Pie.

On Friday, the King Arthur Flour company, based in Vermont, took its baking demonstration road show to the Portland, ME Holiday Inn by the Bay, which also hosts the fantastic Chili and Chowder Challenge. The King Arthur people do free demos throughout the country with the opportunity to ask questions, and at the competitive price of $0.00 I couldn't pass up an excuse to leave the house in the middle of the day. I even slipped out of my old-man slippers and into my young-man sneakers. Plus I had visions of free samples floating in my head.

At noon they were demonstrating how to make tasty, flaky pie crust and chocolate tart crust. Stasia and I made some pie for Thanksgiving last year so, um, experts? But as the Germans say, "man lernt nie aus," aka "you never stop learning." I never even started learning, so this would be as good a time as any.

The conference room was good-sized and most of the seats were filled, so I'd say maybe 100 people were there. I stood in the back just to prove I could still stand, and I lowered the average visitor age by 20 years, easily. I suppose most youngsters (i.e. the non-retired) are either working or, I dunno, sleeping? at midday on a Friday, so I infiltrated the secret baking circle at great personal risk of embarrassment to bring you the hottest tips in pie-baking.

Our very nice, teachful teacher worked at the front of the room and we followed her movements on a projector screen (German word for projector: "der Beamer," which does in fact come from the verb "beamen," or, "to beam." The Germans are funny like that). We had little recipe/tip pamphlets so we could follow along. I wished I had brought a pen to take more notes but when I got home I jotted down as many tips as I could remember. Those tips will follow.

After the demonstration, during which our teacher made everything seem so simple that I was chomping at the bit to try it myself, just because I'd be a fool not to take advantage of a treat which practically bakes itself when under the manipulation of a trained professional and no one else, they had a raffle. They had bags of flour, boxes of mixes, and sundry nifty gifties to give away. I won a box of Cranberry-Orange scone mix, but I just quietly raised my hand instead of making a happy sound as suggested by the hosts. I thought about saying "happy sound" but I didn't want them to revoke my winning raffle ticket for mocking the system.

Scones are something Stasia and I learned to make from scratch in London (from our Taiwanese-Canadian roommate, C.J., naturally) but hey, free mix. On our way out, they also gave us little rubber scrapers (this sounds lame but makes me very excited to scrape and level and, well, maybe mix a little and that's it) and $10 gift cards (off a purchase of $20 or more, but flour never goes out of style).

So basically I made a tidy profit. And I'm likely to buy King Arthur Flour (again, since I'm sure we have some already) so good marketing ploy, King Arthur Flour. I haven't put my newfound pie knowledge to use yet, but when Stasia gets home tomorrow I promise that will change. Callaghan Test Pie on the horizon! That's all from your intrepid baking correspondent for now, so enjoy the tips I could remember, most of which are probably painfully obvious to those of you who use that mysterious organ in your heads for something other than storing Office Space trivia:

- Use butter, not something like shortening. Specifically cold, cold butter, along with ice cold water. You don't want the butter melting from over-working either. You want butter spots in your dough.

- Don't scoop flour directly with your measuring cup. This compresses the flour, meaning you scoop extra flour, which can really add up in a large recipe. Use a separate scoop to pour flour into your measuring cup, then use a flat surface (such as a handy dandy rubber scraper, boo-yah!) to scrape lightly across the top to level the flour.

- Another way to prevent bad measurements is to weigh your ingredients, which always wins out over just eyeballing if you want better quality. But it requires a kitchen scale and patience, neither of which I have in abundance.

- Here's a bad habit Stasia and I have: using the solids-measuring cups for liquid as well. To get the right amount with these measuring cups that come right to the top, you have to fill them straight to the top perfectly, which is hard to do and you're probably going to spill some before getting it in the bowl. Be sure to use the taller, see-through pitcher-style measuring cups with multiple lines so you can get a better measure and pour. As an example, if you're trying to measure 1 cup of water, use a measuring tool the has lines for 1 cup and 2 cups so you can see when you've reached 1 cup. Like the previous tip, this requires some sort of forethought, willingness to dirty extra dishes, and perhaps even patience, reducing its attractiveness.

