I love this bread. Such a nice, glossy, slightly golden interior and spongy texture. Great for dipping in olive oil, and let's not get started about sandwiches.

Did I say get started? Then let's. Your refrigerated starter should be bubbly, about like so (fancy crockery bowl not required):

Put it into the bowl of your mixer (it'll deflate totally):

Then add your dry ingredients on top (note I'm making eight loaves' worth here, so your quantities will be different, though the overall look and feel of the dough will be the same).

Mix with the paddle for two minutes to moisten, then apply the dough hook for five minutes. The finished product should look like this:

Wet and stretchy, no? That's a good thing. Transfer to a bowl and let sit for half an hour. Then give it a stretch or two to spread the yeast around.

Wait another half hour and give it another stretch.

Then another half hour and one more stretch.

Is it sticky, messy work?

It is.

So then, once the stretching is all done, let the dough rise for almost two hours, until it triples in volume and looks like this (this is half my dough, the rest is in another bowl that looks just like this...it didn't seem to warrant another photo):

Turn the dough out onto a VERY well-floured board (durum, if you're using it). Then cut it into 13-ounces pieces with a bench scraper or knife.

Now then, fetching the closest available small basket, bowl or colander, line it with a towel or napkin and sprinkle with more flour (durum, preferably)

Place your lump of dough in it, bringing the cut sides up to the top of the ball and pinching them closed. This is all the shaping you'll need to do for this very slack dough.

Sprinkle with more flour, fold the corners of the cloth over to cover and let sit for 1 1/4 hours or so until the loaves are very poofy.

With your oven up to blazing temperature, dust your peel with flour.

Turn your dough out onto it...

...and slash the tops as best you can with a razor blade or sharp knife. Dough this wet doesn't slash too well, but if you can manage it, the loaves will come out prettier.

Insert into your oven and bake for 20-25 minutes.

I know, you probably don't have one of these. However when I get back next week I'll show you how to prepare your own oven to be more like a big, brick hearth. Until then, have a Merry Christmas all you baking fanatics!

Mexico Bob helpfully chimes in on the subject that just won't die.

Boy, did you ever open a can of worms. Tell us oh master, what is the difference among the following :)

Crema Mexicana
Crema Mexicana agria
Crema acificada
Crema fresca casera
Crema para batir
Crema Centroamericana
Crema Centroamericana acida
Jocoque

Now, now. I never claimed to be an expert on all forms of Mexican sour cream. All I know is what the dairy fat limits are for crema fresca as a product in America. It's kinda like talking about yogurt. Here we've got maybe a dozen different kinds. But go to the Asian steppes and there are literally hundreds. There are more than a few Joe Pastry readers out there who are still experiencing post-traumatic stress from the three weeks I spent on fermented dairy back in the fall of 2007, but I won't hesitate to take my belt off right here, young mister, if you continue to provoke me. Don't think I won't!

Regular reader and contributor Hans writes in to comment:

If my latin-based language skillz don't let me down, Crème Fraîche means fresh cream. The latinos have a similar cream, usually called crema fresca. If you have a concentration of Latin Americans (i.e. Mexicans, though not limited to Mexicans) your grocery may carry crema fresca and I wonder if it wouldn't be essentially the same and cheaper than the French stuff at the health food store.

Thanks for bringing that up, Hans! In fact crema fresca is closer to crème fraîche than sour cream. Its fat content is usually a bit higher, about 25% compared to sour cream which clocks in around 20%. Both are still lightweights compared to crème fraîche, though, which weighs in at a chubby 35-48%.

Though all this begs the question: why is it called "fresh cream" when it's gone sour? I'll need to look into that.

