Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  What’s more, pies led to other desserts: cakes, cupcakes, pot de crème, crème brûlée, ice cream, homemade ice cream sandwiches, s’mores made with homemade marshmallows and graham crackers, and soufflés, and any number of other sweet confections. And then beyond desserts, pies led to good food in general. In my family, I am the go-to guy for sustenance and the pleasure of eating. I am the one in the kitchen, and again, I can count on one or two hands the meals from our kitchen that weren’t made by me.

  To be fair to my wife, she has tossed her hat into the ring, most notably when we thought we were going to bake our own wedding cake (an idea that lasted all of one four-layer cake) and again after our daughter was born, when becoming a mother awoke her inner Betty Crocker (though a Betty who liked to decorate confections rather than bake them). These were good, solid efforts, but in the end, an existence in the kitchen feels natural to me, not her.

  Of course, nobody at home calls me the Pie Guy. I do so many other things. I shop, make dinner, put together lunches, wash clothes, play dress-up. But I still bake pies often enough that I wade into them recipeless and fearless. They’re the best pies my wife or I have tasted, and more times than not, it seems to me that baking a pie is the best thing I can do. When faced with the prospect of daily life—deadlines to meet, tenth graders to teach, that flat tire, the one that’s been in my trunk since August 2009, to fix—baking a pie is sometimes the only thing I want to do. I bake pies for my wife’s students and for holidays and for dinner parties and for my parents to take with them when they visit my sister in North Carolina, and sometimes for no reason at all except that it is always a good idea to have a pie on the counter.

  The Key Lime Pie Bed

  Recipe File

  Pie Crust

  Makes enough dough for 1 9-inch pie crust

  This recipe is borrowed and adapted from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s recipe made with heavy cream, from The Pie and Pastry Bible.

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 stick unsalted butter, divided into 5 tablespoons and 3 tablespoons, frozen and cubed

  5 to 7 tablespoons heavy whipping cream

  In a food processor, combine the flour and salt. Add 5 tablespoons of the frozen, cubed butter to the processor bowl and process for 1 to 2 minutes or until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

  Then add 3 tablespoons of the frozen, cubed butter to the processor bowl and pulse for 1-second intervals, 4 or 5 times, until the butter is pea-size.

  Empty the mixture into a second bowl. Add 5 to 7 tablespoons of heavy whipping cream and, quickly, with a fork or a whisk or your fingers, combine the flour mixture and cream until a dough forms.

  Wrap the dough in plastic wrap or place in a Ziploc bag and refrigerate for at least 20 minutes but no more than 1 hour, or else the dough will be too hard to roll out.

  Because there is no water in this crust and a lot of fat, it is necessary for this dough to be rolled out between plastic wrap or wax paper, preferably plastic wrap, as wax paper tends to create creases in the dough as you’re rolling it out. Roll out the dough with a rolling pin to form a crust that is about 10 inches around and approximately ⅛ inch thick. Place the wrapped, rolled-out dough into the freezer for 2 to 3 minutes, or in the refrigerator for 5 to 10 minutes to rechill the butter and make the crust easier to pull away from the wrap.

  Pull the crust away from the wrap on one side and place it gently into a pie plate, then remove the other piece of Saran Wrap and press the pie crust into the plate, fluting or crimping the edges as you see fit.

  Because of the relatively short baking time of the Mexican Chocolate Pie, you should prebake the pie crust. (I suggest you prebake the pie crust for any pie that will spend less than 45 minutes in the oven.) In order to do this, you will need a piece of parchment paper and pie weights, which you can purchase, though dried beans work just as well and can be reused. (Just make sure you do not try to cook them after you have used them as weights.)

  Preheat the oven to 425°F at least 20 minutes before baking. Line the pie crust in the pie plate with the parchment paper and then fill with weights up to the very edge of the pie plate, pushing them well up the sides of the parchment. Bake for 20 minutes. Lift the parchment and weights out of the pie plate. Prick the bottom of the crust lightly with the tines of a fork. Return the pie crust to the oven for 5 to 10 minutes, or until a pale golden brown, checking periodically to make sure the bottom of the crust isn’t bubbling up.

