When there’s just a fistful, make galette

When and where I grew up, there was a rhubarb plant in everyone’s back yard. No one ever bought rhubarb; they just stepped outside the back door and pulled up the stalks they wanted. And certainly no one ever paid for a rhubarb plant. They just waited for a friend or neighbor to offer a split. If things got dire and someone actually needed to ask for rhubarb, well, that’s what relatives were for.

Here and now, in the big bad city,* I get rhubarb from the farmers’ market or from my CSA share. Sometimes, after dividing our weekly box with my neighbor, there are only a few stalks—not enough for the overstuffed pies of my childhood.

But even if I have only a handful of rhubarb, there’s no need to go without the sweet/tart, Valentine pink, prolifically juicy extravagance that is rhubarb pie. I’ll make a galette instead!

This recipe will make four good-sized servings. You can cut it in half for an even teensier pastry. Or, if you ever have pastry dough left over after some other recipe, you can roll it out on a piece of waxed paper; roll that up into a cylinder; and then wrap it up and freeze it. Then, when you find yourself with a fistful of rhubarb, just thaw out your sheet of dough and bake this treat.

*South Minneapolis. Hey, it’s shady and my yard is small!

Rhubarb Galette
Before you start, you may find it useful to read “All Those Women on Fine September Afternoons” from Katrina Vandenberg’s collection Atlas. I consult my copy every time I make pastry. It always helps.

Pastry
½ c cold unsalted butter, cut in small pieces
1¼ c flour
1 t sugar
½ t salt
3-5 T ice water

Filling
2 cups sliced rhubarb (¼" to ½" thick)
½ t grated orange zest
½ c cornstarch or tapioca
¾ c sugar (more or less to taste)
Pinch salt
A few small slivers of butter

First, make the pastry. Make sure the butter is cold. Blend the dry ingredients and cut the butter into them with a pastry cutter. Cut and cut until the stuff looks like cornmeal or soft breadcrumbs. Going fast is an advantage here, because things will stay cold and this is a good thing.

Sprinkle a few tablespoons of water over the pastry crumblies. Stir with a fork or a spatula until things clump together. Try to roll the pastry into a ball. If it won’t go, sprinkle on a bit more water and try again.

When you have your dough ball, cover it loosely and put it in the fridge to relax. A half hour should do it. Now is a great time to cut up your rhubarb and prepare your filling.

To do the filling, just stir together everything except the slivers of butter.

Preheat the oven to 350°. Roll out your dough onto a floured surface; make a roundish shape. Transfer the dough to a baking sheet.

Look in your filling bowl. Is there powdery stuff in there, at the bottom? Good. Holding the fruit back with one hand, shake the loose dry stuff onto the center of your pastry shape. Then let the fruit fall on top of that. Spread the rhubarb out in a layer about 1 to 1½" thick, then fold the edges of the crust over the filling. There should be a big open space on top with no crust. Kind of like a pie without a pan.

Dot the filling here and there with the slivers of butter and pop the galette into the oven. It’s done when the pastry browns and the rhubarb is bubbling; this will take far less time than for a regular pie, maybe 20 to 30 minutes.

Serve to acclaim!

Just sayin'

Chocolate cream pie on graham cracker crust with whipped cream.

And I am seriously done eating dessert for awhile.

Perfect Pecan Pie!

Artist’s conception - real pic below!

In a rare instance of Amy Boland posting a holiday recipe in advance of a holiday, here’s the pecan pie I made last Thanksgiving and plan to make again!

There are two reasons to like this pie. One, it is full of deep, dark, sugary-buttery-caramely-toasty flavors. Two, it calls for bourbon and I don’t know anything about the stuff. I get to learn! Yay!

Last year I blindly got a pint of Wild Turkey. This elicited reactions ranging from indifference to dismay in the bourbon drinkers of my acquaintance.

This year I went to South Lyndale Liquors—where they will, upon request, pour you tiny tastes of booze from sample bottles lined up on the barrelheads of actual casks conditioned specially for them to sell. The guy who poured for me also explained what I was tasting and why the flavors were there. I chose Buffalo Trace.

So now I feel I have picked a winner, and I’m going to have plenty of bourbon left over afterwards. Um. Pie-making party at my house?

Oh, wait, yeah, the PIE! This IS supposed to be a post about pie.