- After you wrap your ball(s) of dough in plastic, flatten the ball so it will cool faster and more evenly when you put it in the fridge before rolling it out. You can also put the dough, or the pre-made pie crust, or even the pre-made pie in the freezer and keep it for about 6 months with no discernible loss in quality. If you take a pre-made pie out of the freezer you can put it directly into the oven, just add 20 minutes extra baking time to account for thawing.

- Don't roll your dough back and forth. Go out from the center in different directions, like the rays of the sun. Also, don't roll over the edge of the dough so your pin hits the surface. This can compress it oddly and lead to misshapen, cracked edges.

- Put your pan over above the dough so you can see if the dough is rolled out enough to then hang over the edges of the pan. Once the dough is rolled out properly, fold it in half, then in half again. (At this point, if you're working with the top crust, make four little steam-release cuts in the dough near the point of the triangle so you'll end up with the steam vents near the middle when you unfold the dough.) Place that rounded triangle of dough in the pan with the point of the triangle in the center, then simply unfold your dough to get it safely in the pan.

- If you're making a double-crust pie with a top crust, make sure you roll out and prepare both crusts first. Then set the bottom crust in the pan, dump in the filling, and put the top crust on right after. This allows you to pop the pie into the oven right away, which prevents the bottom crust from absorbing a lot of extra moisture from the filling.

- Use a glass/Pyrex pan for pies so you can actually see the bottom of the pie crust and ensure it's getting baked thoroughly. Also, in a conventional bottom-heated oven, put the pie on the bottom rack (not the floor of the oven but the bottom rack level) for 20 minutes to start then move it to the middle. This helps set the bottom. (If you're using a convection oven, which uses air to heat the oven equally, set the temperature about 25 degrees Fahrenheit lower than you would for a normal oven.)

- If you use frozen fruit for a pie, add up to 3 tablespoons of corn starch to thicken the filling.

- A pre-made but unbaked pie can last in the freezer for up to 6 months. Flour in a sealed container can last up to a year. Whole wheat flour should be frozen since it has the wheat germ and enzymes which can spoil easier.

- There's a white whole wheat flour which can fool whole-wheat -haters into thinking they're getting the normal stuff.

- Trivia: vanilla comes from a type of orchid native to Mexico. The plant has since been successfully grown in other countries, including Madagascar, which now produces the majority of the world's vanilla, called Madagascar-Bourbon vanilla. Bourbon refers to the region in which it's grown. I always thought it was alcoholic vanilla. I still like it, but I definitely like it less now. I'll have to add my own bourbon in the future.

Cake Fake-Out

Good birthday cake is hard to come by. For my mom's birthday I thought about trying to make one, but I haven't done cake for a long time. I probably would have needed a test run, and it was too short notice by the time I thought of it. On that note, let me know if you need a test cake made. Maybe for a friend whom you don't really like. Or for a dog's birthday. Or a school bake sale. Kids will buy anything with their parents' money.

So instead, my dad and I headed into Portland to check out Two Fat Cats Bakery. It occupies prime real estate, practically sandwiched between the fantastic Italian grocery store Micucci's and the decadent Duckfat restaurant. I had never even noticed Two Fat Cats, set back as it is, but my dad had and was surely a fan.

As we stepped inside, I was smitten: you go down a few steps and straight into a kitchen, basically. This main area is cozy, not too big but open so you can see all that's going on: cakes and cupcakes being frosted, fruit being peeled for pies, many wonderful aspects of baking that might normally be hidden away. I'm a fan of these set-ups where you can observe and admire the process behind the delicious product.

The employees were terribly friendly and obviously enjoying their work. One even humored me with a laugh and a "That's what we aim for!" when I suggested that a cake looked "good enough to eat," which I'm sure she had never heard before. Don't take me out in public.

