Pie for Breakfast

Championship Brunch: pie, coffee, Mimosa

Come-clean: This is not my pie. In point of fact, I don't really do sweets and, with the notable exception of pizza, I rarely bake. Suffice it to say that we all have our place in the kitchen, and mine is not at the pastry station.

Which is by way of saying how exceedingly fortunate I am to have married a woman who can bake her butt off, because just saying the word "pie" makes me happy. Seriously, until you've had one of my wife's pies, your gastronomic bucket list will remain at least partially incomplete. She has no weak suit: My birthday happily coincides with our own lemon crop, so Lemon Meringue has always been my personal favorite. But they are all exceptional: Chocolate Pudding (filled with a homemade dark chocolate custard), Apple (which I otherwise don't even eat), and - one of the Himalayan peaks of the pie-baking landscape - Mixed Berry, defined by whatever local berries are currently at their peak, and what I was lucky enough to have for breakfast this past Sunday.

What makes a great pie? The trivially obvious: A great crust (consisting, as I understand it, of all of three ingredients, flour, fat and salt), and a great filling (which can be relatively complex, as in puddings, as well as incredibly simple, as in most fruits). It is this very simplicity which belies the difficulty in achieving pie-greatness:

Just-filled with Middleton Farms' berries

• Consisting of almost nothing while demanding great attention to small technical details, a great crust offers the cook boundless opportunity to screw things up; the crust must remain structurally sound in the oven, it must cook evenly, and it must not only be flaky - both light and rich, crunchy and soft - but it should exhibit the same flakiness on the bottom as it does on the top. When it comes to crusts, technique is everything.
• Fillings are similarly unforgiving, if for different reasons: When it comes to filling a pie, there is nowhere to hide. No amount of sugar, lemon juice, and stove-top wizardry will impart flavor to bland berries, texture to mealy apples, or the scent of a perfectly ripe Meyer to bitter lemon juice. When it comes to fillings, there is no way around the imperative to start with great fruit. 

My advice, as a non-participant in the pie kitchen, is this: First, buy the best fruit you possibly can. Almost any fruit can make a great pie, but no great pie can be made from fruit of poor quality. (Please don't list for me the virtues of instant pudding mixes. They have their place, but not in homemade pie. If you are going to roll out your own crust, then by all means, cook your own custard.) Second, read up on pie crusts, paying particularly close attention to the technicalities of temperature and speed (see McGee or Corriher, for instance - and sorry for the AMZN plug, I don't care where you buy it, the link is just to get you the title).

And last, but most certainly not least, always save a slice for breakfast.

French Fries @ Home: Fresh, easy, and not that bad for you (really)

First, potatoes. I love potatoes. I mean, I really, really, love them. I could probably eat an entire meal of potatoes and enjoy it (at least until it caught up with me). I love potatoes mashed, grated and pan-fried into pancakes, diced and pan-roasted as home fries, baked, oven-roasted, and, of course, deep-fried into french fries. Is there any food that is, on appearances, simpler and more spectacular than a perfect french-fried potato? I, for one, think not.

It is to the humble tuber's credit that it remains edible, if perhaps not at the peak of flavor, days, weeks, even months after it is pulled from the ground; certainly, the ease with which potatoes can be stored played a material role in wintering over food supplies for many peoples prior to the advent of refrigeration, particularly in Europe (Europeans still produce the most potatoes per capita, but the fastest rate of change is in Asia, and China is now the world's leading producer). As usual, lots of good info here at Wiki, and if you're really in a potato mood, check out the British Potato Council (you have to love the Brits). The catch is that storage comes at a cost - once the potato begins to decompose, however slowly, the starches that are so essential to its cooking properties begin to break down, and texture and flavor are compromised - so if you whenever you find truly farm-fresh taters (you have to ask - I used to see last-season's crop for sale at the Union Square market in NYC all the time, when the stalls were otherwise lean), by all means, buy them, and cook them post haste.

Thus it was with considerable enthusiasm that my eldest daughter and I rummaged through the basket of just-dug Yukon Golds at the Bernier Farms stall. I would have sworn they still carried the warmth of the topsoil they were unearthed from, but that seems logically unlikely, given the cool weather we've had; in any case, they were gorgeous in all their dirty splendor and, if you listened closely, the breeze through the market seemed to whisper "fry me... FRY ME!". OK, maybe that was just my stomach, but the end result was the same - homemade french fries.

