor the amount of sugar in the syrup to be precisely the way you like it. So I took it upon myself to become my grandmother’s canned pie cherry connection. Every summer but one since then, a year when the cherry harvest was very poor due to drought, I have canned cherries and given about half of what I can to her.
A few years ago, she acknowledged my cherry-canning role in her life by giving me her old, well-used cherry pitter, a 1950s-era piece of German engineering that does an admirable if not completely comprehensive job of knocking the stones out of pound upon pound of cherries. It’s a lot quicker than stoning them with a hairpin, which is what I do when I’m pitting only a pie’s worth of cherries, and having a pitter saves me untold repetitive stress injury when I’m stoning more than the five cups required for a pie. As it did this weekend, when my Belovedary and I went out to Larriland Farm, our favorite of the regional you-pick farms, and picked close to 35 pounds of pie cherries for the annual cherry jubilee.
This, I should note, is not even the whole of it. This plastic container will house an entire bundt cake with room to spare, but it’ll only hold about 25 pounds of pitted cherries and their juice. We had to put the rest in a separate container.
The first thing I did with my cherries, however, was not to can them. Instead I heeded nature’s call and made a pie.
It was very very hot and humid, near a hundred degrees, and so of course my pie crust refused categorically to behave despite having been chilled in the refrigerator for a bit. It kept going to pieces the instant I tried to move it to put it in the pan, so I decided to fall back to the eternal piemaker’s default position: slapping the broken pieces of rolled out crust into the pan as it was possible, pressing the overlapping edges together so it wouldn’t leak too much, and generally doing a yeomanly job of working with what you have to work with. I have had to learn to call the results of such pie crust shenanigans “rustic,” you see, for despite the inherent untruth in claiming that any farmwife worth her salt wouldn’t laugh her nipples off at the idea that she’d ever lower herself to serving (let alone photographing and putting on the internet!) a pie whose crust looked like it had had an interaction with the business end of an outboard motor, lots of people seem to have been decieved into thinking that “rustic” necessarily means that things are a bit unfinished, rough around the edges, or downright ragged, and furthermore that this represents an added bonus of “authenticity” and “realness.” I have in point of fact been in bakeries where a “rustic” apple galette cost twice what the presumably urban apple pie did, despite the fact that they were basically the same damn dessert and the “rustic” version took less skill and expertise to create, what with not having to trim or crimp the piecrust and all.
I have, as may be obvious, some issues with this. On the other hand it lets me smile when I serve a pie that is rather less pretty than I would ideally prefer, and have my guests ooh and ah over it, so I suck it up and claim rusticity.
If you would also like to claim rusticity — although honest, it usually doesn’t behave so badly, and won’t if your kitchen is cooler and less humid than mine was — my basic recipe for a slightly sweet double-crust pie crust (for a 9 or 10 inch pie plate), which I use for fruit pies where the fruit is slightly tart, is as follows:
Sweet Pie Crust (double crust for 9-10 inch pie)
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 Tablespoons sugar
10 Tablespoons butter or vegan margarine (I like Earth Balance, do not use tub margarines, though, as they have too high a liquid content), diced and very cold
10 Tablespoons solid vegetable shortening (e.g. Crisco), diced and very cold
5 Tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons ice water
Stir the dry ingredients together. Cut in the two fats with two knives (if you are seriously old-school, which I am not), or a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Add the water a tablespoon at a time, incorporating it with a fork and using a folding motion. Since the water content of flour varies, it may come together before you have added all the water. When it comes together, keep working the dough with your fork to incorporate as much of the rest of the dryish mixture as you can that way without using your hands (the heat from your hands liquifies the butter, which impairs the texture). Only if you absolutely have to should you use your hands to press/knead in the remaining bits of fat/flour mixture.
