#214: C is for Chilling and Clafoutis
#214: C is for Chilling and Clafoutis
Some thoughts about chilling, pastry making tips, and a recipe for Clafoutis.
C is for Chill
In my work as a practitioner of pie-making, I regularly repeat the words Keep everything chilled…especially yourself at the Pie Camps I lead. There are a few easy things that can help with this. Cold butter and lard from the fridge, chilly flour that I store in the freezer just for pies, ice water, plus on baking days waiting to turn on the heat in order to keep our doughs, the kitchen, students and me cool…and chill. Butter starts to soften at 59°F (15°C) and, being that the normal temperature of hands is in the high 90°s F (mid 30°s C), it’s important to keep our palms and ten digits cool, too.
Pastry Tip: When adding ice-water to dough, use a sieve strainer to keep little ice chips out of your work-bowl lest they melt and give you a very unwelcome mookie-mess during the roll out.Hands are my favorite kitchen tool, by the way, and although I occasionally may lose my marbles, I’ve never lost my hands.
Pastry Tip: Dip hands into an ice-water bath or hold ice cubes for a few seconds to keep them chilly.A Rustic Pie
In the early 2000s I was asked to come to the All Recipes headquarters in Seattle to take part in a live-streamed event featuring recipes for Thanksgiving. Two of us would be demonstrating two different pies. The folks at All Recipes requested I come in a few days early with the pie I would be making live so that they could see and taste it. When I arrived I was greeted warmly, set my pie basket on the test kitchen counter and opened up its hinged woven lid. The pie still had some of its natural heat from baking it earlier that morning and when I set it on to the counter there was a silence followed by the producer saying It’s so….(long pause)…rustic! Well, I guess if you were expecting a pie that could be found on the cover of a glossy food magazine at the check out stand, it was rustic. But I don’t make cookie cutter pies…you know, the ones that come out of a pie press with a crust that looks exactly the same each time. Every pie I make is different. Once I was told that mine were easy to identify because of this. They also said that you could almost feel the love oozing out of them which warmed my heart as you may well imagine.
Life Tip: Looks don’t matter...Love does. I would wager that all of us at one time or other have spent way too much time comparing ourselves to others…how we look, the work we do, what we have or don’t have…the list could go on and on…but none of that really matters so I’ll stop that thought there.
How about just for today we try to keep chill about the little stuff and remember that in the end it really is kindness and love that matter.
P.S. On the day of the All Recipes live broadcast I mentioned above, the trays with the mise en place ingredients for our pie doughs were switched so the other pie maker got mine and I got hers. Our recipes are totally different but in a live broadcast we had no option but to keep chill and keep on. Like life, Pie can throw some wild and crazy curveballs, too.
Recipe: A Crazy Clafouti
Clafouti is halfway between a cake and custard. Traditionally made with unpitted dark cherries, I made today’s version with pitted sour cherries, wild blueberries, oat milk, and gluten-free flour. It’s delicious when warm but if there’s any left, have it for breakfast the next day served on a pretty china plate with a cup of tea.
