Alpha Bakers -- Pecan Pumpkin Pie

I've never hosted a Thanksgiving dinner, and for the first 20 or so years of my life, I wasn't even present at the creation of one, arriving as a guest just in time for appetizers. Nonetheless, every November my general predilections combine with the larger media input to prompt an almost subconsciously motivated flood of sympathy cooking. My usual dinner is a quesadilla with a cucumber nearby, or a few handfuls of whatever is lying around, but suddenly and suspiciously I start roasting chickens and root vegetables, over-buying butter, and tripling my oven output. This makes Thanksgiving more of a seasonal eating fad than a single meal, but seems to work out for everyone involved. I like pumpkins, puddings, panades, and roasted things, and at least it means more variety in the fridge.

I've given up on the notion of ever truly cooking for one. Even when I can manage food that will feed only me, or at least be appealing over a week of leftovers, I simply can't manage shopping for one. Abundance is my natural state, and as long as it's abundance of reasonably cheap ingredients, the Yiddishe mama in me surrenders to it. Yesterday, I tried immersion therapy, buying two pounds of butter and a pile of dried fruits and telling myself that the day's only task was to stay in and bake whatever I wanted from the piles of books in the living room. I'm particularly taken with The Violet Bakery Cookbook, by Claire Ptak, this month, and will be messing about with it some more soon.

On the list, though not at the top, was this week's Alpha Bake, Rose's Pecan Pumpkin pie. Essentially two fillings baked on top of one another in the same crust, a classic pumpkin pie on top of a classic pecan pie. Not entirely necessary, but why not? This week I played it straight, making the recipe more or less as written. Rose's flaky cream cheese pie crust, rolled out with a heavy lip to prevent early shrinkage (no par-baking in this one). The pecan filling is a simple treacle-y custard, made with corn syrup as I couldn't find the golden syrup that I thought was in my cabinet. It's probably in there somewhere. After that, a classic pumpkin filling is layered on top. I used an organic pumpkin puree, frozen and drained, mixed with some not very flavorful but nicely textured cubes of roasted cheese pumpkin. I baked the pie for a few minutes over the recommended baking time, which I worried was going to be too much for the pumpkin custard, but I really wanted to see some browning on the bottom crust. What's the point of a bottom crust if it's just going to be a layer of cardboard wax?

In the event, the pecan underlayer lent moisture to the pumpkin and there was no harm done, although it was a bit firmer than I might have cooked a plain pumpkin pie. The one co-worker who has tried it so far ate a slice very quickly and announced 'That was great!' Hopefully he and everybody else will take some home, as my freezer is filling up and I have tomorrow off as well...
although I'm already out of butter.

Alpha Bakers - Luscious Apple Pie

Labor Day weekend was lazy. There was tubing. There were photo shoots. There were fires in the backyard at my parents' house and an abundance of tomatoes in all stages of ripeness. There was an Alpha Baker apple pie.

When I say lazy, I mean that I was lazy and went tubing, and while I drifted along wondering idly why the weirdos with the American flag on the bank were inquiring if I loved America and freedom, and calling me hipster scum when my enthusiasm didn't measure up to their beery standards, my hardworking mother and sister were shopping all over the Pioneer Valley for the pie ingredients. Rose's version of a classic apple pie includes apples, of course (we went with Empire and MacIntosh, given what was seasonally available), but also apple cider, preferably unfiltered. Even the apple haven that is Western MA couldn't provide us with unpasteurized cider (not freedom-loving enough?) but after a few stores my mother turned up some more pedestrian cider, which was then boiled down with some cornstarch to enhance the apple flavor in the pie. She also grabbed a half-bushel of peach seconds, which were so ripe they began to fall to pieces as soon as they got home, so I threw in a few of them as well.

For a crust, I used Rose's flaky cream cheese, despite my usual preference for a butter crust. I sliced the apples thinly and piled them in. My father asked 'how do you get it not to fall and leave a space?' I thought about it and then said 'I guess I don't. What's wrong with space?' Not to be cavalier, but some of NYC's most acclaimed pie makers, Bubby's included, leave big cushiony spaces in their apple pies.

I didn't actually wind up tasting the pie, as I left it for my Mother to take to a pot luck the next day, but she took this photo of the slice. Her verdict was that the filling was better than the crust, but I think this could have been addressed by a longer initial bake (always always take pie farther than you think you should...) or a re-warming before serving. Realistically, I am probably not going to make a boiled cider solution to thicken all of my future apple pies (I'm more likely to drink the cider), but it's a nice trick to know when faced with lackluster apples.*
 
 *Of course, I live in NY and am extremely unlikely to be reduced to lackluster apples at any time. But I do like cider.

