Storm Story

You and me and rain on the roof...

When my wife Leslie casts a worried eye on the sky, it's time for fear. She's not a weather-watcher, and for her to take note of the way the atmosphere feels means something special is going on.

The afternoon I glanced her way and noted her rolling eyes we were one-and-a-half miles up a steep, rocky Vermont trail, looking for wild mushrooms with six friends. The weather forecast was for stable air with no chance of rain. I was hell-bent on reaching my secret lobster mushroom site. Our friends were enjoying themselves. But Leslie knew what I did not: in truth we were in deep yoghurt.

Moments later she said: "Listen." When I did, the sound was unmistakeable: rain in the canopy. 

"It's not supposed to do that," Claudine, one of our companions observed.

But it was doing that.

For just a moment a burst of concern crossed my consciousness. One of our party, Paul, had endured knee replacement surgery in November. He was already on his way back down the mountain alone, having pushed his personal envelope as far as he dared. Claude and Sara, the two strongest hikers in our party, were also on their way down. They, along with Paul and Paul's wife Christine, who had elected not to leave the parking lot because she was recovering from knee surgery also, needed to get back to New York City for evening obligations. That left Leslie and me, plus Claudine and Henri. We knew where Claudine and Henri were - with us - but that knowledge hardly mitigated the fact that Henri had gone through a lumbar laminectomy in March and Claudine too had had back and hip surgery in the past two years. The facts were chilling: we were a separated party, a party weakened by injuries, a party driven by obligations, with bad weather coming in. The potential was there for disaster.

 

But I refused to let myself feel menaced. Lobster mushrooms are one of my favorites and I knew they would be fruiting. We'd found a few in a predictable site on the climb up. Why let rain and injuries hold me back from collecting all there were to collect?

Lobster mushroom. Yum.

Leslie shifted to a bland face, so I dismissed the sky. What she did next, though, should have worried me even more: held out both hands for Henri to grasp. As he leaned into them to negotiate a short descent past slick rocks and roots, I thought, "Oh, he's having trouble," but my brain refused to process it. "You OK?" I asked.

"Oh, no problem," he answered, without a grimace or gritted teeth. He was not in pain. 

I shrugged. He and I exchanged smiles. Yep, he was OK.

The rain picked up.

We headed downhill.

Ten minutes later the precipitation was steady and moderately hard. Leslie stopped to put on a Gore-tex parka and the rest of us joked that she'd been the only one smart enough to ignore the forecast. Nobody was worried yet. The temperature was in the high 70's - no hypothermia threat - and there'd been no thunder.

The sky flickered. Thunder growled. "Great," I muttered.

Within seconds the rain became a downpour and for the first time I grasped our predicament. My focus, which had been the earth in search of fungi, shifted and I saw the trail from the perspective of Henri’s body: rain-slick roots, big mossy rocks and a slurry of mud. It was as hazardous as a sack full of cobras.

Leslie remained undaunted. Staying an arms-length downhill, she alternatively held Henri’s hands or placed herself where he could lean on her shoulders. We kept a slow and steady pace, stopping just once for Claudine to relieve Henri of his backpack.

Down we went one step at a time. The lightning and thunder were now constant and the heavy rain penetrated everything, drenching us to the bone. 

Eventually we approached the place I needed to turn if I was to bushwhack into my lobster site. Interestingly the sky was brightening, and there were even occasional bursts of sunshine. With what seemed to be a sigh of relief, the rain let up. “Leslie,” I said, waving for her to stop. “Whaddaya think? Are you OK if I slide into the woods for a bit?”

I knew she wouldn’t fib, even if doing so meant protecting Henri’s feelings. “Yes, go ahead,” she answered. “Just, can you come out at a place you can meet us where we have to cross the stream?”

“Sure,” I said, imagining the ugly pitch of rocks and water we had to get Henri across. The stream wasn’t deep but the crossing consisted of balanced rocks and large, tenuous steps.  A peach when you’re fresh is the pits when you’re tired, I thought, and headed off-trail.

