Cooking with Betty Crackpot: Pie Crust & Rhubarb Pie

I just wanted to post a pic of the rhubarb pie I made last week, from the rhubarb plant at my friends' place.  Two of the friends were rhubarb virgins and one didn't care for the stuff.  Well, I am happy to say I have made three rhubarby converts!  Yesssss!!!

I made them a pie, and here it is.  The pastry recipe is Betty Crackpot's - again.  It's a no-fail recipe, really. You can find it here.

And here is the pie, complete with a pretty lattice and everything.

Pumpkin Pie!

This is the first recipe I've made from my recently reviewed copy of Earth to Table, by Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann. I knew this was something I had to make as soon as I laid eyes on the recipe - adore pumpkin pie, and sometimes you need to branch out from the same old recipe you've been using for a decade, right? Right! The fact that this is no-bake is a bonus.

First of all, let me tell you about the pastry. You all know I'm always on the lookout for great pastry recipes, right, because I've had pastry-making issues in the past? I was actually not going to bother making the pastry recipe from Earth to Table because I like this one so much, but I decided to give it a whirl after I read through the instructions. In them, the author advises to use a grater to grate the cold butter into the dry ingredients. This means you don't need to touch the pastry as much with your hands - making a flakier pastry and much less of a mess. This was such a brilliant idea! And it worked fantastically. I can honestly say that this is the nicest pastry I've ever made: it was perfectly flaky, light and airy, and tasted excellent. It was a bit on the salty side, however, but that is easily remedied. I added a bit more sugar to it since it was going with a sweet pie.

Pâte Brisée for 9" single crust pie, page 306 of Earth to Table, very slightly adapted by me

1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
1/2 cup cold unsalted butter
2 tbsp - 1/4 (approx.) cold water

Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Grate butter directly into dry ingredients. Stir. Add water, a tbsp at a time, kneading dough slightly until it comes together. Turn onto floured work surface. Shape into a disk and chill until needed.

In this case, you need a blind baked pie crust, so I rolled out the pastry dough immediately and lined my pie plate with it and stuck it in the freezer until it was cold. Then I pressed foil onto the surface of the shell and added my pie weights (I use rice), and blind baked the crust at 350F for 15 minutes the pie weights in it, removed the pie weights, then baked the crust an additional 20 minutes until it was light golden. I set it aside to cool.

The pumpkin pie recipe in the book is called "Mile High Pumpkin Pie." It uses a meringue made with maple syrup on the top, which is then broiled to get a nice toasted effect. I didn't do this because it required a cup of maple syrup, and because that particular ingredient is expensive for me and I didn't want to part with a cup of it for one dessert, I topped the pie with whipped cream instead. This was just dandy. The filling recipe is amazing, though! For it, I used pumpkin that I roasted last year and froze. That pumpkin was a little pale, so this filling doesn't have the dark orange colour that a typical pumpkin pie might have.

Pumpkin Filling (page 212, Earth to Table)

1/4 cup cold water
1 packet powdered unflavoured gelatin
1 cup cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup whipping cream
2 cups roasted pumpkin
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

Combine cold water with gelatin and let it sit (bloom) for at least 10 minutes.

Cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Add whipping cream until incorporated, occasionally scraping down the sides of the bowl. Add pumpkin, salt, and spices; beat until smooth. Set aside.

In a small saucepan, cook gelatin mixture over low heat, stirring until gelatin dissolves completely - about 1 minute. Add to pumpkin mixture and mix until well combined.

Pour filling into prepared shell. Chill at least an hour before serving.

This was a huge hit! The filling was so light it was almost mousse-like, and it wasn't too sweet. The spices were perfect. This will definitely be made again in my kitchen - it was excellent!

Magazine Monday #45: Perfect All-Butter Piecrust

Well, this is Monday #1 of my hosting Magazine Mondays! To remind you, Ivonne, our usual host, is away, and in her place I'll be hosting until Sept.14th. So, if you've made a magazine recipe and would like to submit it here to be linked to, please send me an email at wandering_coyoteATyahooDOTca.

So, here is my post for today, and following are links to the post of other Magazine Monday participants.