We took home an 8" chocolate cake with chocolate frosting -- or should I say chocolate frosting with chocolate cake? Seriously, here is a bakery that understands when I ask for a "cake" it's only because polite society considers it rude when I inject frosting directly into my veins. "Cake" is about pushing the laws of structural engineering to their limits in order to find the largest possible ratio of frosting to non-frosting-material. The cake is a lie: frosting is the truth.

That's why frosting is so important. You need thick, rich, gooey buttercream frosting, and lots of it. And this cake has frosting: I promise you there's more frosting than cake involved here. Here's where it all started to go wrong, though: for some reason I thought that, as with most foods, cakes needed to be protected from the detrimental effects of heat. I forgot that cakes are impervious to harm, protected as they are by thick frosting shields (and thick plastic cake covers, just to keep stray cat fur off).

I admit it: I put the cake in the fridge (for its own good, I told it). HUGE mistake.

Never put the cake in the fridge! Even hours after we took it out of the fridge, the frosting was still too hard. You do not want your frosting hardening unless you're making some kind of Ganache or maybe a scale model of Mount Everest. So when I had a piece of cake last night, though the taste was amazing, the texture was off. It was just too hard and slightly waxy. I couldn't understand how it had gone so wrong.

Thankfully the cake is also big enough that my mom was able to rescue it. She left the cake out on the counter overnight (covered, of course...don't need any stray cat fut or deep cat paw prints in it, despite the bakery's name). What a difference. Today the cake was perfect. The frosting had warmed to its optimal temperature and softened to its ideal consistency. Frosting delivery system is a go!

I only wish the Two Fat Cats' website had a picture of their logo, because it is worth seeing. I promise I'll start taking pictures again soon. Until then you'd better head to Two Fat Cats yourself and come by some good birthday cake. Otherwise you're gonna end up with a Callaghan test cake, which belongs in an ACME catalog.

Slainte

Happy belated St. Paddy's Day! I didn't fulfill the drunken part of the stereotype, though my dad busted out his Bushmills 21 Year Old whiskey and we each had a taste of that. It's incredible stuff, to be sure. It comes in what's basically a silk-lined, wooden coffin, though, so calling it the water of life seems somehow contradictory. It's been laid back to rest in the liquor cabinet until the next big occasion -- my dad's birthday, maybe?

Naturally, we made a proper Irish dinner. My mom and I made corned beef, carrots, and potatoes in the slow cooker, cabbage in a pot with some of the corned beef juice (why don't they sell that in with the orange juice, I ask you), and Irish soda bread.

I had never made corned beef and she had never done it in a slow cooker, so we used sort of a combination of a few recipes, including the one at A Year of Slow Cooking. We used a bottle of Sam Adams Boston Lager plus a bit of water for the liquid. I liked the flavor it gave; my mom thought it was too strong and probably wouldn't do the beef in the slow cooker again. I was pleased with the results and will be eating leftovers soon.

My mom has a recipe she usually uses for Irish soda bread but Alena sent us the link to the one she tried this year, saying it was worth trying, so we went with that. Someone in the comments suggested "traditional" Irish soda bread doesn't have such niceties as sugar in it, which makes this kind of modern loaf more of an Irish soda cake, but admitted the Irish probably would have used sugar if they could have afforded it. So we'll forgive ourselves the breach with tradition.

It's a good thing my mom was supervising or else I definitely would have over-mixed and over-kneaded the dough. I need more practice with bread-making; the fact that it's possible to get overzealous and ruin the dough makes it more advanced than my usual fare. This stuff is pretty simple to whip up and you don't have to spread the process out over days to let it rise or anything, but the dough definitely ends up sticky and tricky to handle. Because of this, we ignored the suggestion of the recipe to form a ball and put it on a baking sheet; instead we put the dough in a shallow cake pan the way my mom normally does, so it automatically took that shape. We also drizzled some melted butter and sugar on top to make it extra crispalicious.

It came out great. I haven't had soda bread for years so I can't say how it compares, but I've eaten it every day since we made it: sometimes with butter, sometimes with honey, and today without anything because even like that it's tasty.

No cooking or leftovers today, though: it's my mom's birthday, so we're going out to Paciarino in Portland for a nice Italian dinner. Happy birthday, ma! Here's the card I made -- eat your heart out, Hallmark.

