smitten kitchen » Cherries

sour cherry pie with almond crumble

deb — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:35:06 +0000

If there can be no clearer indication that this will be the Summer of Pie at the Smitten Kitchen — as if a 6-week onslaught of galette after pie smackdowns after savory tart built on a platform of tartlets crusted bettys and free-form pretties did not already lead us to that conclusion — my pastry blender broke this week after putting in five very good years. First, one side of it became unglued from the handle and because I am both stubborn and cheap, I’d just hold it in with my thumb while I cut butter into flour. But then the other side came unglued and I ran out of thumbs. So RIP little pastry blender, and Amazon, hurry and bring that new one along, okay?*

If it could have a fitting final act, this would be a fine one, a sour cherry pie I’ve been angling to make for more than three years and have, without fail, missed the painfully short window that sour cherries are available. Not this year. This year the season seems to be stretching on and on, and I couldn’t be more pleased as while sweet cherries make some fine snacking, sour cherries win all prizes in baking.

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new york cheesecake

deb — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:58:45 +0000

New Yorkers have a reputation for being pushy and over-the-top — these are things you learn when you leave the city for a weekend, and a ticketing agent at the airport in Tulsa, for example, informs you that you’re so much more polite than she thought a New Yorker would be. We apparently like things bolder and taller and shinier and more intense and while I’m not sure if this really applies to your average straphanger commuting from walk-up to cubicle and back again everyday, I am absolutely certain that it applies to our cheesecakes.

(No, the other kind, silly.)

How is a New York Cheesecake unlike any other cheesecake? To begin, it’s very very tall. Most cheesecakes — like my Bourbon Pumpkin, Cappuccino Fudge, Key Lime and a Brownie Mosaic riff — use 3 bricks of cream cheese; this uses 5. Most cheesecakes are cut or lightened with sour cream; not here, where firm and intense is the goal. Often they’re scented with a bit of lemon; nobody knows why, only that it tastes good. And finally, they’re often topped with gooey heaps of fruit that will, without fail, not taste as good as their pretty-pretty picture. Why? Because, in most cases, they’re actually canned pie filling.

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sour cherry slab pie

deb — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:39:46 +0000

Continuing my summer fascination with any and all fruit desserts with goofy names, not two minutes after I discovered the existence of slab pie, I was fixing to make it. Why? Because it looks like a giant Pop Tart, and surely you don’t think a woman in her third trimester needs a single other reason to bake something.

But even though I just discovered this whole “slab pie” thing, I’m quite taken with it already — and not just the ungraceful name. It is, frankly, brilliant, more rustic than a pretty little crimped-edge 9-inch round and flakier too: the large swaths of dough manage show off their layers better than they do in smaller quantities, landing shatters and flecks like confetti all over your plate. Slab pie squares, especially the edges and corners, are more portable than wedges from a traditional round — how convenient for picnics and pot lucks — and if you’ve ever wanted to make a pie but known you had more than eight people to serve, this is your answer: pie for dozens. That is, if the baker is the generous sort.

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cherry brown butter bars + new video project

deb — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:07:57 +0000

I don’t know what’s happening to me — maybe it’s third trimester dwindling energy levels and an accompanying desire to get the most bang from my feeble bursts of productivity — but all of a sudden, I find myself saying that I don’t want to cook this thing or that because it’s not practical. Practical! Who am I? Certainly not the girl who baked a wedding cake last summer in her tiny, overheated kitchen. Certainly not a person who has [shh, can't tell you]-making and a 12-layer cake on her summer cooking agenda.

Take this recipe, for example. It was originally a delicious-looking raspberry brown butter tart from this month’s Bon Appetit magazine. And although I usually associate brown butter with winter cooking — hazelnut brown butter cakes, brown butter shorties, pear crisps and brown butter with chestnuts and brussels sprouts, yes please. — and although I’ve never met a dessert tart I didn’t like, all I could think was “these would be so much more practical as a bar cookie!” Practical, there’s that word again. It’s all over for me, isn’t it?

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sour cherry compote

deb — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:19:31 +0000

Growing up, we had a sour cherry tree in the backyard. And I hated it. I hated it because it was cruel in a way that kids think they’re intimately familiar with–shiny, perfect-looking thing dangled inches from your face that when you reach for, is totally disappointing, crushing even (because when you’re a kid, it’s all very dramatic).

Sour doesn’t even aptly describe what these cherries taste like; they’re more along the lines of “caustic” and “acerbic,” especially if you’re a kid. I never understood how something that looked like the very embodiment of cherry perfection–round, bright red marbles hanging from a tree–could taste so awful, but they did.

