Peared Up

Pear pie; Possibility or am I crazy? Pearity

If pear pie were as easy as apple pie, it would be as common. The problem or the problatunity is with the moisture in pears – the fruit stores a lot of it and it releases during the cooking process. This isn’t an insurmountable obstacle in pie making but it does add a degree of difficultly that you won’t find with your pumpkin, your apple or your pecan pie(s).

There are a few things you can do to work around the moisture in pears. You can use a thickening agent – instant tapioca, gelatin, agar-agar, cornstarch or flour. You can line the bottom of your pie pastry with something to absorb the excess moisture in pears – streusel, breadcrumbs, pulverized cookies, Nabisco Vanilla Wafers, gingersnaps or even the cookie-like graham crackers will all help mitigating the soggy crust.

Better yet, cook the pears and the piecrust separately. Unfortunately, there are lots of people who feel this is cheating. People will claim in scratch cooking, a cook, a true cook would know how to bring everything together in one unified dish. Although this isn’t my battle, in our culture we have elevated opinions to the point, that how someone feels about something is more important than the given, verifiable outcome. It is great people have opinions on what real cooking is, I know I do - Most involve an aversion of canned broth. Fact is, that cooking apples or pears before you add them to the crust will make a better pie – less moisture means the crust will be flakier and with less steam given off by the fruit during cooking – your top crust won’t get all volcano-y on you.

For a 9 inch pie, I would get 6-7 pears. Peel and core, slice the pears, the fruit is softer than the familiar apple, so it can be sliced thicker - cut into ½ inch lengths. Place in sauté pan with 1/3 cup sugar, 1 Tablespoon butter, a pinch of salt and 2 T of pear brandy. Cook over medium heat until the excess moisture dissolves. Sift in 4 Tablespoons cornstarch or tapioca over warm fruit while stirring and add to your piecrust – top with pastry, streusel, crumbled cookie/brown sugar mixture, or lattice and place into a preheated oven. The fruit filling can be flavored with cinnamon or ginger but the this isn’t a spice pie, you can let the pears be themselves.

Better yet, skip the pie and tart you pears up. Tarts are pretty much the opposite of a pie – consisting or 3 separate parts: Poached Pears, pastry cream and a sweetened crust – pate sucree or shortbread. On the upside they are elegant, the crust is very forgiving and because you are cooking each part separately, tarts are immune to soggy crusts, hard fruit and weepy fillings. More on that next week.

Atlas Hugged

Cheese monger, writing teacher, former Michener Fella, tireless promoter of poetry and Friend of Saucyman, Matthew Dickman took home the Oregon Book Award this week. No doubt Matthew is getting the award mounted on gold chains so he can wear it around town.

Big congratulations to Matthew, who in the last 12 months or so has been featured in the New Yorker, had his first book published, was nominated for and won the Oregon Book Award and best of all was interviewed here on the Saucyblog, which undoubtedly started the poemomentum that he rode through 2009. You can link back to the interview here and catch up on your Matthew facts and opinions.

The success of Matthew is a big deal. The emotion I feel, it is like shadenfradue, except for I am happy for him – the Germans don’t really have a word for sharing pleasure in other’s fortune. Well, that not a lot of other food news to report on: Okay, McDonald’s is withdrawing from the apparently not so lucrative Icelandic fast food market. The Big Mac is no longer available in the land of Björk Guðmundsdóttir – yes, she does have a last name, albeit not really a pronounceable one. For bonus points, name another Icelander who will not be able to go to the golden arches.

And the flu is still keeping me a bit underpowered, but tomorrow there will be a brand new post, answering your questions about the world of food.

Pieity

Saucyman – ‘As American as Pie’, is pie really that American? – Pat Buchanan

Jingoists be damned, the word is English. Mostly. In the 14th Century, the English language was the first to use the word pie to describe a meat or sweet filling baked in a pastry. Less English sounding, is piehus, which dates back to 1109, a term used to describe a place that sold pastry. Just to complicate the etymology – around the same time pie was being used to describe pastry, a pie also came to be the abbreviation for magpie – a bird that has a reputation for eating anything and whose nests are lined with little odds and ends, much like a pie is composed of scraps and leftovers.