Did I mention you'll need some durum flour? You will, and it can be hard to find. You can of course order it online, or just use all white flour instead. The loaf you'll get will have as much right to be called "Pugliese" as mine — 'cause neither one of them will be made in Apulia! Anyway, my recipe is a variation on one I found in Rose Levy Berenbaum's Bread Bible. The main difference is that where hers calls for a commercial yeast-based biga starter, mine calls for a "sour" starter — the kind I put up instructions for on the menu over there to the right. It gives you a lot more flavor (and a reason to keep re-using that starter). Anyway, here it is. For two 13-ounce loaves:

5 ounces unbleached all-purpose flour
5 ounces durum flour
1 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
7 ounces water
10 ounces refrigerated starter

The treatment of the starter is an important part of the process. It can't be ancient, flat, firm stater that hasn't seen the light of day for weeks. It must be light and bubbly — not that it's going to leaven the bread much. The idea is to build it up in the day or so leading up to baking. I "wake" mine two days before with a feeding and 4-hour fermentation at room temperature. I then put it in the refrigerator overnight and do the same thing the following day, building it up to the quantity I need (and then some). Then I refrigerate it again for use the next day. I quadruple this recipe because, well, my oven holds a lot of bread.

Combine all ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer and mix with the paddle for two minutes to combine your ingredients. Switch to the dough hook and knead for five more minutes, until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl (if it doesn't, add more flour a couple of tablespoons at a time until it does).

Turn the dough out into an oiled bowl and cover with a towel. Let it rise for half an hour, then stretch and/or fold it once or twice. Let it rise another half hour and repeat the stretching. Then let it rise another half hour and stretch it again. Let the dough rise for 1 and 3/4 hours after that, until it's almost tripled in size (this is a very airy dough).

Turn out the dough, and divide it into two equal pieces. Pull each piece into a rough ball shape and place it in a basket (or bowl or colander) lined with a flour-dusted napkin or towel. Let rise for about 1 1/4 hours until it's puffy. Turn the dough pieces, one at a time, out onto a floured peel and transfer them to a baking stone in 550 degree (or as hot as you can make it) oven. Bake about 20 minutes until dark golden brown.

Well, it's a weird week, what with Christmas Eve being tomorrow, but of course I'm still baking away. Maybe I'll dial you all in on a bread project I'm working on: Pulgiese (pronounced pool-yee-AY-zee). As you've probably guessed, it's an Italian sort of thing, actually a southern Italian sort of thing, from, of course, Apulia, which is the "heel" of the great geographical boot that is Italy. Pugliese bread is called a "peasant" bread, though today's iterations are anything but, being made of very finely milled white and durum wheat flours. I guess it'd be fair to call it "rustic" since it's not quite as fine as mass-market "Italian" breads. It also has fairly large holes in it (i.e. an "open" crumb). This is due to the fact that Pugliese is a rather wet dough. Hard to handle? Mmm...a bit, but the results are stunning, even if you don't have a monster brick oven like I do. Shall we?

There is also — technically — a microbial difference between the American and French versions of crème fraîche, as my friend and regular commentator Nick R. points out. One can purchase such a culture, which is composed of a mix of Continental bacteria, and gives a more authentic product. If you're interested you can buy it here.

Also, the missus, who never misses a chance to pinch a penny until it bleeds, writes in to comment:

If you're going to buy heavy cream AND buttermilk, why not just spring for the creme fraiche?

For the record, I wasn't necessarily suggesting anyone go out and buy both of them. I just meant that a little of the sour stuff could be added to some cream in a pinch (though for the record I'll bet buying both is still cheaper than actual crème fraîche, and you'll have leftovers to make buttermilk pancakes and whipped cream to boot!).

Crikey! Who knew crème fraîche could be so controversial!

I get tired of fancy magazines (and, ehem...blogs) calling for this ingredient, don't you? For quite a while I thought it was just a fancy French-sounding name for sour cream, one that allowed my local Whole Foods to charge twice as much money for the stuff. But in fact it is a slightly different animal from standard sour cream, that both tastes and performs differently when you cook with it.

But what if you don't care to pay the extra two bucks a tub? Then you can dive headlong into the great Eurasian dairy fermenting tradition and make your own! First you'll need a liquid dairy medium that contains at least 30% milk fat (light cream is the most convenient option for most of us). Next you'll need cultures of Lactococcus and Leuconostoc bacteria to ferment it with. Those can be found in any dairy case, in a container of standard sour cream or a jug of cultured buttermilk. For every cup of cream you want to ferment, stir in about a tablespoon of either the buttermilk or the sour cream (or a mixture of both if you're feeling saucy). Let the mix sit at room temperature for 12 hours until it thickens noticeably. Voilà...le crème fraîche.