I don’t think it was until I had moved to New York that I came across sour cherries in a format I wholly approved of: a sour cherry crumble bar. Unfortunately, it was very “unapproved” way–in a take-away box from some uppity coffee shop in my apartment refrigerator, and it belonged to my roommate. So I only had A Taste. (Don’t ever live with me, people. I cannot be trusted.) Just a little evening off the side, and then a little more leveling so it looked better, and then pushed it so far back in the fridge I believe the roommate found it months later and didn’t recognize it.

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sweet cherry pie

deb — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:22:30 +0000

Whoever said you can’t make a good cherry pie with sweet cherries was lying. Sure, I love a sour or tart cherry pie as much as the next cherry-lover, but when the Greenmarket only has the sweet ones, there’s no reason to run in the other direction.

It helps that they were early-season cherries, thus not as sweet as the dark purple Bings we’re getting in the supermarkets right now. But I maintain that even if their sugars were fully developed, you could have just dialed back the sugar and punched up the acidity some more to balance it out.

There’s just no excuse not to make cherry pie when they’re this pretty.

You might want to wear dark clothes when you pit the cherries.

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cherry cornmeal upside-down cake

deb — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:39:25 +0000

This is the cake in which I did everything wrong.

1.It was impromptu, on a week that I have been trying to embrace salads, vegetables and water, or all those things I got too little of on Alex and Deb’s Central European Vacation. But I’m a sucker for any and all upside-down cakes, and this one sounded so good, my resolve was immediately weakened.

2. Cherries are not in season around here, not even close.

3. I said if I couldn’t find frozen cherries, I’d take it as a sign and skip it, but then Alex went to the store for me and he’s so good, so eager to get everything on the list that he bought fresh ones that cost so much money, I cannot discuss it in mixed company. But it was still really sweet of him.

4. I do not own a cherry pitter. Oh, I have looked at them, marveled at an extra-cute one at Williams-Sonoma last summer, but that time, like all of the times before it, I determined such a purchase fussy and of little use. Halving and pitting cherries took forever, a forever I would have happily swapped for a $10 limited-use gadget.

5. I do not own a cast-iron or oven-proof skillet that is 10 or 11 inches, though this, too, I have often discussed buying one but the thought of lugging it home always talks me out of it.

6. I had worked until 7 p.m. on Tuesday, swam a mile at the gym, got home after 9 p.m. and still determined that I would have time to bake this cake, cherry pitting included. I hate rushing through recipes; something always goes horribly wrong and I forget an egg or the sugar and swear I’ll never rush again. Yet this is exactly what I did.

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cherry clafoutis

deb — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:37:46 +0000

You know what? I’m having a fantastic summer. Life is incredibly sweet, juicy opportunities for personal and professional development are cropping up left and right, we’re going to Napa in one month and — I’m thrilled.

Its terrible how little I like to talk about this, how fearful even the most level-headed of us can be of jinxing out all the good in the world by bringing it up. I mean, really. There is a difference between flaunting or bragging about a good life and celebrating it, or at least there ought to be. Did I tell you Alex and I had a little paper airplane flying contest before we went to bed two nights ago? Yeah, things are that kind of fun.

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coconut pinkcherry yogurt

deb — Wed, 23 May 2007 20:03:53 +0000

Like ten zillion other brides with mile-long registries, I received an ice-cream maker as a wedding shower gift two years ago, but when I finally busted it out last summer, I ended up really struggling to find good recipes. Why so much sugar in a cantaloupe sorbet? Isn’t it already sweet enough? Why should I add an equal part of water to watermelon puree? It’s a weak flavor to begin with, why dilute it so? Why do so many frozen yogurt recipes call for oddities like gelatin and milk? Can’t you just freeze yogurt? These questions nagged at me as I tried recipe after recipe, and save for a single strawberry sorbet that I still dream of late at night, each final product disappointed me in the exact ways that I predicted it would.

Yet, being a newbie in the world of homemade frozen things, I lacked the confidence to go out on my own, which is why when my new best friend (shh, I haven’t told him yet) announced that his newest cookbook would be aptly titled “The Perfect Scoop” I just knew that it would have the guidance that I needed. By some obvious, glaring oversight on the purchasing department of my Chelsea Barnes and Noble had the nerve to not stock it, and in the two weeks between the time I ordered and received the book, my torture was increased tenfold by having to view countless other examples of the awesomeness of this cookbook.

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