Alpha Bakers -- Perfect Nectarine Galette

Summer is my busy season. While the schools are out, the libraries are full of children. Children gaming, children playing, children bored and causing mischief, children seeking summer reading books of all shapes and sizes (and publication dates). I run daily programs several times a day, and the library also serves as a summer meals site, serving food supplied by the Department of Education to anyone ages 0-18. I have a very supportive staff and a team of summer volunteers, but my limited training skills combined with their youth (many are no more than twelve) means that supervising them is actually the most exhausting part of a summer (well, that and waiting for a new full-time custodian to be appointed after our wonderful custodian's retirement at the beginning of  July (sigh)). 

The summer meals are served on a drop-in basis, with no signups or scheduled attendees. Because of this, it can be hard to predict exactly how many meals we will need, and there are sometimes shortages or overstocks. While most of the leftovers have to be disposed of pretty quickly, sometimes we hit the accidental fruit jackpot. A few weeks ago, I found myself looking at a large surplus of hard nectarines, and a peach galette on the Alpha Baking schedule. This thing pretty much planned itself. 

The fruit is macerated in sugar and lemon juice, and the resulting juices are then caramelized and returned to the fruit with cornstarch (tapioca starch as usual in my case). The whole is then piled onto a round of pie crust, which is folded up around it and the whole is baked and delicious. The pie crust Rose recommends is her flaky cream cheese formula, but I wanted something a little different, so I used the cornmeal crust recipe from the Four and Twenty Blackbirds book.

The caramelized juices were particularly nice. The nectarines don't get as soft as peaches would (I also didn't peel them), but as fruit salvage it was more than satisfactory.

Alpha Bakers -- Black & Blue (& Bloody) Pie

Why do I bake so much? The pursuit of attainable goals. I am in all things a procrastinator. Like Mr. Bennet, I'm "dilatory in undertaking business, [but] quick in its execution." I have trouble stirring myself to do things other people consider basic. I don't hang pictures on my walls. I rarely dust. Half of my furniture is broken. Once I begin a project, I am happy to have begun it, but it is terribly hard for me sometimes to begin even the simplest-seeming things. For this reason, I love structure. I love step-by-step guides and challenges and deadlines. And I love baking--quickly executed projects that use skills I enjoy, that produce tangible and pleasing results in a minimum of time. Low commitment, quick execution, ephemeral decision. It's not the only reason I love baking, but it does seem to be the one discipline I have where I am quick, decisive, and good at planning out my time. Baking gets me out of bed better than anything else--I will lounge if required to shower but happily hop up at 4am to preheat an oven--which has made bread baking a great structure to hang things like writing articles or papers, as the time constraints marry nicely. 

Add on the domestic goddess aura and a sexy if slightly nuts whiff of Little House self-sufficiency, and it becomes clear why this happens so much. Also, pie is delicious. 

This week's pie was the Black & Blueberry pie, a mixed berry with a cream cheese crust. Unlike some of the Alpha Bakers, I make a lot of pie, and I love it. I don't find pie crust daunting, and I like to make it with my hands. I don't mind runny fillings, (John Thorne says they're the way to go, and he's always right), and yet pie always carries with it a certain anxiety that doesn't come up in most other baking circumstances. 

Pie is more than a set of instructions. It's a skill. A physical skill. Because of this slightly mystical truth, pie gets a lot of reverence and a lot of fear. It's not hard, it's just not easy to get right. Pie can turn and bite you in the ass. Every pie is different. I realize that to the true baking personality (or the true librarian) this unpredictability can be painful, even destabilizing. Luckily, I'm more the kind of baker (and librarian) who is caught up in the story and careless of some details, so pie is my kind of game. Also, pie is so, so delicious. I would rather have pie than cake any day, but that's another story (never mind).

It's a story about fruit. We can talk about it when it is not winter any more.

Black & Blueberry pie. A fairly straightforward double-crust pie, made with Rose's cream cheese enriched pie dough. I like this pie dough, but it hasn't become my one and only. An all butter crust still has my heart. The cream cheese crust is very friendly, though, and holds a very nice shape without getting too tough. I can't bring myself to put it in and out of a bag and the freezer as Rose instructs (sorry Rose, I know your detailed instructions really do get unexpectedly perfect results, I just can't be perfect about pie. Talk to me when we're back to wedding cakes), but my hands-in technique yielded some quite acceptable pie crust action. Substitution alert: I misread the amounts I would need so the final product had subbed in mascarpone for 1/3 of the cream cheese (richer, but not devastatingly so), and I used leftover coquito (condensed milk, evaporated milk, coconut milk, and rum) for the three tablespoons of heavy cream. Alcohol is good in pie crust--some people swear by vodka.