  Mexican Chocolate Pie

  This pie is based on Mexican hot chocolate, or those little Abuelita chocolate disks that you can make into hot chocolate, and includes a touch of cinnamon and some chipotle and ancho pepper for a bit of heat. When just out of the oven, it has a kind of airy, mousselike, melt-on-your-tongue texture, and as it cools, it fudges up, becoming a bit more dense and brownielike. It’s got that nice, thin, crackly brownie film on top of it, which we love.

  It used to be the best-selling pie when I owned the pie company, and then I lost the recipe and tried to make it from memory and it didn’t work. The sugar didn’t completely dissolve and there was a grainy mouthfeel to it, so I talked it over with my friend the bread baker (who also makes pastries and desserts) and we figured out that I probably wasn’t whipping the eggs and sugar for long enough. So after a few tests, it’s back in the stable.

  2 eggs

  1 cup sugar

  ¾ cup flour

  ½ teaspoon cinnamon

  ⅛ teaspoon ground ancho powder

  ⅛ teaspoon ground chipotle powder

  2 sticks butter

  1 cup chocolate chips

  1 9-inch pie crust, par-baked (or prebaked) for about 20 minutes

  Preheat the oven to 375°F.

  Using the whisk for a stand mixer, whisk the eggs and sugar for 4 minutes on medium-high speed, or until the sugar and eggs are well whipped and fully incorporated.

  Meanwhile, melt the butter on top of the stove and keep it warm.

  Lowering the speed to medium low, add the flour and spices to the mixer and mix the dry ingredients with the sugar and eggs until incorporated. Turn off the mixer. Add the chocolate chips. Bring the butter to a light boil, and then, while it’s still very hot, pour the butter into the mixing bowl and let stand for 1 to 2 minutes. Mix on a low speed until the butter is incorporated with the rest of the batter, increasing the speed as the butter is incorporated and the chocolate begins to melt, until the batter is a dark chocolate color and most if not all of the chocolate pieces are melted.

  Pour the filling into the pie crust.

  Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the center of the pie is set.

  On the Shelf

  The Pie and Pastry Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum. This was the first thing I bought when I jumped into the pie company. I knew I wanted to change some of the recipes and I didn’t have much of an idea how to do this, so I looked to this text for basic recipes and built variations from there. After the company dissolved, I used this to devise my pie-crust recipe. Other favorite pie recipes: open-faced blueberry pie with crème fraîche, open-faced apple pie, and fresh strawberry and rhubarb tart.

  Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child.

  This is a beautiful and interesting book to simply flip through and read. In truth, there isn’t a lot of French cooking I’ve mastered with this, not yet, but in it there is a brilliant apple custard tart that is a standby for me for dinner parties.

  The Art of Eating, M. F. K. Fisher, and Domesticity, Bob Shacochis. These two books came into my life at about the same time, just after I left college, and introduced me to food writing as an art. They also taught me to think of food separate from the food I had grown up with—my mother’s cooking—and this led me to cook on my own and then experiment with cooking. The experiments, as often as not, failed miserably.

  Cook’s Illustrated.

  I stick to the savory foods from this magazine most of the time, finding the desserts—
and the baked goods especially—often time consuming and unnecessarily difficult and ultimately unsatisfying. Their cupcake recipes (yellow and dark chocolate), however, are quite easy and are maybe my favorite cupcakes to make.

  Jacques Torres’ A Year in Chocolate, Jacques Torres.

  Everything I have made from this book of chocolate desserts has become my favorite version ever of that thing: chocolate chip cookies, double-chocolate brownies, cream-filled chocolate donuts. It’s fast becoming my favorite non-pie-based dessert cookbook.

  IN THE TRENCHES

  Daniel Moulthrop is a thirty-seven-year-old father of two boys and one girl, all under the age of six. The former host of the public radio show The Sound of Ideas on 90.3 WCPN in Cleveland, he is the curator of conversation for the Civic Commons, a Knight Foundation project in northeastern Ohio. His wife is from a food-obsessed family with Sicilian roots.

