For Paul Bowles

The Obsession

Another Sunday passes, and I’m looking forward to a week of resolving problems with building inspectors and plumbers, obtaining my UPC and working out the final packaging details with my designer, thus taking a few more baby steps toward the business launch. It’s become one very long summer, but at least I’ve been able to enjoy it. With a dream about to come true, and many “slow days” that I can spend ice skating, mountain biking or swimming, these are memorable months. 

But they are still  s l o w months. Which is why I can spend an entire blog describing a fascination with apricots. 

When apricots appear in my local supermarket I grab some even though I know they come from far away and were picked green. They are the one stone fruit that has to be consumed at the single ripe moment of perfection. Too green and their alum knocks you down. Too ripe and they’re squishy as a hot banana. I let them sit on my kitchen counter, eating two and three at a time as they reach that crest. Their perfume fills the house.

Apricot-Sumac jam on Greek yoghurt

I think, however, that my fascination comes from literature. I recall scenes from the Middle East, described perhaps by Paul Bowles or Lawrence Durrell, of lunches served in shade-cooled courtyards with almonds, mint tea and sweet ripe apricots. That I can't remember the love affairs and political intrigues in these great works is a bit perverse, but, hey, in my world it's food that conquers all.

I've never traveled east of Turkey, but the last time I visited that country I did enjoy some wonderful apricots. They were a hybrid I'd never encountered at home; smooth-skinned and juicy and seemingly half-plum, but with a classic apricot pit. Their provenance I couldn't discern, since I speak no Turkish.

(An aside on apricot pits: they were the prime ingredient of a quack "cancer cure" in the 1960's, laetrile. They also contain traces of cyanide.)

It is in the arena of hybridization that apricots really shine. I'm not enough of a botanist to know why, but they cross-pollinate well with plums, resulting in plumcots and pluots. They've also been hybridized into luscious little black fuzzies and (I'm told) heavenly pure whites.

My efforts...

New Jersey, where I live, is not known as an apricot-producing state. However a former student grows them on her truck farm, and when I learned, three weeks ago, that her crop was due to come in, I began plotting ways to use them. "Use" because, except for the juiciest black fuzzies, I now prefer my apricots cooked. With space in my home freezer severely constrained, I didn't want to do what first came to mind: making and freezing a batch of oven-ready tarts. Jams are terra incognito to me, so I decided to make some.

As it turns out, wild sumac was throwing out a first crop of red ripe berries the day I drove to Race Farms. I stopped to slice a few "candelabras" and a thought hit: why not incorporate Middle Eastern spices into the jam? After all, just plain apricot jam can be had in a grocery store. I’d never seen apricot+sumac jam, or apricot+mahlep, or apricot+mastic.

Alas, Race Farms’ apricots were not very pretty. They'd been hit by hail when still green and had suffered unusual cold as well as a premature hot spell. As a result they were speckled with discolorations and warts, widely varied in size, and equally widely varied in taste. I bit into a large one and salivated from sweetness, but a tiny one made me pucker and drool. I bought a couple of quarts anyway, figuring the flavors would blend acceptably, and the "exotic" spices would conceal all sins.

Indeed, the addition of mahlep and mastic made for pretty interesting flavors. Sumac worked too, but I made a mistake in that department: tossing the berries in whole. They're tiny and tough, requiring careful work with tongue and tooth to avoid broken fillings or crowns.

Ready for toast

As I mentioned above, I'm a novice at jam making. You don't want my recipes - they're not mine anyway, but recipes from other sources that I've "decorated" with weird spices. Probably you don't have access to mahlep or mastic either, so those options are out. But sumac grows wild in many places, and I can share a thought about it. 

First of all, don't harvest sumac unless you are certain of your plant ID. There is a poison sumac and it's nasty stuff. There's also plenty of wild red berries which novices might think are sumac, but aren’t - and will give you the trots, or worse. Note also that red staghorn sumac - the good stuff - prefers the exact same environment favored by deer ticks, poison ivy and hungry snakes. 

Sumac berries are small, hard-centered, fuzzy-surfaced and sticky. They're sour as lemons, which turns out to be a good thing for two reasons: most jam recipes are  cloyingly sweet, and the truth about fruits is, the more sour they are the more flavors are released by cooking. 

If you scour the internet for sumac recipes you'll mostly turn up ways to make beverages, and formulas for za’atar. The former gives you kind of a pink lemonade; the latter, a spice blend. To add sumac to jam, it's best to make a little bag of cheesecloth, bruise the berries, put them in the cheesecloth sack, put the sack into the completed jam and stir things around, then remove the sack after about 5 minutes and taste the results (the jam, that is, not the sumac). You might need to adjust sugar.

I've decided that sumac could make an interesting basis for curd, which is my next project. But more on that when it happens - let's go back to jam for a moment.

Again I'm a novice here but I do have taste buds and as I've said most jams are too sweet for me. Which is why, when my three test jams were done, my preference lay with  apricot+sumac.

Finally, many jam recipes produce so huge a yield they're only suitable for families of 8. However, jams are built upon a weight ratio, which can vary from 1:1 (equal parts fruit and sugar) to 3 parts fruit to 2 parts sugar (3:2). Armed with an inexpensive kitchen scale, any home cook can make small quantities of jam by simply weighing the harvested fruit then calculating the amount of sugar. The big advantage of making small quantities is a single half-pint jar can store safely in the refrigerator for several weeks and you don't need the hassle of hot-bath canning.

OK - I know there are excellent jam-makers out there just waiting to correct the mistakes I’ve made, so let's hear it. I'd like to get good at this preserves thing and you can help. In the meantime, I've got a ton of apricot jam to eat (which is great on GF sourdough toast, btw) and a sumac curd project in the wings.

 

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!