But wait, Joe, if I can use buttermilk and sour cream cultures to make crème fraîche, aren't I just making more regular buttermilk or sour cream? I mean...what's the difference? The main difference is fat content. Crème fraîche has much more than either sour cream or buttermilk (I mean, it's French, right?). There's no fermented equivalent in American dairy cases.

For the crème fraîche in the onion tart recipe, you mean? Nope. Sour cream can't take the heat that crème fraîche can, and will break in the oven. So should you not have access to any, just substitute a lesser amount of heavy cream. It won't have the same zing, but you won't be disappointed.

It's a dark photo, but then the days have been dark lately. Lots of that nasty weather moving through. But we can't let that stop a pastry project, now can we? I start with my puff pastry scrap ball (a little brain-looking thing that was previously frozen, now completely thawed). If you don't collect your own — start! Otherwise some nice flat store-bought puff pastry will do just fine.

Roll it out into a circle of whatever thickness you'd like. I'm rolling mine out as thin as I can because it's going into a brick oven at very high heat. So, the thinner the better to prevent the center from ending up soft or mushy.

Trim it up however you'd like with a pizza cutter, then dock the dough to let steam out (you don't want it puffing up very much).

To your small quantity of caramelized onions...

...add your cream or crème fraîche and stir it in. Salt the mixture lightly (you'll be adding bacon to it later).

Spread it over the dough round (very thinly if you're using a brick oven, thicker if you're using a standard oven).

Then sprinkle on your blanched bacon. This is some hog jowl bacon I found here locally (Oh, Kentucky, how do I love thee...?).

Push the coals aside in your Electrolux EZ-Bake brick oven, and sweep the floor. (If you don't happen to have one of these, simply follow the standard oven instructions below).

Slip the tart onto a lightly floured peel, and jiggle it to make sure it isn't sticking.

Then slide the tart onto the floor of the oven.

It'll be ready in under two minutes, provided the oven is well heated (I'd already fired my oven for bread, which is what I baked just after this). The tart should come out blackened around the edges, which is traditional, or so I'm told. Note for brick oven users: you'll want to pick the tart up with a metal peel, not a wooden one, since there'll likely be a bit of scraping involved. Onion tarts are wetter and heavier than pizzas, so be prepared.

How did it turn out? Very well. Puff pastry, when it's cooked that fast, is bound to be at least a little underdone on the top. My guess is that puff pastry was not the original dough for onion tarts back in Alsace. They probably used a leaner bread or short crust dough of some sort, which would make a lighter, though considerably less decadent, tart.

The most popular story on the origin of the onion tart is that it was originally a baked good with which the bakers of old would test the heat of their ovens. If they pushed the embers aside and put one down (among the still-burning embers) and it baked up in a certain amount of time, then the oven was hot enough for bread. I tend not to put much stock in stories like this, since preparing an entire tart seems like a rather labor-intensive way to take an oven's temperature. The classic method, as I understand it, was to toss a handful of flour onto the floor of the oven and see how long it took to burn. Thank God I live in the modern era, so I can simply point a laser beam at the thing.

And in case you're wondering, yes, I plan to use the brick oven for my tart. I've never tried it before, so it should be, at the very least, interesting. Keep your fingers crossed.

A pro who knows weighs in on onion slice-ery:

I read the piece on cutting onions, and as far as being more or less oniony, the less times you cut the onion (and the sharper your blade is), the less damage you'll do the cell structure, resulting in less of the sulfuric compounds mixing and producing the tear-inducing sulfuric acid. A dull knife (or food processor blade) rips and crushes lots of cells, resulting in more sulfur, more sulfuric acid, more tears, and a stronger onion flavor.

For those reasons, your method is right on the money. It doesn't result in the wierd, oddly-shaped pieces that come from the first cuts on the sides, the large, flat pieces that stand out and don't cook at the same rate as the rest. If you're trying to cook them evenly and deeply, like for your onion tart, you want to have them as close to identical as possible, as you well know. For diced onions, leave the root end intact, and make radial cuts almost to the root end, then turn the onion 90 degrees and cut across for wonderfully even diced onion. Having said that, cutting across the onion (making half-rings) will result in a completely uniform thickness for each slice of onion, instead of pieces with tapered ends and thick centers. It may not make much difference, but as long as I'm nitpicking, I figure I'd mention it.

