Baking & Desserts

Strawberries were early this year by about three weeks. And from the gate they were sweet and juicy  in tastings that I had in late May.  Maxwell’s is the earliest producer in our area and his berries have been wonderful.  I’ve been buying them at from Jordan’s Farm who packs the quart containers over the top so you’re getting a big quart box of berries.  This year they’re priced at $7.95.  Jordan’s own berry season is just beginning and early berries are in the shop now.

Boxes of local berries at Jordan’s Farm

So far I’ve made all kinds of pies and cobblers with the berries. On the main page of the blog put “strawberry pie” in the search box and you’ll get 19 recipes (some repeats) for strawberry desserts. Two of my favorites are uncooked berries folded into a thick strawberry sauce. (see link: https://thegoldendish.com/2019/06/26/two-great-strawberry-pies-timeless-classics-that-deserve-to-be-made-in-summer/#more-4355

Strawberry pie made with Sprite

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The Times cooking app is ubiquitous.  Everywhere you click you can come across  recipes from it. I see friends’ postings on Facebook extolling their wonderfulness as easy-peasy splendor.  But they’re not all created equal.  And I’ve prepared many a NYTimes Cooking  recipe that fostered these two reactions: “Not worth the bother,” and “nothing to write home about” –and the sheet pan dinners.  Please put a hold on these for a while.

There are a few that have been wonderful, mostly baking recipes, which I favor. My least favorite are the pasta recipes.  But I’m not an ardent pasta fan.

On the “like a lot said side” is a butter cookie that must be made with cultured salted butter; they’re terrific.  And the best feature is the Saved Recipe  section where you can get to them readily by typing in the search bar the recipe name or category.  One that I had made long while back was the the famous pound cake from Detroit.

Otis Lee’s Detroit Pound Cake, NYT

Some work out beautifully and others are complete failures.  I don’t know what happened to the line editing process at the Times because some recipes are not edited for clarity, as though line or  copy editors were let go.

Sliced cheesecake

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The distinctiveness of this pie is its crust: made from fairly finely crushed saltine crackers (best with  the original Keebler Saltines)  and moistened with melted butter until it holds together so you can pat it into a pie plate. Chill it a bit and then bake for about 15 minutes until it’s lightly brown.

When I first posted this pie on Facebook I had lots of comments, one in particular that said “How low can you go.”  At first I wasn’t not sure what that meant.  But then I took it to mean that it was a fulsome stab at cooking economically, resorting to cracker crumbs for a crust.  But this crust makes the pie as does its simple  filling that take minutes to make.  The result is a pie with a flavor  profile of sweet, salt and sour. I loved this pic so much that I made it a second time a few days later.  It was in that second version  where I made changes.  The first time the crust fell apart because I hadn’t crushed the crackers fine enough and I added more melted butter so the crumbs would hold up better.  I’ve actually seen some versions where the cracker crust is rolled out like a standard pie dough.

Here the pie is covered with lightly whipped cream; some versions use meringue

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I’ve decided that Shaw’s is my least favorite supermarket of the Big Three (Whole Foods, Hannaford and Market Basket). My reasons were firmly planted after a visit to the Falmouth Route 1 Shaw’s recently where I went to buy two items: Hershey’s cocoa and Karo light syrup.   I’ve never done a complete shop at any Shaw’s. Though if you want to finish fast, the Shaw’s at Westgate Shopping Plaza in Portland is the best because hardly anyone is in there. But I was in Falmouth and it was convenient to go there.

Route 1 Shaw’s in Falmouth

 

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You rarely see sweet potato pie on desserts menus at New England restaurants or bakeries. That’s because it’s strictly a southern confection that for some reason hasn’t made it up north.   Instead there’s plenty of pumpkin pie recipes in our northern New England culinary sphere.  It might be time to change that habit.  I know I will after making sweet potato pie from a recipe courtesy of Dolester Miles, a James Beard Award pastry chef whose roots are firmly planted in Alabama–namely, at the chef Frank Stitt’s string of restaurants in Birmingham.  I made the pie twice not for Thanksgiving but for a weekday dessert in my household.  We just loved it.

Sliced pie with whipped cream and grated orange zest

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The most time-consuming step in making this pie is peeling the apples, coring, pitting and slicing them just right. Otherwise it’s a cinch to make.  But its core  of goodness is this: It’s baked in a cast-iron skillet. The crust gets beautifully burnished more so than in a traditional pie plate.  And the ingredients list is minimal.  No spices like cinnamon or nutmeg are used, just the plain goodness of great apples, sugar and a bit of butter–and the secret ingredient, cous cous.

Skillet apple pie with cous cous

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It’s an odd little book.  Ten basic cake recipes and 17 additional cakes with toppings.  And then there’s the issue of pan size. The author gives many options for pan size, but many are hard to find.  Consider the  6-inch spring form pan or the 10 by 3-inch deep round cake pan–not the usual pan sizes. But forget about finding a loaf pan that measures 12 inches long, 4 inches wide and 3 inches deep, otherwise known as a pullman loaf pan.  Leroux Kitchen had a 9 by 4 by 3-inch version.  But make a cake in the wrong size pan and you’re headed for disaster. Exact measuring  and using the proper vessel for baking are vital elements of successful baking.