Cut it in slightly uneven halves (one “half” should be a little bigger than the other), shape into discs about 5 inches diameter, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 20 minutes or so to let the dough hydrate evenly and to re-chill the butter. When you go to roll it out, the bigger half is for the bottom crust and the smaller is for the top crust. If you have left it in the fridge for more than about a half an hour you will need to let it warm up for 5-10 minutes before you roll it or it will just crumble and you will be sad.
Of course, now that you’ve got the crust made, you might as well fill the pie, right? Fortunately fresh fruit fillings go together quickly, assuming you’ve already prepped the fruit. Since we’d already done our pitting, making the filling was (if you’ll pardon my saying this) easy as pie. There are plenty of ways to make cherry pie filling, but this is mine, a slight variation on my grandmother’s version.
Filling for Cherry Pie
5 slightly heaped cups fresh pitted tart cherries, juice drained off
1 cup sugar
5 Tablespoons Minute Tapioca
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/4 teaspoon (or so) nutmeg, freshly ground preferred
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Toss fruit with sugar, tapioca, and flavorings/spices. Let stand about 10 minutes before filling pie crust. Stir again to thoroughly distribute sugar etc. before filling the pie crust.
Note: if you do not have Minute Tapioca, but do have regular pearl tapioca, just put 6 T of pearls in your blender jar or (clean!) coffee grinder and whiz until it is mostly powder with only a small percentage of tiny pieces. That’s all Minute Tapioca is anyway, really, is tinier pieces of regular tapioca.
I know that some people like to thicken their pies with flour or cornstarch, but I have never found them as reliable or as clear-tasting as tapioca. Do be aware that tapioca thickens, in part, as it cools, so pies will still bubble over sometimes, and will also still be runnier/juicier when they are warm than when they are cool. If you like a firmer pie filling, then by all means wait until the pie is completely cool.
Because we’d also gotten blueberries at the farm, and I was heating up the oven for cherry pie anyway, I decided also to make a blueberry pie. It was a little rustic, too.
My blueberry pie filling is slightly different to my cherry pie filling.
Filling for Blueberry Pie
6 cups fresh blueberries, washed, cleaned, and dried
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on sweetness of the blueberries
5 Tablespoons MInute Tapioca
1 teaspoon ground dried lemon peel or the zest of 1/2 fresh lemon, minced fine
1 teapoon ground cinnamon
juice of 1/2 fresh lemon, strained
Toss berries with sugar, tapioca, and spices/zest. Add lemon juice and toss again. Pour directly into pie crust (does not need to stand).
These pies, with tall glasses of iced tea, served as a truly decadent lunch for us and for our friends who came over in the afternoon to share in some canning. They’d made a sour cherry compote that they wanted to put up, and we, of course, had a fairly large quantity of cherries to process. (And for anyone clucking their tongues at the thought of people eating pie for lunch, I’m just sorry for you that you’ve evidently never had the chance to eat fresh warm homemade fresh fruit pie as a meal, because if you had, you wouldn’t be making that face. Which you should probably stop doing before it freezes that way and you have to go through the entire rest of your life looking like someone just took a shit on your carpet. I’m just sayin’.)
And so we did. The large jars are quarts, the small jars with the white caps are twelve-ounce jars, and the small jars with the gold caps are pint jars. My grandmother gets all the small jars of cherries. The darker jars at the right end of the counter are the cherry compote jars. Plus there were almost three quarts of cherry juice left over, but I didn’t bother canning that, just poured it into refrigerator jars… and into me, and my Belovedary, and our guests, over ice.
Come February or so, when I am going a little insane because there just isn’t any fresh fruit in the market worth eating that hasn’t been shipped 10,000 miles (and I’m sorry but I just have problems eating supposedly “fresh” food that is better-traveled than I am), I will be able to head down to the cellar and come up with a couple of jars of cherries and, if I so choose, make myself a pie in the middle of the winter. Or possibly I will do exactly the same thing that my grandmother does with the jars I give to her, and just sit down, pop off the lid, and eat them with a spoon.
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