smitten kitchen

I don’t believe in perfection, in life or in the kitchen. At best, everything we do is a work in progress that gets a tad closer each time we nudge and tweak it. Case in point, last year’s Pie Crust 101 tutorial: My goal was to convince dough-phobes that they needn’t fear the crust by showing how I made mine in five minutes flat, or seriously, way less time than one would spend buying one. My goodness, especially with the lines in the grocery stores this week, right?

Of course in the 12 months since, I’ve probably made about 12 additional doughs and I swear, every single time I think of something that wasn’t in that post and am certain you’ve been robbed. So, without further ado, here is Pie Crust 102: A few extra tips and adjustments. If you’re a pie dough noob, Pie Crust 101 is still all you will need to get the job done, but if you’re looking to take it a step or two further, here you go:

1. I’m over shortening. There, I said it. For most of my life, I didn’t believe in shortening in crusts. It had no flavor, it is rather icky and mysterious if you give it too much thought, and who cares about flakiness in a one-crust pie anyway? But then I weakened my resolve. All the Cook’s Illustrateds and Ina Gartens claimed that the only! best! way to make the flakiest! pie dough was to use shortening in part, and I do value their opinions so. I did this for about two years, and now I’m back to all butter, baby. Do you know why? Well, for all of the original reasons–flavor rules and ickiness is not worth it–but because I have also realized that when you really know how to make pie dough, it won’t matter which fat you use. So butter it is baby! I’ll never doubt it again.

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So, yesterday was a fun and totally out of the ordinary day in the Smitten Kitchen. First, I cooked while wearing lip gloss, which — and I don’t mean to destroy your vision of your blog hostess looking as cute as Giada each day as she creams the sugar with the butter — um, never happens. Oh and second, some really nice young ladies filmed me while I worked.

As part of their grant from PBS’s Road Trip Nation, these recent college grads are going around the country talking to people who have travelled down entirely different career paths in hopes to get a clearer picture of what they’d like to do with their lives. How fun is that, right? And they wanted to come visit the Smitten Kitchen and talk to me, which is really funny considering that the answer to “what kind of career path led you here” is, in short: “What’s a career path?” chased with a guffaw, because I haven’t a clue.

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I am the first to admit that I do not create nearly enough of my *own* recipes. Oh, I tweak, I adapt. I skip some things and add others. But I don’t often enough decide that I want something enough to go out and find my own way to get there, which is a shame because when I do, it is never nearly the disaster I expect it to be.

And when I do, it makes me so happy, so Deb (as I was the only person in this room) let this be a lesson to you: do this more often, okay? Case in point, vowing to give the fresh whole cranberry more of a spotlight this year, I had been trying to figure out what kind of tart could be made with it for weeks, (Yes, besides that one.) but kept coming back to the idea of burying them in some sort of custard or filling to offset how tart they’d be. I knew I liked the frangipane idea, but although I love almond paste tremendously, I’ve always thought plain ground almonds were rather dull.

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I have lamented tart crusts for years, as it seemed that no matter what I did–chill the crusts, weight the crusts, arranged small prayer circles outside the oven–they shrunk on me. No matter how many fingers I crossed, no matter how many Guaranteed No-Fail tricks I auditioned, no matter how many pounds of butter I had sacrificed in my quest, the crust I’d remove from the oven would hold as little as half of the volume of the one I put in, leading to thin tarts and pools of extra filling and oh so very many gray hairs.

Which is why today it is taking all of my restraint not to run up that last flight of stairs and shout from my rooftop: I have conquered my tart shells at last, and they shrink no more! … Although I suspect in my neck of this island, that would barely cause an eyebrow to arch.

But it is true, so deliciously true. And before I go any further–you know, into the most awesome stuff I filled this tart crust with–I need to mark this momentous occasion its own post. Go bookmark this one, my friends, because if you’ve ever sobbed at the doorway of your oven, wondering where oh where your tart walls went, you’ve waited too long for this.

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Is pumpkin pie as we know it broken? This is what I was asking myself at 10 p.m. last night as I had words I will only express in asterisks going through my head as I was in my twentieth minute of trying to push a pumpkin pie filling through a very fine mesh strainer.

The source of the recipe, as some of you may have guessed by now, was the November 2008 issue of Cook’s Illustrated, wherein seeking to make a more complex and less grainy pie, those clever people up in Vermont came to a few conclusions. Swapping out some pumpkin puree with canned yams resulted in a better pumpkin flavor, as did concentrating the flavor by cooking the filling on the stove top before filling the crust. They also found that a mix of a higher and lower baking temperature kept the pie’s custard from curdling (making the filling a bit coarse). And then they found that passing the filling through a fine mesh strainer resulted in a less grainy filling.

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