Finally, the green sprouty thing in the middle is the onion shoot (the part that would break the surface and eventually become an onion blossom if given more time underground) and is a sign that your onion is old or may not have been stored properly. It's not the end of the world, obviously, just something that you'd like to avoid, given the opportunity.

An onion tart isn't an easy thing for me to quantify, since I generally just wait until I have a baseball-sized mass of puff pastry scraps in my freezer, then make one. I'll give it a try though.

About 10 ounces puff pastry
About one cup caramelized onions (see recipe under the Techniques menu)
1-2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1-2 tablespoons cream or crème fraîche
2-3 ounces thick cut bacon, cubed

Preheat oven to 375. Blanch bacon for one minute in boiling water and cool. Roll the pastry out into a thin circle, remove to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, and "dock" it with a fork (i.e. punch holes all over it). When oven is hot, stir the cream or crème fraîche into the onions and spread thinly over the dough circle. Sprinkle on bacon. Bake for 20-30 minutes until the dough is puffy around the edges and golden brown. Optionally, finish by employing a blowtorch to crisp the top. Serve immediately.

An email came in earlier today contesting my assertion that slicing an onion from pole-to-pole versus cross-wise results in any fewer irritant-dispersing cross-cuts of the onion flesh. I'm no expert on onion anatomy, but I was taught that cutting the onion from top to bottom, then slicing inward toward the center, yields a milder tasting onion, and makes you cry less to boot. I dunno, maybe it's all in my head, though I'll tell you that at the very least this technique gives you slices that are a whole lot prettier.

Since I'm light on business today, I decided to take some pictures of this type of slicing (which probably has a name...help me you formally trained chefs out there) instead of trying to explain it. Thanks to our nanny, Cindy, for being my photographer. I can't tell you how difficult it is trying to slice onions and snap pictures at the same time.

So then, start by slicing off the very ends of the onion and peeling it.

Slice it in half from end to end.

Lay one half on the board, flat side down, with the cut ends pointing at and away from you. Then begin slicing the onion toward the center, radially, first at a shallow angle...

...then at increasingly steep angles until you get to the top.

Remove the very center of the onion, you might see a little green shoot in there, just pitch it (it doesn't taste great, and can also be hard on the digestion).

Flip the onion over with you finger...

...and repeat the radial slicing process. Easy as pie, no?

What's the irony here? It's that I'm going to chop my onions for my Alsatian onion tart. I told you I didn't have much to do today.

Here's a good article from yesterday's Toronto Globe & Mail on pairing wine with dessert. Very interesting stuff.

Members of the allium family are unique in the vegetable kingdom in that they store much of their energy in short-chain sugars. Whereas most types of plants "lock up" sugars in the form of very long-chain starch molecules (which growing shoots later break down into usable sugar via special enzymes), onions store much of their sugar in the form of fructose molecules, strung together like pearls on a necklace. The nice thing about that arrangement is that it doesn't take a whole heck of a lot to dislodge those sugars to create the sensation of sweetness. A little heat, say. Which is why cooking — especially long, slow cooking — brings out so much of the onion's naturally sweet flavor. It also creates a rich, dark color as the sugars slowly caramelize.

If the onion is known for possessing any single quality, it's of course the tear-inducing miasma it gives off when it's cut. This is the onion's defense mechanism against being eaten my large mammals such as ourselves. Its design is ingenious. Each cell contains not one, but four different offensive chemical compounds. Left alone, those compounds remain in the cell fluid as inoffensive long-chain molecules. Damage that cell though, and a special enzyme that's stored separately in the cell is released, and goes to work breaking up those molecules up into volatile, irritating chemicals. These chemicals then take to the air, landing on sensitive membranes in the eyes and nose, where they break down into various nasties, including sulfuric acid. The effect is...well, you know the effect. Of all the members of the allium family, it's garlic that produces the highest number of these defensive compounds, something on the order of a hundred times that of a typical onion, though it's interesting that none of them make you cry.

