Posts tagged with "food" - Faerye Net

New pie (with recipe): Sea Salt Caramel Apple Custard

2014-01-27T00:44:14+00:00

I invented a pie! This is, I believe, the first time I’ve done this. (I’ve invented several savory pies, but ‘pie’ to me means sweet — sorry, I am an American that way.)

A few days ago, I made an Oregon Hazelnut Caramel Pie for Ryan (the decoration makes sense if you consider he rescued me from a dead car battery situation earlier in the week.) Since I habitually make pie crust in batches of two, this left me with a single crust to fill. I thought I’d make something I could actually eat. Hazelnuts smell like heaven, but could actually transport me to an anaphylactic afterlife.

I’ve been thinking about coming up with a salted caramel apple pie for a while. I adore salted caramel with a ridiculous, crooning love, apple pie is my favorite food, and “caramel apple” is a time-tested taste combo. However, I don’t so much…make caramel. Well, I tried once to make caramel sauce, as a spur of the moment thing. I made hard candy — very, very hard. This hazelnut pie I’d just made, however, gets to call itself caramel without any crazy candymaking step — and the science backs it up, since it’s baked at 350 degrees.

So I bought a few tart apples and got crazy. Sure, I could have looked up an actual caramel apple pie recipe — there’s one with pecans I could have modified to hypoallergenic in my adored pie cookbook, not too many pages from the hazelnut recipe! But I was feeling wild and reckless and gripped by the urge to create.

This pie uses a modified version of the custard from the Oregon Caramel-Coffee Hazelnut pie in Haedrich’s book, but uses apples instead of nuts and has a salt/sugar topping of my own creation.

Sea Salt Caramel Apple Custard Pie

Ingredients:
One single crust pie pastry in a 9 inch standard pie plate (partially prebaked if you’re fussy.)

Filling:
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) salted butter, melted
3 large eggs, at room temperature
3/4 cup light corn syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
2-3 Granny Smith Apples

Topping:
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
2.5 tsp coarse-grained sea salt*
2 Tbsp salted butter, at room temperature (or melted)

*If you want it a little less salty, I’d try 2 tsp. Also, I don’t know how coarse sea salt gets — mine is La Baleine ‘coarse’, and it’s medium-sized flakes, not rock salt or anything.)

Instructions:
Do this first: Put out butter and eggs to warm. Prebake pie shell if desired. Reduce oven temp to 350°.

1. Whisk together brown sugar, butter, eggs, corn syrup, cinnamon and vanilla in a large bowl.

2. Peel and slice apples into wedges (I aimed for 3/4 inch wide — wouldn’t want to go under half-inch, since they get pretty soft as it is). 2 large Granny Smiths was plenty for me, even being a little picky about shapes of slices, but if you aren’t trying for a rosette, you could fit more!

3. Arrange apple slices in cooled pie shell. Pour custard mixture over. (“Standard” pie pans vary, so you may have a little left over.)

4. Bake 25 minutes at 350°. Turn pie 180 degrees and bake 15 minutes more.

5. Meanwhile, mix sugar, salt and cinnamon by hand in a small bowl, eliminating sugar clumps for even mixture. Add butter and rub together.

6. Remove pie from oven. By now, the apple-custard surface should be mostly gelatinous, if not solid in parts. Sprinkle your topping mixture over the top of the pie, concentrating on the apple slices.

7. Bake another 10-20 minutes or until center of custard no longer moves in waves when you poke the edge of the pan with your mitt (in my oven, another ten minutes on top of what I’ve suggested.)

8. Cool thoroughly — I ate mine refrigerated the next day, but some people like custard pie at room temperature!

I found it very sweet, but complicated, with the apple very well cooked so it matched the custard texture. There is quite a bit of salt, but I like that to counteract the sweetness — and I would not use any apple sweeter than a Granny Smith!

If I do any more variations, I’ll add the results here!

NB: I’m calling it “sea salt” because that’s what I used, and because if there’s a phrase that causes me to Pavlovianly buy ice cream faster than “salted caramel”, it’s “sea salt caramel”. If I’ve abused the phrase, I’m sorry — it started it.

Anecdonutal

2011-05-25T21:48:27+00:00

In Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Ryan tried to attract my attention to a question of logistics. I could not answer, I was entranced by a pink box passing near me.

“Look, it’s a box of home!” I said.

“What?”

“That girl had a Voodoo Doughnut box!”

“Why didn’t you knock her down so I could take them?” Ryan said.

“You’re way bigger than me, why shouldn’t you knock people down in this scenario?”

“So I can have the donuts!”

How to bake a peach

2009-07-30T22:11:34+00:00

I know, some of you will be wondering why you’d bake a peach, not how. There are a few reasons.

You have Oral Allergy Syndrome like your hostess, and cannot eat fresh fruit.
Like your hostess, you’ve been seeing good results from trying something new.
Baked peaches are decadent and delicious.
They may impress guests.

I first had baked peaches at a bed and breakfast as the fruit course of a three-course breakfast and was quite charmed. (what did I tell you? Decadent and impressive!) I didn’t procure a recipe because I thought it would be simple. This is true. On the other hand, you may ruin some perfectly good peaches through trial and error, so why not profit from my scorched and underdone peaches? Here is something very simple, outlined in exhaustive detail.

Baked peach
1 small peach, halved and pitted
1 tsp diced crystallized ginger

Preheat conventional oven to 380°, or convection oven to 350°.
Sprinkle diced ginger on inner faces of peach halves.
Place on cookie sheet and bake for 12 minutes.

Your peach should be firm enough that it doesn’t squish when you take a fork to it, but soft enough to easily cut. Makes a lovely breakfast item, or a light, healthy dessert.

Tips:

You can do this with nectarines as well. I like peaches, and find white peaches in particular are well suited to ginger.
Ideally your peach should be ripe, but not overripe — if it bruises when you squeeze it, try cooking it for less time. 10 minutes has worked for me.
If your peach is large, scale up the ginger and bake for 15 minutes.
If you’re cooking multiples, try using a muffin pan to keep the peaches from rolling and shedding their ginger.

Family dialect study

2008-05-16T22:32:50+00:00

My grandma makes these fabulous fried potatoes with breakfast; diced, not grated, sautéed to crispy translucency. Because they are chunks, not slivers, we have always called these delights “slashbrowns” (I think the etymology is clear.) However, I just found a note in the margin of my thesis: “Is this a word?” across from the underlined “sl” in “slashbrowns.”

I was confident a few websearches would show that this is a longstanding term, possibly of regional origin — which would be totally appropriate to my Oregon Coast setting — but, I am appalled to say, the internet has let me down. No recipes. No tasty tater pics.

I guess my character will make hashbrowns, and my family will be duly noted as even more idiosyncratic than heretofore believed.