The Treeless Forest

TWD 3!

Amy over at South in Your Mouth (how great is that blog title, btw?) picked this weeks TWD Recipe: Double-Crusted Blueberry Pie, and I cannot stress how happy I am she did.  You see, a few weeks back, I volunteered to make pie for the Fourth of July Get-together.  So when I saw the recipe, I knew it was serendipitous.  Then, as I was talking to the co-hostess the day before the get-together, she mentioned in passing that her mother, the other co-hostess, had hinted hopefully towards blueberry pie.  So, extra-kismet.

So Friday morning I dragged my carcass out of bed and headed over to my mom's.  While I remembered to bring my blueberries (though I had to pick up more along the way) I did not remember to bring the cookbook with me.  Given the price of gas, and the 40 minute drive one way?  Thank god for Google Books (about which I don't feel the least bit guilty because, com on, I own the book.)  Nor did I remember to return her pastry cutter to her.  The one and only thing I have in my kitchen that she does not is a food processor (though I do believe mine may be too small to handle the recipe.) 

So, I had to do the pie crust by hand, since my brain refuses to process the two knives method.  So my hands are that much stronger today than they were before.  All in all I didn't do too badly, I think.  The crust was a bit streaky, and a tad ornery to   handle, but once it chilled it was pretty amenable to handling.  Especially since I used wax paper to roll it out.  I've decided I really like this method, as it effectively eliminates the mess.

As you can probably see , if you look at the picture close enough, the crust did require some patching once I got it into the plate.  I am totally okay with this, since Alton Brown once told me that patching is totally normal.  If AB has to patch his own dough on television, who am I to complain about it?  Just be sure that the thickness is relatively uniform -- press the patch into the dough and even it all out.

Sone how in all the 47 pictures I took, I did not take an in process picture of the berries.  Which I'm not terribly sorry about, since it basically looked exactly like what it was: a great big bowl of blueberries with sugar.  I did use lemon zest and juice this time, since I love the flavor of blueberries and lemon together -- my friend?  Makes this Jam?  Yeah...  It's not peach-ginger jam, but it almost as good.  Almost.

Anyway, tossed the blueberries into the crust.  Probably should have tried to even out the excess sugar, but I was running a bit behind at this point.  I then slid on the top crust, and edged it.  Looking at the picture now, I guess the edge was a little sloppy, but there was a couple places where I patched the edge to get it a uniform thickness, so look at the lovely colored sugar!  Mom had seen it a few weeks back while she was at Gordon Food Service, and couldn't resist buying it to make sugar cookies.  Which she was making in the dining room while I was making pie.  Poor planning, you say?  Meh, I blame it all on the power outage.

Anyway, I got it all into the oven.  When I turned down the heat halfway through, as instructed, I noticed the edges were a tad browner than I would like.  I was going to tent the whole thing, but mom dug out a pie-crust protector ring she had picked up somewhere, and had never used.  Apparently?  It works, because it turned out beautifully.  The crust was perfectly done, and settled nicely over the filling.  I really like the way the sugar turned out, as well.  The crust tasted incredible, too.  Dorie isn't kidding when she calls it the "Good for Almost Anything Pie-Crust."  Must make quiche with this sometime soon.

The pie itself was excellent.  This is the kind of pie that I could eat a piece of every day.  The next time I make it, I'll probably cut back a tad on the sugar -- there were places where it was still a little crystallized at the bottom, but it wasn't noticeable if you weren't inspecting the pie like I was.  The filling was nicely oozy*, still slightly warm, and the berries had just enough texture.   As I said, Excellent.

* I like my pie filling slightly oozy, and I'm not a stickler about the pie holding together perfectly once it's been cut.  I'm not a huge fan of pie with jellified insides, so this was exactly perfect.

Tuesdays With Dorie, Number Two

Karina, over at The Floured Apron, chose this week's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe:  Apple Cheddar Scones  This was exciting, because I love scones, and have always wanted to make them.

The dough was assembled quite quickly.  The ingredients are pretty simple, and in fact the only things I had to go out and get were dried apples, buttermilk and apple juice.  Oh, and unsalted butter, since we tend not to use the unsalted variety for daily stuff, and I'd used up all of last week's making cookies.  Pay no attention to the snickerdoodles and sugar wafers on the left, they are entirely extraneous to the process.  I was making a double batch, because I intended to freeze half of them.  Somehow in the planning process, I neglected to factor in the 40 minute drive home in a car with no air conditioning.  So I ended up baking the entire mess of them, except for two that I left in the freezer for my mother to try baking from frozen.  Presumably, I will get the report on how that turned out later in the week.

I have no in process picture.  This is due to the fact that, while Dorie does note that the dough will be very sticky, this does not even begin to cover what the actual consistency of the dough was.  When I make these again, I am going to entirely forgo attempting to pat out the dough, because I think I added about half again the called for amount of flour by the second batch just to make it touchable.  Cutting was next to impossible.  The first batch I just made as drop biscuits, while the second I added enough flour to actually cut them, and make rectangles (the texture came out alright, if a tad rough.) They are definitely worth making the dough, but seriously?  Just make drop biscuits of them.  Much frustration and usage of bad words will be skipped, this way.

[Also, as a purely personal substitution, I will probably try to make these with cream, rather than buttermilk, because the smell of buttermilk makes me gag, something fierce.  I have distinct memories of my host-mother trying to get me to drink the stuff, saying that it was good for the complexion.  I distinguished myself by not throwing it right back up.  Barely.]

These were wonderful.  They taste divine, were tender and fluffy and the cheese tasted delightful with the tiny hint of flavor that the dried apple and apple juice provided.  They tasted wonderful right out of the oven, and to me, just as good the next day with butter.  I plan to have them for breakfast all week.  They're not terribly sweet, and as I mentioned, the apple flavor is not at all strong, and not something to be afraid of.  They would be equally good as breakfast food as they would along side a corn or potato chowder, warmed and topped with a slice of honey ham.

However.  These are not what I would call scones.  The scones from the Scottish Bakery in my mother's neighborhood are dense, creamy, and crumbly -- a distinctly different texture that simply wasn't present here.   These are biscuits.  There is a growing tendency to refer to sweet quick-bread variations as scones, and savory variations as biscuits, which I simply don't understand.  It may be that "scone" sounds fancier and more exotic, and more worth the $3.50 that Starbucks likes to charge, than does 'biscuit,' something that nobody would pay for because they come free with your KFC.  Which is all nonsense, because no self-respecting baker would call what KFC serves a biscuit, anyway.  But I seem to be ranting, now, and I should stop.

All this said, I definitely intend to make these biscuits again.  As drop biscuits*.

*Another reason that these are biscuits and not scones -- drop scones are pan fried, like pancakes.