The neat thing about this defensive chemical process is that it can be manipulated to produce a variety of culinary effects. Slice an onion, especially down its length, and you do relatively little damage to its flesh. The result is a milder flavor, great for sandwiches. Chop it and the result is a stinging, sulfurous pungency. The same thing goes for garlic, which explains why when you merely slice or chop garlic you get a pronounced, though somewhat mellow and rounded flavor. Mash it through a press and you get an atom bomb of garlic-ness. Thus, depending on the application, it pays to consider what effect you're trying to create whenever you lay an allium down on the cutting board.

A question came in last night as to why Alsatian onion tart is considered a wintertime dish as opposed to a summer one, since onions are harvested in the summer months. The answer is, while I don't know much about onions, I believe that it's only the sweeter varieties (like Vidalia onions from Georgia) that are harvested that early. Other varieties, I believe, are harvested at different times of year. However regardless of when they're taken in, when properly stored an onion — at least if it's of a firmer and drier variety — will keep for months. This is undoubtedly what makes onion tart a winter dish...because it's a food that would have been available, fresh, at that time of year.

...of different types can be found growing wild the world over. However the large-bulbed varieties that we find so enjoyable today are thought to have originated in Central Asia somewhere. Though no one knows what the wild ancestors that produced the modern onion looked like, one thing is for certain: the onion has been part of the human diet for thousands, probably tens of thousands of years. The ancient civilization of Ur spoke of them, as did the Egyptians. The onion seems to have been so popular in Egypt, in fact, that the exiled Israelites recorded how terribly they missed Egyptian onions in the Bible. Must have been some darn good onions.

One thing about onion-eating in the ancient world is that it seems to have been restricted to the lower classes. Prohibitions on eating onions among royalty and the priestly classes were observed not only in Egypt, but in ancient India among the Brahmins and Jains. This is presumably because the hoity-toity among them apparently cared what their breath smelled like. What, they had no citron handy?

Concerning the word "onion", it apparently comes down to us from the Romans, who enjoyed a variety of cultivars. One of those, which they referred as the "pearl" (unio), is thought by many linguists to be the basis of the French word oignon, which is where the English "onion" comes from. Of course there are competing theories, because let's face it, that's what linguists are like.

It's been called to my attention that some of you Firefox users out there are having trouble reading the web site. Which is to say that since the weekend the Firefox browser has been warning people that they're accessing a "forged" site, whatever that means. Rest assured that the entirely of the IT department here at the joepastry.com Global Operations Center is working on the problem, and should have a fix soon. Until then, my only advice is to switch to a different browser application, if possible.

My new friend Greg over at SippitySup.com reminds me that there is another French version of Alsatian onion tart, known under the vaguely vulgar-sounding name of pissaladière. The main difference between the two is that being a Provençal dish, it's got plenty of anchovies mixed into the topping. Ours will be the classic onion and bacon version, but as an onion tart enthusiast in general, I heartily endorse both types. Greg's recipe, which goes whole-hog Provençal with the addition of olives, can be found here.

Cooked meat cologne? I won't be looking for any in my stocking this year.

Alsace is a unique little region in that it is perfectly suited for agriculture of the type that yields alcoholic beverages. The climate is ideal for growing grapes (particularly white grapes like Riesling), hops and a variety of fermentable fruit crops. Thus Alsace has been a center of beer, wine and schnapps-making for centuries. No wonder the various powers of Europe have fought bitterly over it for 2,000 years.

It all began with the Romans, who, recognizing how promising the area was for grape-growing, wrested it from Celts and the Gauls in the first century BC. The Franks then took it from the Romans when the Roman Empire fell in about the Fifth Century. That is, until the Magyars and Vikings overran it in the Tenth. That nonsense was put to a stop when the Holy Roman Empire took it in 962. They held it until 1674 when the Kingdom of France was formed as a result of the Franco-Dutch War. The German Empire then took it 1871. France took it back in 1919. Germany re-took it in 1940 and held it until he end of World War II, at which point it enjoyed about fifteen minutes of political independence before France re-re-took it in 1945.

Since then Alsace has been officially French, though you can bet money the Germans still aren't happy about it. In fact they're the last people I'd want with their eyes on my real estate. Who can say what the ultimate destiny of Alsace actually is...