Perfect Pecan Pie

Post-Thanksgiving pie pic update

I copied this recipe out of a column in the Star Tribune in 1997. Usually I don’t post recipes I didn’t create or significantly modify, because I think the person who wrote the recipe should get the credit (and should get stuck doing the typing). But since I don’t think we can go back in time and purchase a copy of the newspaper from an unknown day in late fall 1997, I’m prepared to make an exception.

Also I recall from my glamorous youth, when I worked on food books at a children’s publishing company, that the Copyright Guardians consider recipes to be formulae. So I’m not running afoul of the law, either. Potential haters, please make a note.

1 c dark brown sugar
⅔ c cane syrup OR ⅓ c light corn syrup and ⅓ c dark molasses
¼ c unsalted butter
3 T bourbon
½ t vanilla
½ t salt
4 eggs
2-3 T half & half
2 heaping c pecan pieces
1 unbaked single 9” pie crust
A big handful of pecan halves

Heat oven to 350°. Melt the sugar, syrup, butter, bourbon, vanilla, and salt together. Heat to boiling and boil one minute, stirring constantly. Let cool.

Beat the eggs with the half & half until frothy. Add this to the syrup, beating until well mixed. Stir in the pecan pieces.

Pour into the pie shell and top with a layer of pecan halves. (Make it look pretty.) Bake 45 to 50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Berry Tart

When I tell people what I did yesterday, they say, “You did WHAT now?” Together with two other women, I hosted a baby shower.

This is seemingly a thing about as far removed from my regularly scheduled life as is possible: my house filled with a dozen straight women dressed for a summer party, toting colorfully wrapped packages and ready to talk about babies and children.

Except that the pregnant lady we’re showering is Katrina. She and all her friends, as it turns out, have many things in common. We love books, for one thing (that shower probably had the highest percentage of MFAs at any gathering outside the Loft). We loathe baby shower games; none were planned and no one missed them except to express relief at their absence. And nobody was shy about enjoying a good lunch made of fresh summer produce, or about having a slice of berry tart for dessert.

Berry Tart with Lemon Cream
This dessert is no less delicious for its ease of preparation; you can have the whole thing done in an hour from start to finish. It serves twelve—one slice for every lady at the party plus one more for Katrina to eat later. You know, so the baby can have a piece too.

Half a box of graham crackers (14 sheets)
⅓ c sugar
½ t cinnamon
1 stick butter, melted
10 oz (1 ¼ packages) cream cheese at room temperature
1/3 c sugar
2-3 T fresh lemon juice
1/3 c heavy cream
2 pints assorted berries, washed/hulled/pitted/rendered fit to eat
¼ c jelly or preserves

Heat the oven to 350°. Smush up the graham crackers. I sealed mine in a Ziploc bag and steamrolled them with a rolling pin until they were fine crumbs. Stir in the sugar and cinnamon, then drizzle on the melted butter. Stir up well. Dump into a 10 or 11" tart pan with a removable bottom. Press crumbs into the sides of the pan first, then all over the bottom. Pop this into the oven to toast for 10 or 15 minutes, then cool completely.

Meanwhile, put the cream cheese, sugar, and lemon juice in a bowl and beat them together. Dump in the heavy cream and blend this until smooth.
While you are waiting for the crust to cool, get the berries ready. Wash them, do any hulling necessary, and dry them off. Finally, prepare the jelly or preserves. If you’re using preserves, put them through a strainer–you only want the goo, not the solids. This is going to be your glaze. Warm it up just enough to melt it.

Now it’s showtime. Spread the lemon cream evenly in the bottom of the cooled crust. Arrange the fruit artfully on top. Ideally, no cream would be showing through; but if you don’t have enough fruit to pull that off, don’t worry about it. Last, brush the jelly glaze over the fruit so everything is shiny.

Chill the tart at least four hours; you should probably eat it by the next day.

Just sayin'

Cherry pie with sour cherries from Maple Leaf Orchard.

A Day to Celebrate Pie

The American Pie Council® has declared January 23 National Pie Day! The APC’s web site proclaims a day “dedicated to the celebration of pie.”