  I’ll come home and my father-in-law will have dropped off eight pounds of Gala apples or something. It’s partly because he just loves food. He was the produce buyer at a grocery store. He can’t pass up a deal. When he sees a good melon, he has to buy it and share it with people. He’ll leave half a watermelon in our fridge, or a quarter of a honeydew, or something. One day my wife, Dorothy, and I came home and there were literally sixteen pecks of tomatoes on our dining room table. A peck is a half bushel. So we had sixteen rectangular boxes, slightly bigger than a shoe box, filled with beautiful Roma tomatoes. Dorothy and I were like, “Oh my God, what are we going to do?” We wanted to make sauce out of them, but the tomatoes ended up sitting on our table for a week. And we kept smelling them, and they’re great. But, you know if you’ve made sauce from scratch, you need a lot of time. It’s a whole-day thing. If you’re going to make that much sauce, that’s really going to take all day.

  We recruited Dorothy’s parents to help us, and we woke up at five one morning. This was a few summers ago, back when we had only two kids. We had to get all our pots and pans out. Every burner was going. Then after everything cooks, you take everything, run it through the food mill into another pot. And the food mill pulls out the seeds and the skins. That is the miracle of the tool. If you don’t have one, you should have one. They’re so old fashioned. They look like they’re from the nineteenth century.

  After you run it through the food mill, you still have to reduce the sauce because it’s still really watery. The last time we canned the tomatoes, we had so many burners going, and so much stuff going on, that we had to use our neighbor’s stove. I brought two pots over next door and said to them, “Just let this simmer for four hours, and I’ll be back.”

  From those sixteen pecks of tomatoes or whatever it was, we got something like forty or fifty quart jars of sauce. But literally, I was working on this from five in the morning until eleven at night. Because after you cook it down, you then have to process the jars. You’ve got to sterilize them and put everything in there, making sure you’re doing it clean, and put the top on. Then you have to boil the jars for ten to fifteen minutes, and then you pull them out and let them cool down. That’s when they really get sealed, when they’re cooling down.

  It was like an eighteen-hour day of making sauce and canning. We’ve done it twice. We didn’t do it last summer because it was a little too hectic. Our youngest was born in November of ’08, and it was just a little bit too much. It’s a huge time investment, but it’s so worth it. In the depths of winter, we had tomato sauce until March.

  Our canning started with the tomatoes, but it didn’t stop there. A while later, my father-in-law said, “Come on, Dan, where’s your pickle recipe, you’re Jewish.” And I’m like, “I don’t have a pickle recipe, Dad.” He said, “Well, come on, you’re Jewish.” So I went online to find a pickle recipe. I looked at a few different recipes, and I picked the one that has, like, the most positive comments, essentially. I found a great recipe that is really simple. It has a brine and fresh dill, a few cloves of garlic, and some peppercorns. And we don’t get any more complicated than that.

  My father-in-law buys these great pickling cucumbers. They fit well in a quart jar. The process is so much easier. I can show up at his house at five o’clock in the afternoon, and he’ll usually have taken care of the basic prep work of washing the cucumbers and chilling them. You have to chill the cucumbers, and so he ices them down in a cooler. If he’s done that already, then I can work from seven until ten and make, like, thirty jars of pickles. I can do it after work. That’s what we did this summer.

  The first time I did it, my son was involved. The second time he was doing something else. You kind of have to strike when you’ve got all the fresh food. But the first time was great. He just kept eating the raw cucumbers out of the cooler. It was great fun. And the pickles turned out great. Everybody who tastes these pickles was like, “Oh my God, that’s the best pickle I’ve ever had.” They really are the best pickle you’ve had.

  Then I did strawberries. One day, Dorothy and I were with the kids at the farmer’s market. It was late June and the strawberries were just amazing. They had all these small but supersweet strawberries. I bought two quarts. We had gotten separated at the market, and when I got back to Dorothy, it was like the opposite of “The Gift of the Magi”—she’s got two quarts. I thought, What are we going to do with all these strawberries?