Despite my training & experience, I'm not a huge fan of making pastry, as I've mentioned before. I've had so many failures it's embarrassing! My go-to recipes are this one from Gourmet and this one (scroll down) from an older cookbook. I make this one at work and it's been fine, though it is made with shortening, something I try to avoid like the plague. I'm always on the look-out for new pastry recipes, however, and I was intrigued by one I found in the most recent issue of Food Network Magazine. Touting itself as "perfect" I was skeptical - until I read the recipe. The butter content is extremely high compared to any other recipes I've seen & used. To 3.5 cups of flour, there is 1.5 cups of butter. Also, this recipe has a higher sugar content than most recipes; in fact, some pastry recipes have no sugar in them at all.

So, on the weekend, I gave this a go, and decided to use it to make a blueberry pie with some blueberries I got on wicked sale and froze a couple of weeks previously.

Food Network's Perfect All-Butter Pastry, from Aug./Sept. 2009

3 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups chilled butter, cubed
1 tbsp white or cider vinegar
1/3 cup ice water

Pulse dry ingredients in a food processor. Pulse in 1/2 cup butter until combined. Pulse in remaining butter until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add vinegar. Gradually pour in water, pulsing until combined. Turn out onto a clean surface & press into a cohesive dough without overworking (you should still see bits of butter). Press into a disk & wrap with plastic wrap. Refrigerate at least 1 hour before rolling out.

If you don't a have a food processor, don't worry. I don't; I used my hands, as I usually do when making pastry, and it was fine.

The dough was lovely! It rolled out beautifully!

The recipe made way more than enough for one pie, though. I got one deep dish blueberry pie and three decently-sized apple turnovers, using up some frozen apples I had from last year's apple harvest.

Here is the pie...
And here are the turnovers...My dad came over for dinner that night, and he sampled a turnover as an appetizer. The first thing he said was that the pastry was amazing, and that he could tell it was very rich with butter. So, I had a sample myself, and he was right: this is amazing pastry, and it is very rich! In fact, this is now my new favourite pastry recipe, I think.

Joining me in testing out magazine recipes this week are:

Wizzy The Stick of Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner & Punch made some gave her hot dogs a makeover by making some gourmet dogs from Bon Appetit magazine.

Debbie of Dining with Debbie made a delicious-looking Brazilian Black Bean Soup from Cuisine at Home.

Paninigirl made a great Zucchini Curry from an issue of Gourmet from 2002.

Di of Di's Kitchen made her version of BBQ Braised Vietnamese Short Ribs with Sweet Vinegar Glaze from an issue of Fine Cooking.

Thanks for participating, you guys!

Making Pastry

Despite my training and experience, I've had a lot of trouble over the years making pastry dough. It's weird, but I just have never been able to have a successful result with a variety of recipes, except for a couple: a butter recipe (here, scroll down) and a recipe from Gourmet (here). Today at work, I was asked to make pastry dough for the chicken pot pies being served for dinner. I was a little skeptical that I could pull this off, but I actually did it! I have no idea where this recipe came from, but I suspect it came from a shortening box. The shortening we use at this place is often purchased from Wal-Mart, and it's the Wal-Mart brand, and it doesn't have a recipe on the box, so that's not the source. But whatever the case, it worked out.

Pastry Dough

2 cups flour
1 cup shortening
3/4 tsp salt
1 egg
2 tbsp cold water
1 tbsp vinegar

Whisk together the dry ingredients, and then cut in the shortening with a pastry blender. You'll have something that looks like this:
Crumbly, with some larger chunks in it - it doesn't have to be perfect.

Whisk together the wet ingredients and add them to the dry.
Stir until combined. I was making three times the recipe and I wound up using my hands, and my dough was a bit sticky, so I just added a bit more flour.
The work surface needed to be well-floured for easy rolling, and one of the things I love about commercial kitchens is that you have a lot of room to roll pastry out and you can use as much flour as necessary without it making a huge mess.I needed 36 tops for 36 chicken pot pies, cut with the oval ramekins the pies were being baked and served in.Cute, eh? I was pretty pleased with myself. My confidence in my pastry-making skills has been restored!