I think I'm back...
Sep. 7th, 2010 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quisletI haven't been posting much for quite some time, so I thought I'd take another stab at it. The rhythms of my life haven't been all that conducive to writing for the last year or so. I miss writing. I'll see if my muse is still around to help out...
Faire season is at last upon us, dragging my friends and family across state lines to go dress up in funny clothes in the woods outside Annapolis. Faire season sweeps along things that may seem unrelated, but have become inextricably intertwined in my Faire experience: hurricane season, beagles, the start of the school year, the delicious advance of autumn and my very favorite pasttime.
For the Maryland Faire season, opening weekend is typically the hottest, and it's become a bit of a tradition for me to answer that weather with gazpacho (Renaissance gatorade). This year, however, we had mild weather, so I cast about for another idea. I wanted something tied to the moment to be the centerpiece of the dish, and since it wouldn't be the weather, Maryland peaches seemed a good candidate. On my now bi-weekly commute to Iowa, I was reading the latest issue of Fine Cooking and found some inspiration. There was a lovely article on hand pies, and the fig/raspberry/thyme crostada just cried out to be made in my kitchen. Unfortunately, I didn't have access to any good figs just then. There was also a delicious-sounding recipe for spicy peach pies, fried Southern-style. I decided to channel a little high school trigonometry and interpolate the two, creating my own recipe somewhere in the middle. I also decided to deconstruct my favorite trick for cooking with stonefruit and tuck some rosewater not into the pie filling but into an ice cream, so that the hand pies could be served onsite at Faire, a la mode.
A crostada is really just a flat, rustic Italian tart, with simply folded edges that don't require a recessed pie pan. I made these with 1/3 whole wheat because I like the mouthfeel. I went down to my local Great Harvest and bought some fresh-ground whole wheat flour for this. My mother used to swear by fresh-ground, claiming that you can get whole wheat to do anything if it's fresh enough. I've yet to put that to the test, but it's on my list of things to try.
My ichiban and I also found that our local Bloom grocery store carries French Plugra butter at about $5/pound, so we bought a bunch and froze it, just for baking. When you can bake an all-butter crust with tangy French butter for the same price as the plain American butter, why not? To the uninitiated, the difference in flavor is in the lightly acidic zip of European-style butter, a touch like yogurt. To my taste, tt adds a distinct clean note to the flavor of the butter, an unmistakable sexiness.
These crostada come out the size of large cookies, and with slightly uneven shapes, but that's just part of their charm. I made up the ice cream and pie dough ahead of time, at home, and then the filling was made onsite with the help of my best friend and then baked five-at-a-time in a camper's oven. The ice cream is a slight modification of Alton's recipe from Good Eats. My vanilla beans were a touch stale, so I resuscitated them in a tablespoon of bourbon.
For the dough:
7 ½ ounces unbleached all-purpose flour
3 ¾ ounces whole wheat flour
¼ cup plus ½ tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon kosher salt
9 ounces (1 cup + 2 tablespoon) chilled unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
Put both flours, sugar, cinnamon and salt into a food processor. Next, add the butter and pulse the food processor in short bursts until the mixture resembles course meal. Add 3 tablespoons of cold water and pulse. If the mixture seems dry, add water one tablespoon at a time, pulsing until the dough just starts to come together. Don't work it too much, or you will toughen the dough and undo the flakiness of the all-butter crust. Turn the dough out onto a clean work surface, gather it together, and portion it into 10 2 ½-ounce rounds. Flatten them into disks, wrap them individually in plastic, and refrigerate for somewhere between 2 hours and up to 3 days.
For the ice cream:
2 cups half-and-half
1 cup whipping cream
1 cup minus 2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons rose hip preserves
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
1/4 cup rosewater
Combine all ingredients (including the bean and its pulp) in a large saucepan and place it over medium heat. Use a frying or candy thermometer on the side of pan, or use an Alton trick and bring the mixture just barely to a simmer. As soon as you see a bubble hit the surface, remove it from the heat. Do not let it boil! Stirring occasionally, bring the mixture to 170 degrees F. Remove the ice cream base from the heat and allow it to cool slightly. Strain out the hull of the vanilla bean and any remaining solids from the preserves and pour the base into a lidded container and refrigerate overnight to build some texture and let the flavors get to know each other.
Freeze the base in an ice cream freezer according to the unit's instructions. The mixture will not freeze hard in the machine. Once the volume has increased by 1/2 to 3/4 times and reached a soft serve consistency, spoon the ice cream back into a lidded container and let it harden in the freezer for at least 1 hour before serving.
For the filling:
18 ounces firm-ripe peaches (2 large peaches), peeled, pitted, sliced ½ inch thick
1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
½ tablespoon cornstarch
1 ½ tablespoon hot pepper jelly
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch of cayenne
Prepare an ice bath by filling a large bowl with several inches of ice water. Set a smaller metal bowl in the water. In a heavy-duty 3-quart saucepan, combine the peaches with 1/3 cup of the sugar, the lemon juice and the salt. Cook over medium-low heat until the peaches have softened and released some of their juices, which should take about 5 minutes.