  One night, I said, “I’m just going to can them.” I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I’d never canned fruit before in my life. I just knew the basic process: I cooked them down. I found a way to make jam without adding pectin. But you have to add the sugar at just the right temperature. I tried, but it wasn’t thickening. What I came up with was kind of more syrupy than jammy.

  A couple of months later, I pulled a jar out and poured its contents over vanilla ice cream, and it was the most blissfully beautiful thing. It was just an experiment. I was like, I’ve never done this before, but I’ll try it. It’s not rocket science, it’s not brain surgery; it’s just food.

  Recipe File

  Pickles

  This pickle recipe is adapted from a recipe at allrecipes.com, contributed by a woman named Sharon Howard. It gets five out of five stars there, and deservedly so. Hardware you might need: canning jars and lids, canning tongs, and a superhuge pot for boiling water.

  8 pounds 3- to 4-inch-long pickling cucumbers

  4 cups white vinegar

  12 cups water

  ⅔ cup kosher salt

  16 cloves garlic, peeled and halved

  Fresh dill weed

  Wash the cucumbers and place in the sink with cold water and lots of ice cubes. Soak in ice water for at least 2 hours but no more than 8 hours. Refresh the ice as required. Sterilize 8 1-quart canning jars and lids in boiling water for at least 10 minutes.

  In a large pot over medium-high heat, combine the vinegar, water, and pickling salt. Bring the brine to a rapid boil.

  In each jar, place 2 half cloves of garlic, 1 head of dill, then enough cucumbers to fill the jar (about 1 pound). Then add 2 more garlic halves and 1 sprig of dill. Fill the jars with hot brine. Seal the jars, making sure you have cleaned the jars’ rims of any residue.

  Process the sealed jars in a boiling-water bath. Process quart jars for 15 minutes.

  Store the pickles for a minimum of 8 weeks before eating. Refrigerate after opening. Pickles will keep for up to 2 years if stored in a cool, dry place.

  Note: My father-in-law, son, and I tend to cook in bulk, which is to say we basically multiply this recipe by a factor of 4 or 5. We do this for a few reasons: (1) it’s fun; (2) the pickles make great gifts; and (3) the pickles turn out so good that you’ll want to make sure you have some left over after you give away a case as gifts. I have notes on my recipe that read “2 bags ice, 2 gallons vinegar, 1 box kosher salt” and “2 pecks = 2 cases.” (A peck, by the way, is ¼ bushel, or 8 quarts.) At that volume, we chill the cukes in a cooler, in the sink, and in whatever other large containers we can find. Also, we have used whole black peppercorns, roughl
y 1 teaspoon in each jar, to great effect in the pickles.

  To process the jars, seal them up tight, put them in the boiling water so that the water covers the jars entirely for 15 minutes, and then take them out and let them cool. As they cool, the air inside contracts and pulls the lid tight; you’ll hear the lids pop, which is very satisfying.

  Tomato Sauce

  This recipe is borrowed and adapted from Biba Caggiano’s Biba’s Taste of Italy, one of my wife’s all-time favorite cookbooks. (If I didn’t note this before, I should have: Dorothy is a far better cook than I.) Hardware you might need: canning jars and lids, canning tongs, a food mill (nifty contraption, highly recommended), and a superhuge pot for boiling water.

  12 pounds very ripe tomatoes, preferably plum (Roma) tomatoes, cut into chunks

  2 large onions, coarsely chopped

  5 carrots, cut into small rounds

  5 celery stalks, cut into small pieces

  1 cup loosely packed parsley

  1 teaspoon coarse salt (or more, to taste)

  1 small bunch of basil, stems removed (20 to 30 leaves)

  ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

  Combine everything but the basil in a big pot and cook over medium heat for 45 minutes to an hour, until the tomatoes start to fall apart and the other vegetables are soft.

  Puree the mixture in a food processor or blender, or with an immersion blender (by far the easiest of the three options). Then pass the mixture through a food mill outfitted with the disk with the tiniest holes. This removes the skins and seeds.

  Return the sauce to the stove and stir in the basil. Cook slowly until the sauce thickens to something approaching what you want to put on pasta.