Almost as soon as I began thrashing through the underbrush, Nature took another fickle turn. A close bolt of lightning painted the sky electric blue, thunder clapped, and the clouds opened wide. The storm had seemed heavy earlier, but now it was serious. Rain lashed with fury, turning  the air translucent. Lightning became almost constant, and for the first time I was afraid of being struck. I debated going back to the trail, but there was little I could help Leslie with on the pitch she was now traversing - a moderate, root-free one - and there was nothing she could do to make me safer. Alone and off-trail in a thunderstorm was my personal notion of a nightmare. There was no choice but to keep on. Besides, lobsters lay ahead.

Raspberries? Read on...

Before I got to them the rain doubled in volume yet again, turning my glasses into sheets of water. I could hardly see the forest floor, let along the subtle shifts of leaf cover and color that give away lobster mushrooms’ hiding places.

Lobsters - Hypomyces lactiflourum - are in fact “converted” mushrooms: a conjoining of one, not-very-good-to-eat genus with an overgrowth of a second. The overgrowing fungus, generically known as a hypomyce, converts the host - usually a Lactarius or Russula - into a delicious if crunchy treat. The hypomyce infects the host while the host is still underground. Harvesting lobsters means digging out as much stem as you can . Finding a good harvest means dulling your collecting knife - but you can hardly care, what you’re digging is delicious. For reasons I do not understand, lobsters come up in the same exact place year after year. Plus, when they are in their prime they are a flourescent orange-red; as easy to spot on the dull forest floor as a naked man in the subway.

But nothing is easy to see if your glasses are obscured with water. I stopped to check if there was anything in my pack I could use to squegee them and found one waterlogged tissue. Damn! I pressed on, crossing the low swell of land I knew harbored the quarry.

There they were. Or, rather, there it was - a single mushroom. I dug it up. There would be more. There always were.

But now the lightning was ferocious and the rain unbelievable. I could see almost nothing and was becoming genuinely afraid. Why had I abandoned Leslie, Claudine and Henri? What if something happened - a fall, a crashing tree? Did I really know to get to the right place on the trail? It was time to give up on lobsters and get into rescue mode.

A brief off-trail descent brought me to the stream crossing, fortuitously just as Leslie, Claudine and Henri arrived. The water was rising rapidly and had turned opaque, thanks to an upstream mud bank. It would be a blind crossing - impossible for Henri on his own and damned tough for anyone. Thankful for sturdy boots I inched my way across. Every foothold was tenuous, but at least there were footholds, and no place was deeper than mid-shin. We crossed safely. There was one more narrow, slick patch ahead and then we’d be home free.

20 minutes later we marched (or should I say, staggered?) into the parking lot. Except for Leslie’s parka-covered head, neck and torso, we were each drenched to the knickers. As if to mock us the storm was over and the sun was out. And - glory be! - there were Paul, Christine and Gary the park ranger, waiting with umbrellas and fresh footgear and prepped to headed up to find us. (A #1 rule of rescue: the rescuing party must not put itself in preventable danger.) Claude and Sara, we learned, had gone off to buy us hot coffee. Gratefully we accepted the dry towels Paul was offering, and arrayed ourselves under the park pavilion roof. A dry seat? Priceless. 

Hypothermia is never on my mind in July, so it didn’t occur to me as we sat and dripped that we were risking it. After an hour of inactivity, though, we were each thoroughly chilled, despite coffee, conversation, mockery (“You found how many lobsters?”) and bright warm sunshine. My thoughts were not as clear as I would have wished as Leslie and I got into the car and headed toward Brattleboro and a hotel. But the implications of this fuzziness did not strike me until I got out of the hotel’s hot shower and I re-inspected the box of berries I’d purchased at a roadside stand. What had I been thinking? What in God’s name was I to do with SO MANY red raspberries?

....to be continued....

FYI - if you read this far you've got the good news!

Progress and Pie

Today's puzzle - what the $#@!! is going on here??? (see below)

At the present moment, writing about my business is rather like reporting the function of a healthy immune system. Things are humming along, with all the organs in the background doing their jobs. A comforting picture, but boring.