In a small bowl, combine the cornstarch with 1 tablespoon cold water and stir to combine into a slurry. Add the slurry to the peach mixture and cook over medium-low heat until thickened, about one more minute. Add the hot pepper jelly, cinnamon, and cayenne. Remove from heat and stir to blend. Transfer the mixture to the bowl in the ice bath and cool.
Baking:
3 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon graham cracker crumbs
1 oz (2 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter, cut into 10 thin slices
1 ½ tablespoon heavy cream
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon cayenne
Bake at 400 degrees F, on parchment. The crostadas are likely to leak a bit of their juice which will make a sticky, messy caramel on your baking sheet. Roll the dough disks out into 5 ½-inch rounds, about 1/8 inch thick. Sprinkle each round of dough with a teaspoon of graham cracker crumbs (to keep the dough from getting soggy), but leave a ½-inch border. Put a generous ¼ cup of the pie filling in the center of each dough round, mounding the fruit, topping each tart with a slice of butter.
Mix the sugar, cinnamon and cayenne and place in a small bowl or flour shaker. Fold the edges of the dough over some of the fruit to create a 1-inch rim, leaving the center exposed. Work your way around the circle, pleating the dough as you go. With a pastry brush, brush the crust of each crostada with cream and then sprinkle the crusts and filling with the spiced sugar mixture.
Bake 30-35 minutes, or until the crostadas are golden-brown. Swap and rotate the baking sheet(s) about halfway through, for even baking. Transfer the baking sheet to a rack to cool for about 5 minutes. Then loosen the crostadas with an offset spatula let them and cool completely on the sheets.
Serving:
I wanted to serve the pies in hand with a scoop of ice cream on top, but it didn't work out quite that way. The dry ice in my picnic basket kept the ice cream solid, but not cold enough to survive on top of a warm hand pie. I ended up serving them in bowls. Next time, I might try baking them in a muffin tin with a tall crust to allow room for the ice cream on top and still be eaten out of hand.
Next time, I would probably amp up the chilis, probably with a habanero jelly. The flavor of red jalapeño and cayenne helped to amplify the fresh peach flavor, but didn't really add any appreciable heat. The cinnamon and vanilla worked predictably well with the peach, and the rose in the ice cream definitely did its magic in amplifying the floral nature of the peach flavor while the butter and cream spread all of the flavors around the palate to let them linger and reveal themselves. The crust came out light and flaky, perhaps a touch too flaky. Next time, I think I might go 1/3 shortening for resilience and 2/3 butter for flake and flavor.
Faire season is at last upon us, dragging my friends and family across state lines to go dress up in funny clothes in the woods outside Annapolis. Faire season sweeps along things that may seem unrelated, but have become inextricably intertwined in my Faire experience: hurricane season, beagles, the start of the school year, the delicious advance of autumn and my very favorite pasttime.
For the Maryland Faire season, opening weekend is typically the hottest, and it's become a bit of a tradition for me to answer that weather with gazpacho (Renaissance gatorade). This year, however, we had mild weather, so I cast about for another idea. I wanted something tied to the moment to be the centerpiece of the dish, and since it wouldn't be the weather, Maryland peaches seemed a good candidate. On my now bi-weekly commute to Iowa, I was reading the latest issue of Fine Cooking and found some inspiration. There was a lovely article on hand pies, and the fig/raspberry/thyme crostada just cried out to be made in my kitchen. Unfortunately, I didn't have access to any good figs just then. There was also a delicious-sounding recipe for spicy peach pies, fried Southern-style. I decided to channel a little high school trigonometry and interpolate the two, creating my own recipe somewhere in the middle. I also decided to deconstruct my favorite trick for cooking with stonefruit and tuck some rosewater not into the pie filling but into an ice cream, so that the hand pies could be served onsite at Faire, a la mode.
A crostada is really just a flat, rustic Italian tart, with simply folded edges that don't require a recessed pie pan. I made these with 1/3 whole wheat because I like the mouthfeel. I went down to my local Great Harvest and bought some fresh-ground whole wheat flour for this. My mother used to swear by fresh-ground, claiming that you can get whole wheat to do anything if it's fresh enough. I've yet to put that to the test, but it's on my list of things to try.
My ichiban and I also found that our local Bloom grocery store carries French Plugra butter at about $5/pound, so we bought a bunch and froze it, just for baking. When you can bake an all-butter crust with tangy French butter for the same price as the plain American butter, why not? To the uninitiated, the difference in flavor is in the lightly acidic zip of European-style butter, a touch like yogurt. To my taste, tt adds a distinct clean note to the flavor of the butter, an unmistakable sexiness.
These crostada come out the size of large cookies, and with slightly uneven shapes, but that's just part of their charm. I made up the ice cream and pie dough ahead of time, at home, and then the filling was made onsite with the help of my best friend and then baked five-at-a-time in a camper's oven. The ice cream is a slight modification of Alton's recipe from Good Eats. My vanilla beans were a touch stale, so I resuscitated them in a tablespoon of bourbon.
