(Not Key) Lime Pie

I remembered, on the 14th, that it was Pi Day, so of course I had nothing prepared, no fruits in the apartment, and only 2 eggs.  Flipping through Joy of Cooking suggested a Key lime pie, and we thought that instead of using sweetened condensed milk, we could use a can of sweetened condensed coconut milk that I'd picked up in an impulse buy, since coconut and lime tend to go together well.

Purchased at our local grocery store, Don Quijote, which is, in fact, Japanese-owned.

Our notes:

• Not wanting to put the effort into a regular pie crust, Key lime's graham cracker crust was appealing.  Instead of regular graham crackers, I used some "Star Wars" graham snacks, as those were the only graham crackers at the store that didn't use shortening or artificial flavor (and were also a reasonable price).  When I made the crust, I did not add any additional sugar, thinking that the cookies were sweet enough.  However, I think the crust could have benefited from the crunchiness and the extra bit of sweetness that the sugar would have contributed.
• Also, it would have been best if we could have let the pie crust cool before filling it.  Because I wanted to minimize the amount of time the oven was on, I baked the crust, then worked on the filling as it was baking and then a bit more after it came out of the oven.  The resulting crust was a bit soggy.  Perhaps next time I'll make a frozen (not Key) lime pie so that the oven only needs to be on for the crust.
• The recipe called for a 15-oz. can of condensed milk.  As the photo above indicates, the condensed coconut milk was only 11.25 oz., which I lowered even more by pouring off some of the oil that had separated out.  I thought I'd make up for it using some leftover regular coconut milk from a different recipe.  Unfortunately, this may have made the resulting custard a bit too soft.
• The recipe called for ½ cup of lime juice; for us, this was 4 limes.
• We should have only had to bake the pie for 15-17 minutes, but we probably ended up baking it for about 25 minutes as it didn't seem set.  I suspect the extra liquid from the coconut milk threw off the baking time.
• The unbaked filling tasted great: both lime and coconut flavors were obvious.  Unfortunately, the coconut flavor baked out of the finished pie, and the lime flavor was not so pronounced.  Yet another reason for making a frozen (not Key) lime pie, but substituting coconut milks for the regular evaporated and sweetened condensed milks.

Using the pi dish for Pi Day!

Overall, this was a tasty pie, though with a few additional changes it could have been even better.  Clearly, our next project should be a frozen coconut-lime pie!  I'll need to get more Star Wars grahams before then.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 667-668 (crust), and 688 (pie)

Anniversary apple pie

We wanted to have a special dessert for our anniversary.  I didn't want to get a cake from a bakery, and I have never had much success making a cake at home, so we decided to make a fruit pie.  After spending some minutes scouring all of our cookbooks and Google Drive recipes, we finally decided on a recipe from a cookbook we don't even own: the Betty Crocker French apple pie recipe, the one my dad always used and for which I have carried a scanned copy through numerous apartments in three states.

As you can imagine, apples aren't really in season right now, and we are at least 2000 miles from the nearest commercial orchard.  We had a mix of Fuji, Gala, and Braeburn varieties, and we had to really go through the bins at the grocery store to find the good ones.

I had found a new (for us, at least) pie crust recipe that substitutes sour cream for the ice water and some of the butter: for a 9" pie, it's 1 cup flour, 1 stick of butter, ¼ cup sour cream, ½ tsp. salt, and 1 tsp. sugar.  It looked pretty foolproof, and while I wasn't the one who made the crust this time, I can attest that the dough ended up in the refrigerator in near-record time, and the end result was tasty...so, I'd say it was a success.

While the crust didn't take long to put together, I had a very short time window to roll out the dough and get it into the pan; it got soft fast, and it isn't even very hot in our kitchen anymore.*  So this may have to be a wintertime pie crust recipe unless I can get quicker about rolling it out.  However, I stuck the crust into the freezer while I got the filling ready, and it was just fine by the time I was ready to fill and bake.