UPDATE: Mexico Bob Chimes in (again) with this piece of historical trivia:

You failed to mention Muscatel which is one of the original grapes used by the Romans for making wine and the Alsace Muscatel is very famous.

I stand, again, corrected. Or rather added-to. Mexico Bob, I thank you.

That's French for onion tart (I'm a man of the world, don't you know). In Alsatian there's a different word for it. What, you mean they speak another language in Alsace? I thought it was part of France! Yes, that's true, Alsace is technically part of France. I say "technically" because it's always been something of its own animal on the European map. Not quite autonomous, but then not quite part of either France or Germany (the countries that it borders), it's got an independent spirit — and a language to match. Alsatian is sort of a French-ified low German dialect, related to Swiss German and Swabian, dialects that few Germans, and even fewer Frenchmen, can understand.

Alsatians call their onion tart flammekueche, which sounds awfully German, does it not? And it means pretty much what it sounds like: "cooked" (baked) in "flames". It gets that name because, just like Neapolitan pizza, it's traditionally baked in a still-burning wood-fired oven at astoundingly high heat. And in fact onion tart is pretty much the pizza of Alsace. It's eaten casually, often served in bars, and people eat and eat and eat it until until they basically pass out. Try one sometime and you'll see why. It's addictive in the extreme.

One of the things I like so much about Alsatian onion tart (or flammekueche, or Flammkuchen, or tarte à l’oignon, or tarte flambée) is that it's one of the very few dishes in which the onion takes center stage. In fact, other than onion soup, I can't think of any others. So that alone makes it special. It's also rich, rich, rich...and of course I have a special place in my heart for things like that (specifically in my left ventricle, right next to a giant blob of arterial plaque). But, you only live once, am I right? And anyway this is the time of year for hearty winter fare. Let's dig in.

I've never been a supporter of organic anything, but that seems to be the only kind of advertising that finds its way onto my ad pane over to the right there. That's the nature of web-vertising though, you throw open the window and whoever is willing to pay can come on in. Makes me feel a bit cheap and dirty, I'll confess it, but what can I do? Baby needs a new pair of shoes. I'll tell you this though, the day an ad for one of Michael Pollan's new books comes up there, that piece of code is history.

We've been on fruitcake-like Christmas items for a couple of weeks now, and some of you are getting understandably impatient (downright ticked off in a few cases). So let's switch gears, shall we? At the beginning of last year I resolved to do more savory baking on this blog. So far I've done zero. This week I'd like to remedy that with something I tend to like to serve around Christmas time, a little thing called Alsatian onion tart. Any takers?

Cook's Illustrated, perhaps the only food magazine I read with any regularity, does great service to the food community with their regular evaluations of equipment and ingredients. This week a reader called my attention to their reviews of high-end butters. Their panel of tasters sampled 8 different products in all, among them heavy-hitters like Isigny Ste. Mère Beurre de Baratte and Beurre de Chimay. I was gratified that my personal favorite, the Danish label Lurpak, topped their list of recommendations (what's that they say about great minds again?). The only big surprise was their disdain for Beurre Échiré, another top brand from France, which they considered too sour and cheesy.

A stinging rebuke from my father, Joe Pastry Senior, over the weekend, getting after me for my inclusion of nutmeats in last week's recipe. "If fruitcake were meant to have nuts in it," he said, " it would be called fruit AND nut cake." All I can say is that if he were to share his top secret recipe with me (and his booze-injecting horse needle), these sorts of oversights wouldn't happen.

Toasted with butter and a cuppa tea. Ahh...

But back to business. The one piece of trivia you hear most often about stollen is that its elongated shape and white color (after it's baked and dusted with sugar) are supposed to be evocative of the Christ Child wrapped in swaddling clothes. Of course I'm always highly skeptical of stories like that, since they smack of easy answers to questions that really have no answer. Why is the stollen shaped the way it is? Who knows?

The name "stollen" comes from a German root meaning "post" or "pillar" which makes sense given that it's well...long. You don't find it in a simple loaf shape most of the time, at least not in German markets. Could one be made that way? Absolutely, even though the purists might howl. But then none of them are likely to be around on Christmas morning when you're opening presents, eh?