For the dough:
7 ½ ounces unbleached all-purpose flour
3 ¾ ounces whole wheat flour
¼ cup plus ½ tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon kosher salt
9 ounces (1 cup + 2 tablespoon) chilled unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
Put both flours, sugar, cinnamon and salt into a food processor. Next, add the butter and pulse the food processor in short bursts until the mixture resembles course meal. Add 3 tablespoons of cold water and pulse. If the mixture seems dry, add water one tablespoon at a time, pulsing until the dough just starts to come together. Don't work it too much, or you will toughen the dough and undo the flakiness of the all-butter crust. Turn the dough out onto a clean work surface, gather it together, and portion it into 10 2 ½-ounce rounds. Flatten them into disks, wrap them individually in plastic, and refrigerate for somewhere between 2 hours and up to 3 days.
For the ice cream:
2 cups half-and-half
1 cup whipping cream
1 cup minus 2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons rose hip preserves
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
1/4 cup rosewater
Combine all ingredients (including the bean and its pulp) in a large saucepan and place it over medium heat. Use a frying or candy thermometer on the side of pan, or use an Alton trick and bring the mixture just barely to a simmer. As soon as you see a bubble hit the surface, remove it from the heat. Do not let it boil! Stirring occasionally, bring the mixture to 170 degrees F. Remove the ice cream base from the heat and allow it to cool slightly. Strain out the hull of the vanilla bean and any remaining solids from the preserves and pour the base into a lidded container and refrigerate overnight to build some texture and let the flavors get to know each other.
Freeze the base in an ice cream freezer according to the unit's instructions. The mixture will not freeze hard in the machine. Once the volume has increased by 1/2 to 3/4 times and reached a soft serve consistency, spoon the ice cream back into a lidded container and let it harden in the freezer for at least 1 hour before serving.
For the filling:
18 ounces firm-ripe peaches (2 large peaches), peeled, pitted, sliced ½ inch thick
1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
½ tablespoon cornstarch
1 ½ tablespoon hot pepper jelly
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch of cayenne
Prepare an ice bath by filling a large bowl with several inches of ice water. Set a smaller metal bowl in the water. In a heavy-duty 3-quart saucepan, combine the peaches with 1/3 cup of the sugar, the lemon juice and the salt. Cook over medium-low heat until the peaches have softened and released some of their juices, which should take about 5 minutes.
In a small bowl, combine the cornstarch with 1 tablespoon cold water and stir to combine into a slurry. Add the slurry to the peach mixture and cook over medium-low heat until thickened, about one more minute. Add the hot pepper jelly, cinnamon, and cayenne. Remove from heat and stir to blend. Transfer the mixture to the bowl in the ice bath and cool.
Baking:
3 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon graham cracker crumbs
1 oz (2 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter, cut into 10 thin slices
1 ½ tablespoon heavy cream
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon cayenne
Bake at 400 degrees F, on parchment. The crostadas are likely to leak a bit of their juice which will make a sticky, messy caramel on your baking sheet. Roll the dough disks out into 5 ½-inch rounds, about 1/8 inch thick. Sprinkle each round of dough with a teaspoon of graham cracker crumbs (to keep the dough from getting soggy), but leave a ½-inch border. Put a generous ¼ cup of the pie filling in the center of each dough round, mounding the fruit, topping each tart with a slice of butter.
Mix the sugar, cinnamon and cayenne and place in a small bowl or flour shaker. Fold the edges of the dough over some of the fruit to create a 1-inch rim, leaving the center exposed. Work your way around the circle, pleating the dough as you go. With a pastry brush, brush the crust of each crostada with cream and then sprinkle the crusts and filling with the spiced sugar mixture.
Bake 30-35 minutes, or until the crostadas are golden-brown. Swap and rotate the baking sheet(s) about halfway through, for even baking. Transfer the baking sheet to a rack to cool for about 5 minutes. Then loosen the crostadas with an offset spatula let them and cool completely on the sheets.
Serving:
I wanted to serve the pies in hand with a scoop of ice cream on top, but it didn't work out quite that way. The dry ice in my picnic basket kept the ice cream solid, but not cold enough to survive on top of a warm hand pie. I ended up serving them in bowls. Next time, I might try baking them in a muffin tin with a tall crust to allow room for the ice cream on top and still be eaten out of hand.
Next time, I would probably amp up the chilis, probably with a habanero jelly. The flavor of red jalapeño and cayenne helped to amplify the fresh peach flavor, but didn't really add any appreciable heat. The cinnamon and vanilla worked predictably well with the peach, and the rose in the ice cream definitely did its magic in amplifying the floral nature of the peach flavor while the butter and cream spread all of the flavors around the palate to let them linger and reveal themselves. The crust came out light and flaky, perhaps a touch too flaky. Next time, I think I might go 1/3 shortening for resilience and 2/3 butter for flake and flavor.
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Date: 2010-09-07 06:18 pm (UTC)