So pie, the word, has its roots in Chaucer’s English. But there is such a thing as an American pie. Yes, American pies are have a reputation for sweetness but the pie’s Americanness has more to do with its importance in the colonists diet than its composition. When the colonists – Scots, Welch, Cornish, the very people who established US food traditions, first arrived in the States, the things they had traditionally used in their cookery, items like flour and milk were rare. As were proper brick ovens or even the tin lined ovens (called Dutch ovens) that were built into hearths. This made bread baking a tad problematic. Pies used less flour and could be baked in a pan with a lid over an open fire. Because of their ease and utility, pies quickly became a mainstay of the American kitchen, more likely to be found than bread. It remained this way for centuries.

The abundance of apples in the New England states/colonies made apple pie an early favorite – A pie that nativist hold as being especially American – A baking technique imported onto native shores, made with the apple varieties that didn’t exist in the old world became symbolic of cultural purity. Sweet Potato pie would be a better example of Americanism or possibly Shoofly pie – a sweet, thick pie based on the thrift of inexpensive molasses (& considering why molasses was cheap…), this pie could also be held up as an especially American pie.

Before I cracked open the books, I was expecting to find pie’s etymology to be roughly English. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find historically a pyghe was some sort of eel and squab concoction baked in a suet crust. It was a nice reminder to realize, that recipes like words, change, evolve, and come to reflect influences of the people who use them, sure let’s call pies American.

Do-Tella

Saucynut – What can you tell me about hazelnuts or as I like to say filberts – Squirrelly

Hazelnuts are the fruit of the hazel tree. And by tree, I mean a shrubby, low growing tree that is often used as a field break or an edible hedgerow. The hazelnut’s cultivation dates back to at least Roman times but the Romans weren’t the first to crack this nut. The tree seems to be from Asia minor/Turkey, it has been exploited for food since prehistoric times. After the fall of the empire, hazelnuts weren’t really used as crops in Europe until the end of the 16th century, where the English began growing the trees outside of Kent. About the same time, New World colonists were unimpressed with wild nut available to them in the Americas and sent back to England for better fruiting varieties.

It wasn’t just Anglo-Saxons who took to the hazelnut renaissance. The French enjoy their noisette and possibly named the nut in after St. Phillbert the Norman King. The Italians grow the nocciola outside of Piemont and for other Europeans, there is nutella to spread on everything. Turkey is the world’s leading producer of hazelnuts with Italy, Spain making significant contributions to the annual crop. In the US, hazelnuts are grown almost exclusively in Oregon.

Nutella is an obvious hazelnut product, but outside of the familiar oval jar the combination of chocolate, sugar and hazelnuts are a winning combination in the pastry kitchen. Frangelico is a hazelnut flavored liquor. The nuts turn up in Sauce Romesco, in Turkish Delight/lokum. Hazelnut oil is expensive and quick to spoil, but makes for really good salad dressing. Torrone is a hazelnut nougat found in Italy and Dukka is a hazelnut spread used in Egyptian cuisine.

Some sources swear hazelnuts and filberts, commonly used as synonyms, are not really interchangeable. A hazelnut is generally regarded as the wild nut; while the filbert, the larger nut that has been cultivated from European varieties. This usage isn’t universally endorsed, consistently applied and is really more of an opinion than immutable rule.

The classification problem isn’t the exclusive problem of the filbert. The taxonomy of all nuts is a difficult proposition. What makes a nut a nut? A shell? Explain coconuts or pine nuts. Brazil nuts are not the fruit of a tree but a swollen stem. Walnut, pecan and acorns all act like nuts – shells, trees, clusters of nuts are easy to classify. Chestnuts look and act like nuts, except they store most of their energy as starch as opposed to fat. The almond, which is fatty, but is rather confusingly a member of the non-nutty prunus (cherry/peach) family. Peanuts are both tubers and legumes - not nuts at all, except people with nut allergies avoid them assiduously.

Chill Out?

Saucyman – Is vichyssoise an authentic soup? - What is the Soup of the Day?