French fries, however, present the home cook with a few obstacles, notably deep-frying (messy, dangerous, and requiring special equipment), and health (fat, fat, and more fat, although I'm not really very concerned with fat per se, the health issue having more to do with the types of fat and total calories consumed, rather than the percentage or grams of fat in isolation). Inspired by Heston Blumenthal's approach, I've experimented with "oven fries" for years now, with greater and lesser success, and I've now convinced myself that a good - no, a very good - oven fry is possible, even likely, with relatively little effort, and not much guilt on the health front.

Oven Fries

1. Start with proper potatoes. If you're going to go the trouble, and bear the caloric consequences, of making and eating home-made fries, surely it's worth a good potato. Most important is that the potato be of the waxy variety, and ideally fresh from your favorite local grower's patch of dirt. My go-to waxy potato is the Yukon Gold, great flavor, texture, color, and you can almost always find them.
2. Pre-heat the oven to 450F and boil a pot of salted water that is large enough to accommodate all the fries without crowding. (If you don't know how to salt water, go with the Italians' advice for pasta: It should taste about like the sea - this works for pasta, vegetables, whatever.)
3. While everything else is getting hot, proceed to cut the potatoes into roughly rectangular shapes. You will waste a bit, but you can use the trim for something else, or compost; but it's important to start with the right shape. A bit oblong is fine, as length is not so critical; what is essential is that the four "sides" of your potato are parallel, so that you can subsequently cut it into fries of uniform thickness. Cut the potatoes into planks of uniform thickness, typically 5-10mm per side; I like about a 1/4", but, while this is a matter of preference and aesthetics, cooking times and temps must be adjusted. Take the planks and stack them and cut them into sticks of width equal to their height - this will give you nice fries of uniform thickness, a pleasing square shape, and - most importantly - equal cooking time. As you cut the sticks, drop them into a bowl of cold water; this will help rinse starch off their surfaces and prevent them from sticking together.
4. Dump the potato sticks into the boiling water to blanche - carefully! use a slotted spoon or something to avoid splatter - and cook for about 5 minutes. 5 is my number, for my size fry (pictured); it will vary, so watch them. They should come out just barely starting to be tender, but not at all falling apart - if they don't 'bend' at all when you pluck one out, they're not ready; if they start breaking or fail to hold their clean-cut shape, they're over. This step is critical: There is no such thing as a decent fry that has been cooked only once. There is no short cut. You can use water, as I do here, instead of oil (not quite as good, but still quite good, and much healthier, easier, less messy, and safer at home), but you MUST blanche them before frying, or your fries are destined to suck. Seriously. It has everything to do with giving the starch molecules in the outer layer time to glue together before frying, which is what creates a crisp crust and a flaky interior. The chemistry is unforgiving on this, you can take my word for it, consult McGee, Corriher, or this excellent discussion from the French Culinary Institute, or you can eat shitty fries.
5. Gently - gently - drain, rinse, and pat-dry the potatoes (laying them out on a kitchen towel which you then fold over works well). Transfer to a large bowl and coat them liberally with good-quality olive oil. When in doubt, keep it local - I'm still working through the bottom of a bottle of TJ's Spanish EVOO, but I'd prefer to have used DaVero's 40-weight. And when I say liberally, I mean it, now is not the time to skimp on fat. The fries should be coated and glistening with oil.
6. Transfer to a sheet tray, moving the fries around to ensure that they all have room to breathe. Don't "crowd" the tray! Transfer the sheet tray to the 450-degree oven and bake for about 20 minutes. Watch, listen, and check them frequently from 15 minutes on, but I suspect you'll find about 25 minutes total cooking time.
7. Take them out and salt the hell out of them. Nothing worse than a bland, under-seasoned french fry. Kosher salt is a staple around here, but sometimes it doesn't stick to fries very well, so a finer grind of good sea salt, or - better - one of the more powdery sel gris would really make them sing.
8. Serve IMMEDIATELY! Heinz (and no other) ketchup is optional.

Good vittles...