Category Archives: Baking
Greased and floured
My pal PAM
Just so you know, in my experience, when “buttering and flouring” it makes no difference whether you grease the baking dish with butter or the easy-to-use spray oil. I spray. Always. The flour sticks to it as well as it does to butter and it’s about 500 times easier to deal with.
Note: According to Nigella, you can use the paper wrapping from a stick of butter to grease a dish. OK, but that means you have to save the wrapper then remember that you have it. Too complicated for me. Given my habitual state of semi-lubrication, there is no way I’d remember I even had a stash of greasy butter wrappers in the first place, let alone where I stored them. Unless of course it was under one of the vodka bottles in the freezer. But if it works for you, have at it.
No. Box. Brownies. EVER!!
I feel about brownies from a mix much the same as Joan Crawford, at least as rendered by Faye Dunaway, did about cheap closet accessories. I loathe them. Ok, OK, I hear you. You’re scratching your head, your brow is furrowed and you say to yourself in a perplexed way, “But I thought she said use a mix for pie crust.”
“It’s HARDER to bake from scratch,” you whine. “What’s up with this crazy bitch anyway? Why can’t she make up her mind?”
It’s all about cost/benefit. Pie crust is hard to make and can easily go wrong, way way wrong. I have found one mix that almost never fails and tastes pretty good, so I use it.
Brownies, however, are a different story. Why? It is ridiculously easy to make de-licious, fudgy brownies if you use my recipe. They always, ALWAYS come out right and they taste infinitely better than that crap in a box, and I don’t care if it’s made with fancy Italian chocolate. Still gross.
I found this recipe in an issue of Ladies Home Journal at Grammie Sue’s house about 25 years ago, and it has never failed me. By happy coincidence, it comes from the queen of all movie stars, and my all time favorite actress, Katharine Hepburn. The magazine featured an interview with her, which explains why I picked it up in the first place, as I was really more of a Spy magazine girl at the time. Oh shit, who am I kidding, on the odd occasions I could get my ass off a barstool, all I ever bothered to read was National Lampoon at that point in my life. Spy was too highbrow. Anyways, what the LHJ interview lacked in dirt on Kate and Spenc-ah, it more than made up for with this fabulous recipe. Hundreds of satisfied dinner guests and half a dozen voluntary sugar comas can’t be wrong!
Hepburn’s Brownies
Melt over low heat:
- 1 stick unsalted butter (1/2 cup)
- 2 squares (or 2 ounces) unsweetened chocolate, best you can find, though Baker’s brand is fine
In a bowl, whisk:
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup sugar
- ½ teaspoon vanilla extract (pure, not that nasty imitation stuff – might as well use a mix if that’s all you’ve got. For variety, you can substitute pure almond extract for the vanilla. Party on!)
Once the butter and chocolate are melted, slowly add the mixture to the egg mixture, whisking all the time. DO NOT just dump the hot chocolate in all at once, no matter how much you want to. You could end up with scrambled eggs.
After that’s mixed, add:
- ¼ cup flour (no more!)
- ¼ tsp salt (do not omit this! Sweetness unbalanced by salt is not worth the calories.)
Stir it until it’s blended, then dump the batter into a greased and floured, square baking dish (8” x 8” or so). Scrape the leftover batter into the pan or into your mouth. At this point do I have to tell you which I’d choose?
Bake at 325 degrees for 30-40 minutes depending on your oven. Mine runs a little hot and I dislike overcooked baked goods, so I do about 30 minutes.
And listen, Christina, if you invite me over for dessert and serve these brownies with walnuts, I can’t be held responsible for my actions. I have been known travel with an axe from time to time. It won’t be you I’m mad at, of course, it’ll be the nuts.
In praise of the bread machine
courtesy breadinfo.com
Let me tell you bread machines were the hottest things since, well sliced bread, in the early 90s if memory serves. These days you don’t hear much about them, really, what with the ascendance of convection ovens (two sets of cooking times, are you kidding?), restaurant grade appliances (in the home?! I don’t need the unreasonable expectations created by having six burners), and the George Foreman grill (get real, I live in New York City. There’s barely room for the coffee maker in my kitchen, and that’s critical). But you never hear about the lowly bread machine anymore. It’s fallen out of fashion, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because we’re in a period where labor-intensive is more chic than labor-saving, and that’s just messed up.
Well let me tell you, fashionable or not, the bread maker is absolutely the greatest kitchen appliance. Evah. Imagine waking up to the smell of baking bread in the morning – takes the sting out of being occupied, don’t it? But the real benefit is that you do almost nothing, no kneading, no resting, no rising, no agonizing. Just dump the ingredients in, press the button and walk away. Four or five hours later, voila. Could not be easier.
Now, I have read the food porn that touts the pleasures of bread making – how Zen the experience of being up to your elbows in dough can be, how satisfying it is to serve a handmade loaf to family and friends. Blah blah blah.