Yes, it fits in a bowl, it is liquid and it can be spooned in the most loving way. Serving the combination of potatoes and leeks chilled should disqualify the dish from the soup category – I have just never been able to get behind the concept of chilled soups – Ever notice how gazpacho would make a real good drink base. But vichyssoise doesn’t have to be served cold – it isn’t revenge, it is soup.

Maybe the more specific question at hand - Is the soup authentically Vichy? Vichy is a town in South Central France - For centuries the town was famous for its waters, both mineral and holy. For about 4 years Vichy was the seat of the collaborative Nazi Government in France. Guess which one Vichy is currently associated with?

Vichy was so identified with the Nazi, that various expat chefs attempted to rename the soup Crème Gauloise in the early 1940s - if they had only chosen Freedom Soup. The soup’s creator, Louis Diat, avoided using the name Vichyssoise in his own cookbook. But it didn’t matter, the name had stuck; potato leek soup is vichyssoise, vichyssoise is potato leek soup. Although the word has evolved since it was first used in the early 20th century, vichyssoise now has a more generic use to describe any chilled, pureed soup…a vichyssoise of white beans and sweet onions. BTW – not defending the usage, only reporting on it.

Maybe the bigger question is: Is vichyssoise even French? Chef Diat, was the rarest ingredients in America’s melting pot, A Franco-American, making he and Boyardee the odd émigrés. Diat was born in the greater Vichy area but created his soup while serving at New York’s Ritz-Carlton. Second hand sources report Diat was inspired by a hot soup his own dear Mama made when he was a young Frenchman. Diat’s contribution to this new soup was the chilling and the chive garnish.

A French Chef, inspired by French ingredients reinvents a dish from his French youth. This means of course that vichyssoise is…American, or thought of largely as an American preparation. Diat began serving the dish in New York either in 1914 or 1917. By 1923 La Revue Culinaire identified the dish as an American soup. This isn’t a case of giving credit where credit is due, here American means a bastardization of French technique and style.

As the rain outside my window and the shortening days reinforce, summer is gone and with its departure goes the temptation to chill soup. Potatoes, leeks and cream is a pretty winning combination - go straight to the source, Diat’s mother and serve the soup hot, on a chilly day – Makes more sense than chilled on a hot day.

Locanomonics

The NY Times Freakonomics Blog has been posting findings from Texas State University historian and author of the book, Just Food, James McWilliams. In 3 posts, Mr. McWilliams is looking behind the feel-good patina of localism to see if the math backs up the emotion.

His work is interesting, in a mathy, wonky-policy Type of way. If you don’t have the time or interest in reading the trilogy of posts, McWilliams' findings boil down to this paragraph.

…Sustainably produced local food is not accessible by all. In general, only the elite few with the time and material resources to capitalize on such environmental munificence have the time and money to benefit from transparently sustainable farms. As a result, the preconditions are inadvertently established for something that generally tends not to bind diverse communities into a cozy whole, but to fragment them: exclusivity.

McWilliams argues that the current locavore movement exists for the few, the proud - the citizen shoppers with disposable incomes.

Fair enough and so what.

A group of middle-class citizens got together to use public space, create events and to inspire, sustain and revive the craft of the small farm. If the closest these people have ever been to manure is reading an essay about it in a Wendell Berry book, how is this bad? What is wrong with supporting choices that are important to you as a consumer? Isn’t that what rational markets are all about?

If the sole purpose of promoting local food has been so Farmers Market supporters can get pesticide free berries, organic tomato juice for Bloody Mary’s and free range bacon for a weekly brunch where people talk about their children’s Montessori activities and how awesome Obama is - the locavore movement should be consider wildly successful. People went out and created a marketplace that reflects their values. The fact that Farmers Markets and local foods don’t solve everyone’s food security problems isn’t the fault or the problem of the local foods ‘movement’.

This is like an economist complaining despite all the local and municipal resources that go into building a church – easements, roads, sewer, traffic management, tax abatements, that outside of a couple of AA meetings, the only community the church really serves are people in that particular denomination.