Fabian and Hojo will learn to get along eventually. For love.

Tennessee Truffle Shuffle

The other night, when making those delicious Peanut Butter-Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies, I wanted to make sure I had something like the "rolled oats" that the recipe called for. I knew we had "thick & rough milled" oats and whatever Quaker Oats are...but were they rolled enough? Google, what are rolled oats?

Enter foodsubs.com, aka The Cook's Thesaurus!

This site is so useful. Some parts are admittedly easier to parse than others. If I try to consider individual types of oats and suss out their differences, the letters on the page start to swim and my brain atrophies. But from that mess of swimming letters and brain-mush and pictures of oats that look exactly the same, so much the same, I'd say the point is use whatever oats you have for whatever you're doing because what can it matter in a world where they canceled Firefly but they're still looking for ways to keep Two and a Half Men on life support, what can anything matter!

So I just went with Quaker Oats. It was fine, because any oats are fine. Let's leave it at that.

Check out the green onions & leeks section, though, and you can find out that green onions are scallions are shallots (in Australia!) are spring onions (Fruehlingszwiebeln in Germany!) are Chinese onions (in China?) are stone leeks are cibols! And none of these is a leek! (Don't be fooled by the stone leek, it's a notorious fraud.) And there's even something called a Tennessee truffle, aka a ramp. (Sometimes also masquerading as a wild leek -- were you fooled?) Humble origins, foodie prices. Crazy!

Plus, you can see freaky pictures, like a puddle of mustard oil, which can be found terrorizing internet goers at the oils & cooking sprays section! It haunts my dreams. And Indian markets, apparently.

What are you waiting for? The Cook's Thesaurus: learn to make your food sound exotic even if it's the same old crap.

Slugging and Baking

As a quick follow-up to my previous post, my mom is pretty sure that my uncle used to "slug" to work, which makes sense since he works for the government and lives just outside of DC. Plus, he's kind of a hippie once you get past that faux-conservative exterior, so I bet he was happy to undermine the auto industry's profits. My mom thinks she and my dad might have slugged with him one day to get into the city. I'd think that kind of thing would be hard to forget: standing quietly in line, getting in a random strangers car when called like some sort of prostitute, riding silently into the city for free? Guess I'll have to ask my uncle and see if he's got more to tell me about it.

And as a quick follow-up to a Facebook post from last night, the Peanut Butter-Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies from the Brown Eyed Baker site were awesome. Stasia thinks raisins are wrinkly, healthy chocolate chips, but I reject that notion and demand actual chocolate in my cookies. Peanut butter always helps, too, both in flavor and shape. Not that I care much about the shape of cookies since all I really want is to under-cook them for maximum softness and gooeyness, but it can be satisfying (and easier to pick them up) when they don't end up pancake-flat every time. Handy tip. Otherwise just do what Stasia and I sometimes do: eat your fresh cookies with a spoon. Then you can sell it as "breakfast" easier. Put away the Cookie Crisp.

I didn't get any pics, but there's more dough in the fridge so maybe I will next time the cookies come out of the oven. We were going to try the technique described on the site for giving an extra-wrinkly, crispy (is wrinkly+crispy where "crinkly" comes from?) texture to the top of the cookies

To shape, basically roll the dough into ball, then pull it apart in half (so the jagged edges are facing each other), then turn those halves up (so the jagged edges are now facing up), then press them together (side by side) to make them round again, with the jagged edges on top. Hope that explanation helps!

but we didn't end up making the balls of dough as big as suggested in the recipe (believe me, I tried to make them huge but I was overruled as usual), so it was hard to pull off the proper method. Still, delicious, and I will be trying other recipes from the site for SURE. These Italian Pigu sound delicious, simple enough for me, and hilarious, which is my ideal foodstuff. Heh: Pigu.

Edit, March 20, 2011:

The dough dries out very quickly when kept in the fridge. The cookies still turned out well the second time around, but I wouldn't recommend saving the dough for more than a night, maybe two.