What I Learned Today

I made my first pie the other day—and followed it with my second pie a few days later. They provided the perfect final destination for my nectarine tree’s bounty. There’s something satisfying about making a pie and the crust and using your own homegrown fruit! Now if only I’d grown some sugarcane, harvested wheat, and milked my own cow… that would have been my own pie!

Now, while making pie-filling is trivial, making a good pie crust requires a bit more effort. I didn’t have the vegetable shortening that the recipe called for, so I substituted butter. I baked the first pie on an infernally hot day, and as I was squishing the butter into the flour, it was melting all over the place. The result was a gooey, sticky dough. I rolled it out anyway, with the liberal use of additional flour, using 2/3 of the dough for the bottom and the last 1/3 on top as the pie cover. And it turned out great.

But I suspected that the dough wasn’t supposed to be quite like that, and consultation with other pie-making friends confirmed this. So when I rolled up my sleeves to bake the second pie, I incorporated two useful tips I’d received.

• Instead of trying to cut or mash the butter into the the flour, freeze the butter and then grate it with a cheese grater.
• Instead of flailing around with rolling pin and flour, and scraping the dough off the cutting board with a knife, chill the dough and then roll it between two sheets of wax paper.

Both of these suggestions worked brilliantly, even though I didn’t bother to freeze the butter or chill the dough! I’d had success with the cheese grater before, when making biscuits, and it worked perfectly here—faster and less messy than other methods, and the mixture I got out was the appropriate “mealy” consistency, actually needing the recommended couple of tablespoons of water that caused it to glom into a dough.

The wax paper trick is so fabulous that I wonder why it isn’t a staple of all pie recipes. (The one I have recommends rolling out the dough, folding it in half, lifting it into the pan (scraping with a knife if needed), and then unfolding it.) The wax paper not only saves you from having to add any flour (thereby altering the consistency slightly), but it is trivial to transfer the flattened dough into the pie pan (top or bottom) without breaking it; you simply invert the empty pie pan over the bottom crust, flip, and peel off the paper, and later flip the top crust onto the filled pie and again just peel off the paper. My wax paper worked a couple of wrinkles into itself, which left an interesting linear pattern on my pie crust, which I left because I liked it.

The end result with pie #2? A tasty, satisfying, even-thickness, flaky pie crust, with minimal effort.

Never content, friends are now giving me tips on cosmetic improvements, like crimping or fluting the pie crust edges, carving my initials in the pie top, or crafting a lattice. I’ll be sure to share any interesting future developments.

I posted previously about a dramatic biscuit failure I experienced when I forgot to include baking powder, due to a careless reading of the recipe. Instead of regular flour, it called for “self-rising flour”, which already has baking powder mixed in. The strange thing is, no one seems to agree on exactly how much baking powder should go into self-rising flour. Casual googling turned up recommendations for 0.5 tsp, 1 tsp, 1.25 tsp, and 1.5 tsp (same as 0.5 Tbsp) as the amount of baking powder to add for each 1 cup of flour.

Now the difference between 0.5 and 1.5 tsp may not sound like a lot, but consider that it represents a 50% increase or decrease from a middle value of 1.0 tsp. For something as sensitive to stoichiometry as baking is, I’d expect that to make a difference. Then again, it seems reasonable that the desired amount would vary depending on the item being baked and how much loft you hope to get — which sort of defeats the purpose of a pre-mixed flour-baking powder product.

But even specialized biscuit recipes disagree on this, but seem to choose either 1 tsp or 0.5 Tbsp (1.5 tsp, in agreement with my mom’s recipe). (As a side note, they also vary widely on how much shortening or butter to use, as well as how much milk or buttermilk to use and whether or not to chill the dry ingredients + butter. The number of permutations sent me into a brief paralysis (gosh darn it, shouldn’t we have converged on a solution by now?!) until I decided to give up on the web and just use my mom’s recipe.)