Access to local foods isn’t going to solve every problem in the current food supply system. But a strong, local, food economy where growers, farmers and ranchers are supported might be very good today. And in 10 years: When the cost of fuel and agricultural inputs are so high the cost of transporting the fruits of monoculture 1,000 of miles is prohibitive or impossible, all local residents might very well be grateful a group of concerned citizens promoted and supported small scale, local agriculture and worked to develop a market for those goods long before it was a necessity.

Just sayin.

EL Cider

Previously on Saucyman…

I addressed what my favorite eating apple was. Secretly, it is the Honeycrisp, but I almost always answer Pink Lady, in part because it is a good apple but mostly because it is fun to say. But why just have one favorite apple there are lots of good ones? Why just use the apples for eating? Orchards haven't been cared for just solely so we could eat something out of hand nor give Neruda an object to ode upon, apples have been called upon for many different functions.

Different varieties are have been propagated to for canning, drying, tempting Adam, for baking, cooking & saucing and for the making of cider. By cider, I mean the hard, fermented drink - not unpasteurized apple juice. Although the latter will ferment all by itself, but this natural process adds more of an effervescent bite than high alcohol content. It is the secondary fermentation, coaxed along by human hands, that makes hard cider.

In the 18th Century US, apple orchards were kept for making cider. 'Orchard' and 'kept' imply some sense of order that didn't really exist. In early US history, apples came from near wild strands of trees, 1000s to 10,000s of trees left in a semi-feral state. Since each apple seed is a new potential variety - these largely untended trees would have produced countless varieties. All the apples were gathered up and pressed together as a way to preserve apples and have something to drink. And in an economy that didn't always see, trust or use cash currency, cider was a popular bartering item.

While throwing everything in the press together seems chaotic, especially to brewers and vintners, cider requires a balance of apples to produce superior results. Cider apples fall in 4 different categories: bittersweet - tannic but low in acid; sweet - low tannin, low acid; Bittersharp - high tannin, high acid; and Sharp low tannin, high acid. All are used in combination to produce quality cider.

Cider suffered greatly in the 20th century. First a wave of German immigration, along with refrigeration, rail based distribution turned beer in the national, low-alcohol drink. Prohibition took its toll - making sales illegal for years and with the loss of industry came the loss of the institutional knowledge it takes to produce quality cider. After its repeal, a generation of children who were raised on soft drinks rather than cider, preferred to stick with what they grew up with. And later in the century farm subsidizes would encourage farmers to rip out garden patches and orchards and indulge in monoculture.

Well all of that and the emergence of the banana. As the apple declined in importance, a highly perishable fruit, grown in the tropics, transported thousands of miles became the preferred, portable healthy snack food. Amazingly displacing a fruit that can be grown in almost every part of the US and enjoys an incredibly long shelf life.

21st century is seeing a bit of an apple renaissance. The micro/craft brew movement has helped train a new generation of cider makers. The Red Delicious is having its supremacy challenged from new varieties and old faves being revived - As consumers try new apples it is hard to go back to the Red Delicious - whose name is half true anyway, it is red.

Apple of Mine

What is your favorite kind of apple to eat out of hand? – Pome Fan

My local Farmers Market offered dozens of different apples yesterday, the main Market will carry 100s of different apples on any given autumn Saturday, which is still only a fraction of the 7,000 or so apple varieties that are cultivated. The selection is overwhelming, especially considering until very recently almost all apples were either red or green.

My Market friends tell me the Honeycrisp is the most popular apple with their customers. The apple is well, honey sweet with a crisp bite. A relatively new hybrid, the fruit is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota, created in the early 80s. Like a lot of Midwesterners, the apple had to head west to come into its own. Popular with growers in both California and Oregon and more importantly, Washington, which is the US’s leading apple producing state, and is pretty much to orchards as Iowa is to corn fields.