Betty Crocker's recipe is pretty simple.  For a 9" pie:

6 cups of apples
¾ cup sugar (white sugar, but I used brown)
½ tsp. cinnamon (I used our Trader Joe's stuff; maybe I should try the Ceylon cinnamon next time!)
½ tsp. nutmeg
¾ cup flour
Dash of salt (I used 1/8 tsp. of kosher salt)

To this, I added the juice of one lemon, partly to keep the apples from browning while I peeled and sliced all of them, and partly to punch up the flavour.  This could have been reduced to a half lemon as the pie had a pretty strong lemon taste (obvs).

I made half of the crumb topping recipe, as I've noticed in the past that a full recipe makes WAY too much.

½ cup flour
¼ cup butter
¼ cup brown sugar

This seemed to work just fine for the pie.  I also added some cardamom (because why not?); while good, for me it was not entirely necessary.  Take it or leave it.

I used the pi dish, of course.

Obviously, for me, this will always be a recipe to keep.  We made just a couple of small modifications to tailor it to us specifically, but the crust, the filling, and the topping all turned out great.

Similar to my experiences with peach pie, I cut the apples into chunks rather than thin slices.

*This is a relative statement, as the chocolate on our chocolate-covered shortbread cookies (a Christmas gift) became soft enough to stick to the plastic wrapper and peel away from the actual cookie as we'd unwrap them.  We now store the box in the fridge.

Betty Crocker's Cookbook (year unknown, c. 1960s-1970s), p. 321
Writeup background noise: an interesting assortment of music, including Kylie (1988-2007 selections), Tom Petty, Rihanna, Santana, the Jackson 5, KT Tunstall, Yael Naim, and Gavin DeGraw.  Not to mention the Australian Open on mute in the super-background (Serena's match is about to start).  Wow.

Quiche Lorraine

I wanted to make something new for dinner, and since we actually had eggs, butter, and (2%!) milk in our fridge, I decided on a quiche.  We also had some bacon and a LOT of onion, for some reason.  In short, we had almost everything we needed to make a quiche, and I'll take any opportunity to use my mini Cuisinart food processor.

I used my now-standard pie crust recipe, scaled for a 9" pie plate:

• 1¼ c. flour
• ½ c. butter [cubed and tossed in the freezer for as long as possible]
• ½ tsp. salt
• 3-4 Tbsp. ice water [I tend to use a couple more Tbsp. than recipes call for, but maybe that's just me being a pie crust beginner.]
• ½ tsp. sugar [omitted for the quiche]

The crust came together fairly quickly, and I chilled it for maybe 10 minutes before rolling it out into the pie plate.  This worked better than letting the dough chill for a couple hours, then taking it back out and letting it come up to room temperature for several minutes before rolling.  Most likely a product of the local climate on average being much warmer than most places where American cookbooks are written.

The crust needed to be baked before filling.  I have a handy tool to weight pie crust while baking, which worked very well, but the crust recipe said to bake 20 minutes with weights, then to remove the weights, poke holes in the bottom of the crust, and bake for about 10 minutes longer.  For whatever reason, the crust still puffed up quite a bit during the last 10 minutes of baking, even though I took especial care to actually poke the crust all the way through to the plate.  Next time I have to pre-bake a crust like this I might try baking the entire 30 minutes with the pie weight on.  This might also help bake the crust more thoroughly than the process of baking, then cooling slightly, then baking some more.

Joy of Cooking's quiche recipe calls for 2 cups of milk and 3 eggs.  Perhaps we should have used whole milk instead of 2% that we had, but the custard turned out to be quite soft and I had to bake the quiche for 50 minutes altogether, rather than the "35 to 40 minutes" that the cookbook said.  Even at 40 minutes, the quiche was nowhere near a solid.  Looking at my other recent posts, maybe I should get an oven thermometer to see how accurate our oven is, because there seems to be a theme of "had to bake for way longer than called for" in some of the other writeups.  Perhaps a correct oven temperature would have helped set the custard; or perhaps we should have used an additional egg or two.