Horseshit.
It’s a lot of time and effort, and it never comes out right. The machine is foolproof and slattern friendly, and the product is indistinguishable from “real” homemade bread, of which I’ve eaten a fair amount in my life – one look at my ass proves it. I can’t tell the difference, and I’ll bet Grammie Sue couldn’t either. And by the way, if she’d had a bread machine in the 1950s, things might have been very different in her house.
So dig that bad boy out of the closet and crank it up. Don’t worry if you’ve lost the recipe book. There must be a million recipes on the web, but all you need is one. You can thank me later.
You can make pie, and you should
As mentioned, I feel strongly about pie for cultural reasons. If you can’t make it, find a decent bakery where you can buy one. To my way of thinking there aren’t many. Usually a manufactured crust (the kind you see in the freezer at the grocery store) is a dead giveaway that the product will suck. So is a big blocky rim on the pie or anything that looks like this.
So dry it makes me choke just looking at it.
As I’ve said, making pie crust from a mix is not hard. You just follow the directions on the box and fill the damn thing with fruit, sugar, flour and butter and shove it in the oven. But a few tricks are worth pointing out:
You can mix the dough with a fork. If I’m feeling particularly lazy, and I usually am, I use the electric mixer (for me, the Kitchenaid stand mixer is a gift from God) for about 15 seconds, just until the dough comes together.
Recipes always tell you to chill the dough before rolling it out, but if you leave it in the fridge for more than about 10 minutes it gets too hard to roll. Just saying.
For pumpkin pie, do not, I repeat DO NOT, bake the shell before filling it. That’s just crazy and the rim will burn before the filling is set. Speaking of which, never use anything but canned pumpkin. Fresh pumpkin pie is stringy and dealing with a whole pumpkin is a giant pain in the ass from start (lugging it home, cutting it up, seeding it, removing all that stringy stuff) to finish (Do I have enough puree? Too much? What is all this stringy crap in my pie? Eww). It is always disappointing, especially if you spent a whole freaking day making it when you could have just opened the damned can (always use plain puree and add your own spices, eggs, etc.) and caught up on Project Runway while it baked.
Making a prebaked shell for one crust pie gives me fits. The crusts always collapse or they shrink and become unusable, or the recipe calls for pie weights (what?) or tells you to fill the thing with dried beans while you bake it. Screw that. Just avoid them. Make a graham cracker crust (or use ginger snaps) or chuck the whole project and make brownies instead.
You can crimp the top and bottom crusts with a fork if you must, but I think this looks gross and it always burns because the crust is too thin. Plus the crust bonds with the pie plate and makes it really hard to cut and serve. See?
Ugly, overdone crimped edge. Yuck.
Better to use your thumb to pinch the edge between your index and middle fingers. It’s a tad Martha, but it looks so much nicer and the pieces hold together better. Look.
Nicely crimped and properly vented.
Apple pie: For the love of God, use only Macintosh or Rome apples. Any guest who requests a slice of cheddar for his pie should be asked to leave. Enough said.
Fill ‘er up: Go on, mound the fruit up high. There is nothing worse than a skimpy layer of filling. See top photo.
Lattice top pies: What are you on, crack?
Pie crust: NO FEAR
That’s right, ladies, I said PIE CRUST. I’m opening strong, gambling that this will not scare off the one or two readers I have straight out of the gate, and I’m doing it because I am not afraid.
I grew up in Maine where chowder, baked beans and pie are the holy trinity of soul food and standards for all are ridiculously high. My Grammie Sue taught me to make crust from scratch, and I have even been known to do it from time to time; however, state visits are relatively rare in my house these days, and Anthony Bourdain doesn’t drop by as often as he once did. Generally, the folks I entertain are not what we would call gourmands, especially when it comes to baked goods. As a rule, they find a homemade pie sufficiently impressive to skip over a detailed investigation of what went into it. And I have never had a piece pushed away after one bite accompanied by a moue of distaste and an incredulous pie crust from a mix?.
That’s correct. I use a pie crust mix. And on the subject I have two words for you: BETTY CROCKER. The mix, not the book. It is the only palatable alternative to scratch crust, and in my world, unless you’re making lard piecrust – yup, lard as in rendered animal fat – there’s really no point in putting in the effort. In case you’re interested, here’s a good recipe for lard pie crust, though I think you can safely skip over the madness about the wood stove and canning up front.
Here’s what you should never do: use premade frozen crusts, buy those vile floppy rounds by Pillsbury (they taste like plastic), make crust using a Jiffy mix (beyond inedible). These are all gag inducing, utterly revolting.
Now, with the Betty Crocker crust mix, you do have to roll out the dough, but it’s a pie ferchrissakes, as my angel mother would say, and there’s no way to make a decent one without a modicum of effort. You’ll need a rolling pin, but a wine bottle will do in a pinch.
Want to make a pie? Here’s what you do.
Kitchen Slattern 