My baking odyssey in this book stemmed from a food article in the Saturday “Off-Duty” section of the Wall Street Journal called, “This Chocolate Cake Recipe Is So Good, It Needs No Frosting.”

The newspaper’s adapted recipe called for a 10 by 3 inch round cake pan or the unusual 12 by 4 by 3 inch loaf pan.  I liked the idea of a loaf pan cake of this size.  I tried everywhere to find it online and at our various kitchen stores. No luck.  So I settled for the 10-inch round cake pan, which I found at Leroux Kitchen, and it was the only one on the shelf.

I made the cake, and it turned 0ut beautifully. Great texture, with an unbelievably tender crumb and deep chocolate flavor.  I didn’t do the icing, a chocolate butter meringue, and the cake stood up well without a topping other than confectioner’s sugar.  The recipe in the newspaper was adapted from the book.  I ordered it from Amazon to arrive in two days.

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There’s a great divide between  northern and southern versions of cornbread. The former uses sugar whereas what’s termed “real cornbread” in the south, sugar is verboten. I favor southern style cornbread compared to the more cake-like versions up north. The kind of cornmeal you use adds further distinction.  Before our kitchens became so artisan-minded, an ingredient like Quaker Oats cornmeal in the familiar yellow container was all that was available until the notion of stone ground, coarse or medium fine became a choice as in Bob’s Red Mill brand or the   Anson Mills  heirloom corn meal.

I get my cornmeal in 5-pound bags from the southern granary, Boonville Flour and Feed, a wonderfully old-fashioned mill who also makes the best all-purpose flour.  Southern flour is called soft winter wheat, favored by southern bakers for pastry, cakes, biscuits, cookies and the like.  White Lily has always been the standard, though some purists now prefer flour from small mills. (White Lily is now owned by Smuckers.)

Though I use white cornmeal for baking, my favorite corn is the all-yellow variety (hard to find), found this week at Beth’s Farm Market; it’s called Vision

The softness of southern wheat is unmistakable in what it does to biscuits in particular and cakes and pastry dough.  It’s a bit of an effort to acquire this flour by mail order but well worth the bother.

Last week I received my order of all-purpose flour from Boonville along with self-rising flour, which I use for biscuits,  and their stone-ground white cornmeal. (One has a choice of getting self-rising cornmeal, too.) Ah, there’s another difference between north and south cornmeal practice.  White cornmeal is standard in the south, the yellow shunned by cooks  below the Mason-Dixon line.

The white does bake up yellowish and has, I think, a finer flavor and texture.  Most recipes for cornbread require a cast-iron skillet; I like to preheat the skillet in the oven with some fat melting in it so that when you pour in the batter it sizzles, creating that wonderful outer crispy crust on the finished baked bread.

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One of my favorite blueberry pie recipes involved a method that relied on making a jam out of the berries and folding in uncooked berries to mound in a baked tart shell. Couldn’t be easier.  But I couldn’t remember the exact proportions of the recipe.  It came from a cookbook that was now in a disheveled state of disrepair on my shelf and stopped at the page that said Tarts.  The rest of the book was missing.  I couldn’t remember the name of the author.  No where in the book did it state the name of the book or its author.

I then did an exhaustive Google search.  It was a book on baking; that much I knew.  After many  moments of search and trial by error the name  to me: Paula Peck. She worked with Craig Claiborne at the Times and contributed many recipes.  And she was also a force with James Beard, who was still alive in her tenure.  You can’t get better credentials than those.

Then I did another Google search for Paula Peck’s blueberry tart.  What came up was the recipe in a site called ImPECKable Eats by Megan Peck, the granddaughter of Paula Peck.  Her site recreated her grandmother’s many baking recipes  (including this tart) from the “The Art of Baking” as well as Peck’s book “The Fine Art of Cooking.”  (see http://impeckableeats.com/about).

I ordered a hardback copy of the book from Amazon.  My old book was paperback.  I figured this would last a lifetime (mine, at least).

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I’ve made pies galore this strawberry season. (You l can look them up in the search feature Search strawberry.)  The standard double crust pie filled with nothing but strawberries  is always  a take-away favorite. I’m not a fan of its frequent partner, rhubarb; I prefer each on its own. There’s cobblers, a gloried pie assembled differently from pie.  And there’s the wide world of what’s usually called fresh strawberry pie.  Uncooked berries are mixed in with a thickened strawberry mixture and piled into a prebaked pastry case. I have three versions: a cornstarch thickened mixture of crushed strawberries with lots of sugar; another type uses Sprite as the flavoring agent in the cooked berries.  Both of these versions direct you to pour the cooked mixture over trimmed uncooked berries already in the shell.

Past posts of strawberry pie: Clockwise, left–cooked berries over fresh, classic strawberry lattice-topped pie and fresh strawberry pie flavored with Sprite

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