Not bad, not great, and sadly not worth several hours' prep time.

The verdict on this one, though, was that I would NOT make a quiche again, or if I did, I would not do my own pie crust.  I spent an entire afternoon in our windowless kitchen making and baking a pie crust, then slicing and cooking onions and bacon, and finally preparing the filling (admittedly the easiest part of it all).  The finished product was not astounding, and the worst part was, it was not even a satisfying dinner: I could have used another slice or two but held off since I knew exactly how much butter and bacon had gone into that quiche.  So, unfortunately, this is probably not going to be a repeat recipe.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 108-109

Peach pie

I recently checked out the cookbook The Perfect Peach, written by a family who run a peach farm in California.  Not only does it have fantastic photos and great recipes, but it's also got a number of fascinating vignettes of life and work in the orchards.

Thankfully, the peaches at the store this week were in better condition than when I had shopped for the peach ginger scones, so before Dom had even gotten a shopping cart, I had already selected quite a few peaches for us.  I decided to try a peach pie even though Dom would be gone for the week; I honestly had wanted to wait until later in the week, but with the peaches ripening by the minute even in the fridge, I had to make the pie today.

Since butter (and dairy products in general) are far more expensive than on the mainland, I didn't have enough to make a 9" double-crust pie, so I figured I'd do a lattice top.  The crust took very little time to make, but that was just as well; time was very limited since it was already getting warm in the kitchen, and the oven wasn't even on yet.  I ended up using 1.5 recipes' worth of an all-butter recipe I had found before, and my tiny Cuisinart did the job admirably.

I would have woven the lattice, but the dough was warming up already and I had to really hustle to get the strips of dough laid out and back into the fridge before the butter melted.  I also discovered I need a better way to transfer the lattice to the pie, as the lattice defied my expectations by sticking to the parchment paper in places.

Quick notes

• Most recipes call for sliced peaches, apples, etc. when making fruit pies.  I find that chunks work better, both in terms of prep time and in terms of the texture of the finished product.  For whatever reason I find it easier to slice a pie of fruit chunks rather than a pie of thin fruit slices.
• Like many other instances, I used less sugar than called for; the recipe says to use 3/4 c. granulated sugar, while I used a little under 2/3 c.  Probably more of a case of having to adjust to the fruit's inherent sweetness.
• Lemon juice seems to be the acid of choice when making peach pies.  I substituted lime juice out of necessity, which I thought would lead to a better taste in the finished product, but this is 100% subjective.  In the end, the baking process seemed to have toned down the overt lime flavor, though I'm convinced that lime juice is a better choice than lemon juice.  Again, totally subjective!

Frankly, the peaches were tasty enough at this point that I could have eaten them without the crust.  Or without baking.

• I should take care to ensure that the pieces of peach lie flatter in the crust.  As you can see in the photos, I sort of just dumped the bowl of peaches and juice into the pie crust without much regard to orientation.  This causes the lattice to become sort of distorted.  It still tasted great; it simply wasn't as aesthetically pleasing.

Pie before baking.  I had a moment of panic when I flipped over the parchment paper with the lattice and some of the dough stuck, but it seems to look all right after all that.

• Many peach pie recipes, this one included, indicate that one should dot the top of the filling with butter before putting the top crust on.  I didn't have enough butter for this and I also had seen firsthand how much butter had gone into making the crust.  However, while the pie was baking, I noticed that the peaches on top of the filling started looking a little dried-out.  Maybe the butter helps prevent the filling from drying in the oven?  Ultimately, the pie tasted just fine, even if the peaches were a little wrinkly on top.  Much as I would have loved to put butter on top of the filling, it's probably ok that I couldn't.

Pie after baking!  I had not sprinkled sugar on top of the pie, though if I'd been making this for a dinner party or something, I probably would have.