I decided that a scientific test was called for. I split up the flour involved in a batch of biscuits (2 cups) into three bowls, for baking powder:flour ratios of 1 tsp:1 cup, 1.5 tsp:1 cup, and 2 tsp:1 cup. There was enough material to make two full biscuits of each type, plus some extra left over for a partial-biscuit. I measured the biscuit height before and after baking. The following chart shows the average (across two biscuits) difference in height I observed (data points in blue, average in red).

A clear difference emerged! It’s even almost linear, which is a bit surprising given the small sample size. Now it would be interesting to try even smaller and larger amounts of baking powder… the curve is likely to have an interesting shape at both ends. But for food, one of the most important measures of success is not size, but taste. I sampled all of the results and found that I couldn’t really tell a difference between the 1.5- and 2-tsp results, but the 1-tsp biscuits were noticeably less fluffy. I conclude that the wise biscuit baker should avoid self-rising flour with less than 1.5 tsp of baking powder per cup of flour (or avoid it altogether and just add your own ingredients).

Some other notes:

• One of the annoyingly tedious parts of making biscuits or scones is the “cutting in” step that gets the fat (butter or shortening or whatnot) into the flour. I used a tip from my friend Evan: freeze the butter, then use a cheese grater to shred it into the flour. Mix with fingers. Works like a charm!
• Some biscuit recipes call for milk, some for milk with lemon juice added, and some for buttermilk. Ever wondered why? Well, adding lemon juice or using buttermilk lowers the pH of the liquid (makes it more acidic). And chemical leaveners such as baking powder and baking soda are basic, therefore in theory should react more strongly in an acidic environment (giving your baked good more “rise”). But baking powder is baking soda pre-combined with its own acid (cream of tartar). So you shouldn’t actually need an acidic liquid. I tested this by dropping some baking powder in water, then in buttermilk. If anything, the baking powder reacted more to the water than the buttermilk. (I should do the same test with baking soda.) This also explains (maybe) why some recipes use baking powder and others use baking soda + cream of tartar — the latter want control over the ratio, just like the self-rising-flour issue!
• Biscuit aficionados recommend the use of flour with a lower protein content (to get even more loft) such as cake flour; see How to make the best Buttermilk Biscuits from Scratch. I haven’t tried this one yet, either.
• I actually did a parallel experiment, with the same three types of mixtures, but first chilling the dry ingredients + butter. However, a distraction at a critical moment caused me to forget to measure the biscuits before they went into the oven! So I only have their post-baking heights. If anything, the relationship seemed weaker, with less rising action. While a firm conclusion should await more reliable data, for now I’m going on the assumption that the chilling step is unnecessary. (Taste is unaffected, too ;) )

Clearly, the field of interesting experiments with ingredient combinations is a rich and open one, even just for making biscuits!

Today I learned what happens when you forget to add baking powder to biscuits. More accurately, maybe I learned to read the recipe more carefully. :/ I was merrily talking with my sister and trying to throw together some quick biscuits to go with our chicken curry (yeah, we have weird menu combinations sometimes). This recipe seemed like a good google-find, with final-product photos of light, fluffy, delicious biscuits. I mixed up the dough, kneaded, rolled it out, cut circles, and put them on the baking sheet. We popped them in the oven. Oddly, 13 minutes later, they were still flat. I figured I’d missed some sort of rising agent, but it took a more careful read to figure out what that was:

Ingredients:
1/2 cup cold butter or margarine
2 1/4 c self rising soft wheat flour
1 1/4 c buttermilk (or whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice added)
flour for dusting
melted butter for brushing baked biscuits

Yeah, I’d read right over the “self-rising” part. Whoever heard of “self-rising” flour anyway? Not me! I’d skipped ahead to the recipe steps, which simply refer to “flour”. My post-mortem inspection also revealed this note, which I should have spotted the first time around:

To make your own self rising flour, simply add 1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt for EACH cup of all purpose flour.