Like market goers, I really like the Honeycrisp. But there are others; the Baldwin is a good apple, which on a quality scale is closer to Alex than Billy. Arkansas Black, Braeburn and the cidery Winesap are all noteworthy apples. I am pretty much willing to try any apple but I sometimes wonder if I am paying not so much for quality and flavor, as novelty. A little more mainstream - I am very fond of the Pink Lady. I actually like the flavor and texture but people constantly accuse me of what I really enjoying is saying Pink Lady – Not really an invalid critique either, the fruit does sound prurient but tastes good – sweet with a cidery bite.

Bridging the gap between the popular apples and the fruits with the smaller, critically acclaimed following is the Gala. The apple has as much indie cred as New Zealand’s other export, the Flight of the Conchords. The Gala is cross between the Golden Delicious and Kidd’s Orange Red. Created in the 1920s but not introduced nurseries until the 60s, the apple has cider-like nuances and a good firm flesh.

Red Delicious is still the number one apple sold and grown in the US. As I have touched on before, taste is a minor consideration in selecting varieties of produce to grow and bring to market. Storage and the ability to ship will trump the floral nuance of an esoteric heirloom variety every time. Red Delicious, a mealy, tasteless apple is an important export to the burgeoning Asian market. And is still a big seller domestically, grocery chains buy up the variety knowing the likelihood of one bad apple destroying a batch is minimal considering how durable the apple is.

But the Red Delicious is loosing market share as consumers demand more flavor. The aforementioned Gala, Pink Lady along with the Fuji – apples grown from stock developed in Asia and Australia/New Zealand are becoming more popular at the same time traditional apples – numerous varieties that all seem to have ‘Jon’, ‘Pippin’ or ‘Spy’ worked into their names are being revived.

Next Saucyman we will address what happened to all those apples Johnny Appleseed planted.

Chocolate Gain

Maybe your 401(k) is a shadow of its former self but restoring your financial health could be as close and convenient as a candy bar: Both sugar and cocoa have been trading near historical highs this October.

Cocoa’s prices spiked this week as reports that world’s largest producer of cacao, the Ivory Coast, would be harvesting 14% less cacao in 2009 than 2008. With predictions of El Niño weather patterns affecting Indonesia’s crop - accompanying drought conditions could curtail the harvest from the world’s third largest grower. Prices spiked to a generational high of $3000 + per metric ton as dealers compete to secure a piece of a predicted shortfall.

While speculation and pre-programmed ‘buy orders’ are additionally responsible for the rise in the chocolate's price; the spike in sugar’s cost may be more attributable to the more classic economic formulation of supply and demand. Rain in Brazil, drought in India, protected markets in the US are partially to blame for demand exceeding supply by as much as 5 million tons in 2010.

Added to the production woes, many beverage and confection companies are placing greater demands on the sugar supply as they return from using the price stable, heavily subsidized corn syrup to sugar. Many analysts see value in products that are made of pure cane sugar – these foods are bizarrely thought of as healthy/healthier alternatives to those fueled by corn syrup. Along with the ability to add value to their products in the short term, companies are currently returning to sugar in order to prefect formulas/recipes and secure long-term contracts before an inevitable so called fat-tax is enacted on corn-based sweeteners.

An economic downturn might mean budgeting away pints of Ben & Jerry’s but candy bars along with alcohol and lottery tickets seem to be pretty recession proof. The same forces that are brutally punishing Starbucks and massively rewarding McDonalds seem to be at play here. A combination of low-cost indulgence coupled with the understanding sugar is pretty comforting have fueled candy makers profits over the last 2 years. Confectioners by in large remained profitable for the duration of the Great Depression as candy was both a low-cost source of caloric energy and a comfort in uncertain times. People intuitively understand this phenomenon, as candy has been used to treat countless smaller, more personal depressions.

Rising profits for confectioners, soaring prices for the raw commodities and a market that remains willing to pay for small comforts makes this year’s trick or treat windfall all the more precious. My advice, something you will never hear from Jim Cramer, this Halloween, hand out bundled derivative mortgage futures to the young ghouls and goblins - Save the snickers for yourself, you’ll be holding on to the more valuable investment.