I also mis-read the filling amounts a bit so the final mix was 12oz frozen blackberries and the rest frozen blueberries, with a handfull of cranberries and strawberries thrown in, making this a Black & Blue & Bloody pie (Black & Blue & Bloody new band name I call it). I didn't change the ratio of other filling ingredients because I judged it close enough, and so it was. I added the berries to the cornstarch (all right, it was tapioca), sugar, lemon juice, and lemon zest straight from the freezer, then let the pie rest filled for roughly the recommended hour and had no problems. There were plenty of juices but it wasn't runny at all. I would have possibly opted for a runnier pie and a slightly less thick tapioca twinge, but that's a personal preference. It did run enough to resemble a very satisfactory crime scene.  

We had it for brunch, along with a very excellent quiche. My friend 'BeeBo,' below, is a big fan of blueberries.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Eat MORE Pie

Back on the pie crust train. We had a bag of 'utility' Macouns on the counter and a butter/margarine crust ready to go. And go we did.

I actually took this pie down to Libby and Rob's, re-living the time when my wonderful testers lived right here in-house. Full of butter, apples, vietnamese cinnamon, and not much else (ok, ok, I threw in a pear), this was pie at its purest.

The next evening, Rob, who hadn't been there for dinner, put it to me thus: "I was reading my horoscope, and it said I would be finding a new love and beginning a new relationship. And I now know that it was true--your pie."

Tuesdays with Dorie: Fold-Over Pear Torte

This may not be widely known on the internet, but anyone who knew me in high school will confirm that I am a recovering anglophile. My addiction was less to footballers and crusty punk and the Royal family than to the comedians, the cottages, and above all the literature. I remain a Shakespeare addict, a serious Caryl Churchill fan, and a Jane Austen evangelist, but I no longer dream about a 19th century estate or little rose covered cottage of my own (ok, I do, but it doesn't have to be in England, karma...anywhere would do...).

The British addiction, which coincided with and was partly fueled by a furious crush (pash?) on Emma Thompson, was enhanced by much early reading of Britsh children's books, from the better known novels of C.S. Lewis, Noel Streatfield, and Frances Hodgeson Burnett to the slightly more obscure works of folks like Rumer Godden. These were complimented by many books from the era when American children's books were rather like some of their British counterparts, especially the mildly Transcendentalist 'moral pap for the young' written by the great and underestimated Louisa May Alcott, and the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery (a slightly different but no less urgent nod to Laura Ingalls Wilder, of course). I loved the dresses, the farmhouses, the emotional honesty, the earnest love affairs, and the food. Blancmange, hotcakes, raspberry cordial, and yorkshire pudding, custard and cold chicken and jelly. One item that always made an appearance was mince pies, a Christmas must-have (not being Christian, I never really knew that they still are).

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie selection, a crusty roly-poly filled with custard, chopped pears, almond extract, raisins and nuts, took me right back into that world of stodgy puddings and flaming mince. In this, it's a very uncharacteristic Dorie dessert. Usually, she leans toward the modern all-American or the classic French, but this Fold-Over Pear Torte is, at least in my version, right in the center of the British/American post-colonial camp.

Due to a momentary measuring brain-blip (unsurprising given my exhausted mental state for the weekend), I made half the filling in a full crust. It was presumably less wet and fruity than it was meant to be, but that spicy, almost Christmas-y taste was great, and the abundance of crust made it much easier to transport to rehearsal, where it was entirely consumed, although not with as great avidity as next week's Caramel Pumpkin Pie.

"Shut the lower draught of the stove, so that the oven may heat. Then wash your hands and get out the flour, sugar, salt, butter, and cinnamon. See if the pie-board is clean, and pare your apple ready to put in."


"I really don't know how to measure for such tiny pies; I must guess at it, and if these don't succeed, we must try again," said Mrs. Jo, looking rather perplexed, and very much amused with the small concern before her. "Take that little pan full of flour, put in a pinch of salt, and then rub in as much butter as will go on that plate. Always remember to put your dry things together first, and then the wet. It mixes better so."


"I know how; I saw Asia do it. Don't I butter the pie plates too? She did, the first thing," said Daisy, whisking the flour about at a great rate.


"Quite right! I do believe you have a gift for cooking, you take to it so cleverly," said Aunt Jo, approvingly. "Now a dash of cold water, just enough to wet it; then scatter some flour on the board, work in a little, and roll the paste out; yes, that's the way. Now put dabs of butter all over it, and roll it out again. We won't have our pastry very rich, or the dolls will get dyspeptic."      ~Louisa May Alcott, Little Men