Oddly enough, I had noticed (and even commented on) the lack of salt in the recipe… but completely missed the lack of baking powder. Duh! What a stupid mistake! And here I had been all proud because I made risotto last night without a recipe (and with new ingredients I’d never tried) (and it was *good*!). The “biscuits” came out as little flat wafers that are basically inedible (especially if you were hoping for fluffy jam-platforms instead). I won’t even bother with a photo (too embarrassing). Well, next time I hope I’ll pay more attention to the recipe. Excuse me while I return to my self-flagellation.

“Not only good science but also good fun,” states the New York Times blurb for this excellent book by Russ Parsons. I agree, adding, “and good eats, too!” Like What Einstein Told His Cook, this book (How to Read a French Fry and Other Stories of Intriguing Kitchen Science) goes behind the kitchen scene to explain the whys and hows of cooking, treating it as the exercise in chemistry that it truly is. The book also contains a heaping serving of absolutely delectable recipes that I am eagerly working my way through.

Here are some excellent bits of information I gleaned:

• Ever wondered why cast-iron skillets should be “seasoned” when new, by repeatedly heating a bit of oil in the pan? The goal is to build up a waterproof, nonstick surface by taking advantage of a natural reaction between the oil any any bit of water: the oil hydrolyzes, and some of the byproducts are polymers, which stick to the pan plastic-like. This explains why you don’t need to do it with nonstick pans.
• “Chicken-fried” steak always seemed a bit of an odd term to me. It turns out that “chicken-fried” just means “pan-fried”, a technique in which meat (usually chicken) is fried in shallow oil so that only the bottom part is deep-fried and the top gets a kind of moist roasting.
• Cooking isn’t just about heat. If you add a few tablespoons of water when sauteing vegetables, they should cook “more thoroughly”, because water dissolves the pectins and cellulose in the veggies and softens the cell walls. Sugar also “cooks” fruit by sucking out moisture and collapsing cell walls. (This is helpful when making ice cream with fruit, as it prevents the fruit pieces from turning into isolated ice cubes.)
• Pears have a grainy texture because they contain little crystals of lignin, the woody substance generally appearing in planet cell walls.
• We let pancake batter sit for 10 minutes after mixing so that any gluten strands that developed (caused by mixing) can relax, and the resulting pancakes will be lighter and fluffier. (I always wondered why!)

I’m only 1/3 of the way through this book. I look forward to many more insights in the rest of it!

I had some extra ricotta cheese, left over from making lasagna, and I wondered: what else can you make from ricotta? Some googling turned up several answers, including Ricotta Gnocchi with Browned Butter and Sage, and I decided to try it out.

I’ve never made gnocchi, but I love eating it. I had some vague idea that it was generally made with potatoes. But this recipe creates mostly-ricotta gnocchi (with some parmesan cheese, parsley, and flour). The resulting dough was extremely sticky, even after adding some extra flour. But I rolled it out, cut it into little pillows, and then pressed them into a fork as directed. The next instruction was to drop them in boiling water and then spoon them out when they floated to the top, in 2-3 minutes. They were so squishy when I dunked them that I was skeptical that 2-3 minutes could really turn them into gnocchi, but sure enough, it worked! Very easy!

The browned butter with sage was absolutely divine. I was fascinated to observe that the butter really did turn from clear-ish yellow to a browned hue, simply by heating. Apparently this is caused by the milk solids and salt in the butter turning brown. Except that — ha! What I’d actually used was I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (I’m sure several of my friends are now cringing in horror). I don’t think it has any milk solids, but apparently, it browns too! And it’s tasty!

(Now I’m itching to look up the Fats chapter in my copy of “What Einstein Told His Cook”—I’m pretty sure this was covered—but I loaned it to a friend a while back.)

If you have any other great suggestions for ricotta cheese recipes, I’d love to hear them.