The town of Berkeley Heights New Jersey has my building permit application. My plumber is waiting in the wings, as are my equipment and raw materials suppliers. My packaging designer is on her third draft, my business partner is reviewing the packaging copy, and I’m waiting for several vendors to call me with estimates. I have finished one thing: a short promotional video, embedded here: 

So, clever music and a pretty actress (that’s my wife, Leslie) aside, there’s not much of interest going on with my business, gentle readers. So I’m going to write about pie.

Pic crust tools and ingredients chilling in the 'fridge

For the past year or so I’ve been chiding Gary Lincoff, author of The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, whenever he posts a pie photograph on his Facebook page. “You need to make a gluten-free version!” I nag. At which I can just about hear a big chunk of his followers saying, “Yuk!”

It’s easy to wince at the concept of gluten-free pie crusts if you’ve never tasted a good one. However, since half the effort of making a wheat flour crust consists of preventing gluten from over-developing, removing gluten from the formula doesn't create much loss.

A scant eighth teaspoon of Xanthan gum - crucial ingredient for GF crust

I’ve been rolling pie crusts since I was 4 or 5. Which is not to say I’m any kind of baking expert; I’m not. I do love pie, however, and am quick to judge crust quality. (Point of historical fact: my mother’s relatives, the Mallery family, used to have reunions every August. There was silent but intense competition among the women as to who made the best pie. Which was emphatically not about the filling, but the crust.) So when I say I’ve got a good gluten-free crust formula, please take me seriously.

Half a stick of butter (4 tablespoons)

Although I’ve blogged about pies before, it’s time to write a very specific recipe if for no other reason that Mr. Lincoff has come out with a new book, The Joy of Foraging. He’s so good at finding wild edibles there’s sure to be Facebook posts all summer regarding pies made with found fruits. I’m thinking that people like me (ie - celiac sufferers) deserve to enjoy what nature offers in final, sugar-drenched, baked form too. So here goes.

Flour

A great deal of what happens in the ideal pie crust has to do with how the ingredients are handled. Therefore, the type of flour is not totally critical. That said, I believe two things are important about flour: it needs to be Easy, and it needs to taste Good.

Unfortunately there is no single gluten-free grain flour that will make great piecrust. All GF flours are blends - grain flour + starch flour + dough enhancers/gluten substitutes. You can buy pre-mixed flours, and that’s great, but in my house there’s so many flours I can make special blends for different types of pies (more on that, below). The one thing all my blends have in common? They’re based on a simple formula: Bette Hagman’s Featherlite blend.

The late Ms. Hagman came up with this mixture decades ago. In my opinion it can’t be beat for sweets, although I sometimes modify it. The recipe: 1 cup white rice flour, 1 cup corn starch, 1 cup tapioca starch, 1 tablespoon potato flour. 

There’s an easy way to blend these dry ingredients: put them into a big ziplock bag, leave a good amount of air,  zip the bag closed and shake it like mad. Depending on the size of your bag (and your willingness to clean up should the seal fail) you can make rather large quantities this way.

Once you’ve got the flour you can focus on handling, the first step to which is, chill everything.

Thin slices of cold butter

A pie crust should be nicely flaky. To accomplish that, unsalted butter is the best shortening. Butter contains water, which, under the right circumstances, changes quickly to steam and lifts surrounding dough. As this is going on the butter melts, coating the flour grains. In combination with the naturally occurring sugars in the grains, the fat-soaked flour turns crispy. 

That’s a lot to happen all at once - or at least in fast sequence - so to make all the pieces play together it’s critical to prep them. Which is where temperature comes in. You’ll want the butter to be flat sheets, thin enough to melt fast but thick enough to perform lift. And, you’ll want the butter to be solid until the instant the crust hits the oven. That’s what keeps the most water in the butter and makes the tastiest flakes. Therefore, you want the butter to be cold throughout the crust-making process.

I keep butter, flour, dough enhancers, a wooden work surface, a bench knife and a thick ceramic mixing bowl in the refrigerator, waiting for fresh fruit. Once a harvest comes in I figure out how much pie Leslie and I can eat, and get working. (BTW - that photo at the top of the page? When I make crust on a hot day I chill the rolling board further with whatever is in the top of my freezer.)

