Category: Pastry

A Big Day for Gluten-Free Bakers

I’m constantly fielding requests for gluten-free baking ideas, and constantly letting readers down when I fail to deliver. I don’t get into gluten-free baking much, not because I’m not sympathetic to those who can’t eat gluten, but because there are only so many hours in the day (and I’m under serious pressure to get through the entire classic pastry catalogue before I eventually grow old and die). However I wanted to note that tomorrow marks the release of C4C gluten-free flour. The brainchild of Thomas Keller and culinary researcher Lena Kwak, it’s available from Williams Sonoma starting today.

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This Week: Bisteeya

Savory baking, edible birds, pie…when I triangulated those three things on a map, my finger landed squarely on Morocco. Specifically on Morocco’s most famous dish: bisteeya, also spelled b’steeya, bistella, pastilla, pastella, the list goes on. Interestingly, the only time I’ve heard a real Moroccan pronounce the word it sounded like pas-TEL-ah. So I’m all kinds of confused on the name.

However a rose by any other name would still taste like Moroccan pigeon pie. Actually more of a pastry than a pie, it’s a delicate, spicy, savory-sweet combo that works great in either a conventional home or outdoor brick oven (and a lot of you have been bugging me for more brick oven recipes). Let’s make it!

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On Pie

Reader Jonah points out that I failed to make the connection between chicken in a salt crust and Medieval pies, as I promised to do early in the week. Very true, Jonah, thanks for the reminder! My thought was simply this: that once upon time, pie wasn’t so much a “what” as it was a “how.” Which is to say, it was a method, a way to cook and to preserve food. I think of pie as the original Tupperware.

Food historians make the case that pie-eating dates to Greece and Rome. But here it really depends on what you mean by pie. Pies of the ancient world were more akin to modern tarts: open-faced, made for immediate consumption. The Arabs were the next in line to create pie-like baked goods, which is to say pastries with top and bottom crusts. Yet they were not — at least to my way of thinking — true pies. Those evolved in the Middle Ages in Europe.

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You spell it M-A-N

I’ll be honest, I sometimes wonder if all my pastry baking detracts from my masculine image. Apparently I have little to worry about, as the fine folks at Sumo Skinny have just written me into their post Cook Like a Man: 5 Sites to Help Dudes in the Kitchen. One less thing I have to worry about, I guess.

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How does a brine work?

Quite a few readers out there have written in asking whether a salt crust gives a result similar to a brine when it comes to roast chicken. It’s a good question. Both methods surround the bird with a salty medium. Intuitively, they should produce a chicken that’s about the same in terms of taste and texture. But in fact that isn’t so.

The critical difference is water. A solution of just 3% salt will penetrate chicken muscle much more readily than the salt in a salt crust will, even though there’s a lot more salt in the crust. Which begs the question: why?

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Cockfighting, Academic Style

Want to see a really good fight? Get a few anthropologists together in a room and ask them when chickens first arrived in the New World. Then back away and start placing your bets.

How chickens came to the Americas is one of the great unresolved anthropological debates. On the one hand you have those who believe chickens arrived in the New World with the Spaniards and/or Portuguese. On the other you have those who contend that chickens arrived far earlier and from the other direction, via the Polynesians. A few outliers claim ancient Egyptian seafarers brought them, but most of those types also believe in the Loch Ness Monster.

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You mean you actually EAT those things?

Not everyone in the ancient world ate chicken. While just about every ancient culture valued chickens for their eggs, by no means all were excited about their meat (the Japanese eschewed both and mostly kept chickens as exotic pets). The Romans are an excellent example. Avid egg eaters, they were extremely practical. They considered the eating of hens to be wasteful, an act only fussy, decadent pantywaists like, say, the Greeks would be capable of (here I should insert that there are notable parallels between the way the Romans viewed the Greeks and the way some Americans view the French). The Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote this about the inhabitants of the Greek island of Delos:

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How to Hatch 15,000 Eggs

Modern chicken and/or egg production horrifies some, and I’ll admit that it can be an ugly (certainly smelly) process. What most people don’t know is that mass egg hatching isn’t a strictly modern practice. The ancient Egyptians perfected it as long as 3,500 years ago. That makes sense when you consider how adept the Egyptians were at scaling.

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