According to the APC’s notes about pie history, “Pie has been around since the ancient Egyptians. The first pies were made by early Romans who may have learned about it through the Greeks.” So not only is pie A) delicious; but it B) has the power to transcend space/time and C) is not subject to the laws of cause and effect.

Hooray for Pie!

Zwiebelpastete

I brought this dish, based on a recipe from Marianna Olszewska Heberle’s German Cooking, to a Pie Day party. The original recipe called for bacon, but I (rightly) guessed there’d be vegetarians and left it out. Instead, I used repeated simmering to draw out and deepen the flavor. When people asked how to say this word, I explained it is pronounced “onion pie.”

½ cup butter

1 c flour

1 pinch sugar

1 pinch flour

2-3 T milk

1 T olive oil

3 large sweet onions, sliced
1 c vegetable broth
¼ c vodka
½ c sour cream
1 egg plus 1 egg white, lightly beaten
1 T chopped fresh chives
Salt and pepper to taste
1 egg yolk, beaten with ½ t water
¼ t caraway seeds
Paprika

Mix flour, sugar and salt; cut in butter until mixture is like coarse meal. Sprinkle on the milk, mix with a fork, and form the dough into a ball. Roll out and line a greased 10" or 11" pie pan with the dough. Crimp or flute the edge and trim off the extra. If you have time, wrap loosely and let the crust rest from an hour up to overnight. This will keep fancy edges from puffing out of shape in the oven.

Heat the oven to 350°. Prick the crust all over with a fork, weight it, and bake until browned, perhaps 20 minutes. Remove the weights and set the crust aside.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a big sauté pan. Cook the onions gently until they begin to soften. Splash in half the stock and continue stirring until the liquid evaporates. Splash in the rest of the stock and repeat. Splash in the vodka and cook the onions down one more time. Set them aside.

Turn the oven up to 375°. Separate one of the eggs and set the yolk aside. Beat the white and the other egg, then mix with the chives, sour cream, and salt/pepper to taste. Mix this into the onions. Spread the onion mixture evenly in the bottom of the pie crust.

Beat the leftover yolk with the half teaspoon of water and brush all over the top of the pie. Sprinkle on the caraway seeds and dust the top with paprika. Bake until the pie is set and the top begins to brown, about 20 minutes.

Let cool slightly and serve warm.

Happy Pie Day!

Beer/Pie Pairings with Amy and Joe

Did you know Curran’s Restaurant has Pie Happy Hour? I kid you not. From 2pm to 5pm and from 7pm to close, you can waltz in there and have a slice of pie for a dollar.

This is the kind of friendly customer-centric, get-‘em-in-the-door promotion I’d expect from Curran’s. They have been a neighborhood standard for more than sixty years. Think of a homegrown Perkin’s or Country Kitchen with career waitstaff. The clientele is a mix of families, elders, and high school couples on weeknight dates. So it is a little bit of a surprise to learn that Curran’s also has a long list of foreign, domestic, and craft beers in bottles.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

My friend Joe and I headed over for a flight of beer and pie. We ordered two beers and two slices of pie each. We split each beer and managed to eke out eight bites from each slice, eight sips from each half-beer. Our tasting notes are transcribed below. We were, in spite of ourselves, surprised by what we learned.

The worst beer overall, to my chagrin, was my own longtime favorite: Summit EPA. It performed poorly with every pie we tried, although it was tolerable with apple. Apple, we found, was the all-around good beer companion. While it did not excel with any beer we tasted, it made an acceptable sidekick to all of them. “The Will Smith of the pies,” remarked Joe.

The worst pie was blueberry. Curran’s blueberry pie is nothing to write home about in the first place; it’s an uninspired assembly of canned blueberry filling and pale crust. But had it been a better pie, it would only have been a bigger shame to eat it with beer. Time after time, flavors clashed like a pair of second-rate drag queens angling for the same spot on the dance floor. The Summit EPA and blueberry pairing was a complete loser.

The overall best match was Blue Moon and pumpkin. Curran’s tremblingly tender custard tastes strongly of fresh pumpkin and nutmeg. When that flavor combines with smooth, clean Blue Moon, it’s a magical moment.

So what’s next for beer/pie pairings? Curran’s has other beers to try, other pies to probe. Maybe a beer/pie potluck, where everyone brings either a six-pack or a pastry?

Beer and Pie Tasting Notes
Click to enlarge!