Preparation

Ready to be chopped and ground

Making pie crust is yet another example of the superiority of weighing, rather than dry measuring, ingredients. Keep in mind that digital kitchen scales are now quite cheap. I see them in pharmacies for $10.

The basic weight ratio of pie crust ingredients is: 3 parts flour, 2 parts shortening, 1 part ice water.  Experience tells me I can make a quarter-sheet of mini-pies  - enough to last about a week in my household - with a crust recipe founded on 1/2 stick of butter. If I reach into the ’fridge and find 1/3 stick or 2/3 or 5/8 stick, it hardly matters. I just weigh the butter; all else follows. If you’re bad at math like me, divide the butter weight in half. That gives you the ice water weight. Multiply the ice water weight by three. That gives you the flour weight.

You can make a decent pie crust using the ingredients above, if you use good technique. However I do some modifications that work wonders. For a half butter stick quantity, I add two teaspoons of rice vinegar to the water (weighing both together), and substitute 1/4 the flour with almond meal, which I make by coarse chopping almonds, then running them through my spice grinder until they threaten to become almond butter. (Admittedly it is easier to buy almond flour, which is available at many grocery stores.) The flour should also get a scant 1/8 tsp xanthan gum, a pinch of salt, and two teaspoons of sugar. 

Butter shavings in cold flour

If I’m making a pumpkin, squash, sweet potato, pecan or “Derby” pie, I use teff flour in my featherlite blend instead of rice flour. Dark teff is earthier and rye-like; ivory teff is spicier and can have notes of fish (try it for a seafood quiche).

Technique

This is the crucial part, and the only kitchen task I try to accomplish at speed. Keeping the ingredients cold is important, and a bit challenging, especially in the summer.

Put the chilled rolling board on your work counter. Drape a couple of layers of plastic wrap - big, generous pieces at least 18” long - over the board. Set the cold bowl and a bench knife on the board. Stick the water + vinegar in the freezer.  Unwrap the butter. Measure flour, sugar, xanthan gum and salt into the bowl, and stir to mix.

The well awaits

Using the cold bench knife, slice the butter across its end into pieces @ 1/16” thick, tossing into the flour as you cut. From time to time stir the flour with your fingertips so that the butter chunks get coated and stay cold. When you have all the butter cut, toss the flour/butter lightly to distribute chunks evenly.

Using just your fingertips, press each piece of butter through the flour and against the side of the bowl to squeeze it into a big flat flake. Toss from time to time. When all or most of the butter is pressed, overturn the bowl onto the plastic sheets. Gather the blend into a mound and form a well in the center. Retrieve the ice water, punch through the thin skin of ice on top, and pour it into the well. 

First fold. Note flakes of butter and oozing water

Toss the flour that forms the “hillsides” down onto the well until the wet dough/water is covered. Pick up one end of the plastic wrap, then fold it onto the other end, enclosing the dough. Press and pound until the mix is 1/2” to 3/4” thick. Unwrap the top layer of plastic, scraping any dough that sticks back onto the dough mass, and use the bench knife to fold the dough into thirds, like a business letter.

At this moment you are probably wondering what kind of madman I am, calling what’s on your work surface “dough”. It’s a dry-on-the-outside, sticky-in-the-middle, water-oozing, semi-rectangular mass. But bear with me.

Third fold. Slowly, the mess becomes dough.

Close up the plastic again and press/pound the dough flat, trying to work the “package” so that when you fold it the next time the folds will be at 90 degrees to the last set. 

Repeat these cover-pound-uncover-fold-re-cover actions 4 to 6 times, until the dough begins to look like dough. Then wrap it up in the plastic and stick it back in the ‘fridge, where it needs to rest 6 or more hours before being rolled.

And that’s really all there is to it - with but one additional thought: When you roll the dough you’ll get better results if your rolling board is chilled and coated with a rubbed-in tablespoon or two of superfine brown rice flour.

Ready for refrigeration. Several hours of rest will allow all the water
to be absorbed and the dough will be ready to roll.

I’m not going to suggest pie fillings. That’s best left to folks like Gary, who seem to have more ideas for wild edibles than I ever will. But I will tell you my absolute favorite: wild huckleberries. I wish I had some right now!