Oxy-Moronic

When does a cupcake become a cake? Size Matters

Last season on Ace of Cakes attempted to bake the world’s biggest cupcake. Cookware stores are selling giant cupcake pans. Last week, big-ass cupcakes were sighted & reported on in both the Northeast and down by Florida. Just when it was safe for smaller portions, as price and caloric pressures are the dominant consideration in food trends, huge cupcakes or as I like to call them, cakes, are everywhere this year.

I’m not a stickler about definitions. Words should first and foremost convey a meaning, create emotional and intellectual understanding, these are far more important than the exact dictionary usage of individual words. I’m especially casual about spoken language, which is far more flexible than its written counterpart (Web-ease, txting and twittering falling somewhere in between). Still my long dormant inner scold was awakened by the concept of full figured, plus-sized cup cakes.

I’m not sure there can be a giagundo cup cake – by definition this is a cake that is cup-sized or made from ingredients measured by a cup. The word cupcake was first used in 1828, when author Miss Leslie used the term to describe her White Cup Cake. Her cake, a smaller version of a pound cake – the cup is both a measurement (one cup of sugar, milk, butter & 4 cups of flour) and a presentation (the batter was baked in a cup-shaped pan).

Rather than reading me rant-on about word usage, which is really a false outrage, instead enjoy The Onion’s consistently funny, generally annoyed Amelie Gillette as she shakes her fist at a completely different aspect of the giant cupcake.

It used to be that the American Dream was self-sufficiency: to own your own home, or build your own successful business from the ground up. Now the American Dream is to bake a cupcake big enough for you to live inside, breathing only cupcake, eating only cupcake, trying to drink only cupcake, until you suffocate inside the mushy, sticky, sugary embrace of your very own giant cupcake tomb.

Well said Amelie, well said.

Um, Clarification

Deadlines are powerful enticements. Amazingly, artificial deadlines work just as well as the real-life deadlines with actual consequences. The Saucyman blog was started as a way to make sure I was constantly writing and trying to improve my craft. Being thoughtful though, always a challenging task, is more difficult with 2-3 updates a week. I get about 3 hours to read, research, write, edit and correct each post. On really good days, a draft sits overnight or 24 hours and I get to come back and revise & correct a draft with fresh eyes. On bad days, I throw a post up without taking the time to be careful and accurate.

The other day, apparently I was either a little rough on hunters or wasn’t quite as clear as I could have been. I actually like hunters. I find the activity honest, true. I don’t conflate fall hunting with Bambi killing. It is just not my thing, nor is football, the novels of Ayn Rand, expensive cars, REI shoppers, public radio subscribers and the list goes on…it is always easier to articulate the issues that divide people than affirm what unites us, which is part of the problem.

The current culture war mentality tells us that there are 2 types of people - hunters and candy-assed, urban dwellers who are scared of guns. I refuse to play that game - the world is far more complex than either/or scenarios. Even if the vast majority of gun owners are respectful, careful and contentious – there are certainly enough who aren’t. For the 300,000 hunting permits issued in California annually, there are roughly 13 hunting related injuries, statistically 2 of which are fatal.

Actuarially, hunting is a reasonably safe pastime, on par with heart attacks in recreational sports. Even so there are still people who never should be allowed near a loaded gun. Best example: Dick Cheney’s quail farm experience (no permit, private land) where beer drinking, loaded weapons and shooting at birds with clipped wings lead to farcical outcomes. Yet this style of hunting is presented as a more manly activity than oh, I don’t know, reading books on a couch.

It is ridiculous to pretend that every hunter is noble, respectful and Natty Frickin Bumppo just because they kill their own prey. I take a serious amount of grief for being an urban living, small dog owning, martini sippin’, vegetable loving resident of these United States. Even so it doesn’t give me the right to be snarky or unfair to the people who aren’t my enemies, but are constantly pitted against me.

To share a meal - both the food itself and the act of cooking for others is a rare act of unity in an increasingly fractured society. I want to encourage the love of food and inform about the kitchen arts - to do so in a manner that is funny and entertaining. Funny is the harder one because funny is sometimes goes hand-in-hand with meanness. Still, I think I missed my mark a little the other day, was lazy, went for an easy joke, rather than working a little harder for a better result. I apologize.