• I baked the pie for about 55 minutes at 400°F.  I had put the pie in the oven without the crust protector at first, but then took the pie out at 20 minutes to fit the crust protector around, then baked for about 30 more minutes plus my "I'll stand in front of the oven and monitor until it looks done and/or I start to get impatient and/or concerned" phase.
• The juices in the filling were still a little runny, which would have made slicing and plating a bit problematic had I been serving this for other folks instead of just me.  I used about 3 1/2 Tbsp. of flour, which is right in the 3-4 Tbsp. range called for in the recipe.  Perhaps next time I should try using one of the recipe's other suggested thickeners instead (tapioca flour or instant tapioca), neither of which should be too difficult to find around here.

Tasty!

My next kitchen experiment is to freeze slices of this pie for when Dom gets back next week.  Though I could try to hold myself to one slice per day, I still probably shouldn't consume the entire pie on my own.

Addendum, 19 September: Thanks to Betty Crocker (and unfortunately, no thanks to our usually-trusty Joy of Cooking which only provided instructions on freezing unbaked pies), I was able to freeze roughly 4 slices of the pie.  I simply put the entire pie plate, obviously more than half empty, into the freezer; after several hours, I wrapped the pie in plastic wrap as best as I could.  We'll see in a couple of days whether or not it worked!

Addendum, 2 October: Apparently I had forgotten to update.  The thawed pie was, to me, just as tasty as it had been before freezing, with perhaps a slight decrease in texture.  Not a bad solution to the problem of how to preserve a baked pie, but of course the ideal would probably be to eat the entire thing before it would have to be frozen. :)

The Perfect Peach (2013): pages unknown as I was using an unpaginated ebook version.

Writeup background music: the soundtrack for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Since Dom is gone, I'm on a 6-day Star Wars marathon, which I started Monday.

Pumpkin pie

If you know me at all, you know that I greatly enjoy baking: cookies, cakes, rolls, you name it.  Pie is a relative exception, as I am not usually impressed with store-bought pie crusts (what's in those?) and I don't particularly care for super-flaky pie crust anyway.  Also, I've noticed that almost every pie crust recipe is awash with dire warnings like "MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS COLD!!!1!" or "DO NOT OVERHANDLE DOUGH AT RISK OF TURNING IT INTO SOMETHING TERRIBLE", or "Don't use a food processor, the pastry blender is the ONLY way to do it", etc. etc.  So for a while, I would make fruit cobblers, crisps, and other treats that only required a top crust.  But then I received a small food processor for my birthday along with a later suggestion that it could be used to make pie crusts.

Our handy copy of Joy of cooking has a number of pie crust recipes, but they all feature shortening, which we never buy.  So I found a few recipes and techniques for all-butter pie crusts and set about making some dough.

I needed some way to keep the water cold.  Festive, no?

The new food processor is ready for some pie crust action.

Either my food processor was too small for the amount of stuff, or a flour grenade went off in my kitchen.  Nonetheless, this was the dough before it got dumped onto the counter, shaped, and tossed into the fridge.

Recipes say that the dough should be able to form a disk at this point.  I got something more like a crumbly mound o' dough.  Perhaps I hadn't added enough water?

Crumbliness notwithstanding, this stuff rolled out great after a couple days in the fridge and a much-longer-than-recommended time between taking the dough out of the fridge and rolling it out.  Look at that edge!

A pumpkin pie in all its glory.  This is made with a pie pumpkin that I had already baked; I never liked pumpkin pie (no joke) until I started making it with a fresh pumpkin.  This crust turned out tender and not very flaky: perfect for Dom and me, but your conclusion may vary.

Was this as much trouble as I thought it was going to be?  Not really.  Sure, making crust takes a lot longer than going to the store and getting some out of the freezer case, and I'm sure it can be very finicky, but I think the results are worth it.  Based on some of the comments I got for this one, it seems that others thought so too!

TASTY.