This is American stollen, mind you. Which is to say it tried hard to be the real German article, but not being truly German, it isn't. My shape isn't perfect (I left a little too much lip down below), and I used things like cherries and dark raisins which are verboten among the purist crowd. I bring this up because there are people out there who feel strongly about stollen (similar to those who feel strongly about biscuits), and are going to give me grief after this is over. So be it.

Begin by putting the sponge ingredients, save for the milk, in the bowl of a stand mixer.

Whisk to combine...

Then stir in the milk with a wooden spoon until you get a thick batter.

Cover with a cloth and let sit while you prepare your dough ingredients. Have ready your macerated fruit mixture from day 1. Notice I have dark raisins in there. What can I say, I had them and didn't want to run to the store for the golden kind. Technically the cherries aren't kosher either (they will tend to color the crumb a bit) so if you don't want them, swap them out for more raisins or an equal portion of the other fruit.

Now for the dough. Again put your dry ingredients in a bowl...

...and whisk to combine. You should also combine your wet ingredients at this time, beating them lightly.

After half an hour has passed, check your sponge, it should be bubbly.

Fit the dough hook on the mixer and turn it on low. Add the dry ingredients.

Then the wet ingredients.

Stir (knead, really) until a dough comes together.

Then add your butter in pieces. Looks like brioche, no? Zat iz because eet iz.

When the dough is uniform, add half the marzipan.

Then the macerated fruit and nuts. If they don't incorporate easily in the mixture, turn the whole mess out and knead it by hand for a minute or two until the mixture is evenly distributed. Let it rest for half an hour.

Now then. Roll the dough out into a rough oval

Make trench in the middle by pressing on it with a rolling pin...

...and fill the trench with the remaining half of the marzipan (some people use much more than that, rolling it into a thick log and putting the log in the trench...it's up to you).

Then fold the dough over to enclose the marzipan, ideally, leaving less lip than I've done here. Oh yes, stollen lovers, I know there are many more ways to shape stollen. However this is the shape my grandmother used to buy hers in, so I'm partial to it.

Bake for 50-60 minutes until it's well browned. All to cool on a rack.

Paint with butter.

The dust it with powdered sugar.

Slice, toast, eat.

A wealth of information comes our way via Mexico Bob. Apparently the citron has quite a pedigree. In the ancient world it was employed both as an emetic and as a mouthwash. Here's this from Theophrastus:

In the east and south there are special plants... i.e. in Media and Persia there are many types of fruit, between them there is a fruit called Median or Persian Apple. The tree has a leaf similar to and almost identical with that of the andrachn (Arbutus andrachne L.), but has thorns like those of the apios (the wild pear, Pyrus amygdaliformis Vill.) or the oxyacanthos (the fire thorn, Cotoneaster pyracantha Spach.), except that they are white, smooth, sharp and strong.

The fruit is not eaten, but is very fragrant, as is also the leaf of the tree; and the fruit is put among clothes, it keeps them from being moth-eaten. It is also useful when one has drunk deadly poison, for when it is administered in wine; it upsets the stomach and brings up the poison. It is also useful to improve the breath, for if one boils the inner part of the fruit in a dish or squeezes it into the mouth in some other medium, it makes the breath more pleasant.

And this from Pliny the Elder:

The Assyrian fruit, which some call Median, is an antidote for poisons. Its leaf is like that of the andrachn (Arbutus andrachne L.), but with thorns running between. The fruit is notable for the fact that it is not eaten and has a strong odor, as also do the leaves, which impregnates clothes stored with them and keeps away harmful insects.

This is the fruit whose pips we have related Parthian nobles boiled in foods in order to eliminate bad breath. No other tree is so highly praised in Media.

And that's still not all:

The citron is also used by Jews for a religious ritual during the Feast of Tabernacles, by whom it is called Etrog. Therefore the citron was always considered as a Jewish symbol, and is found on various Hebrew antiques and archeological findings.

Whew! Thanks Bob! Everything I ever wanted to know about the citron in one easy blog post.

It ain't a make of French car, if that was your answer. It's a fruit, the candied rind of which is frequently called for in Christmas fruitcake recipes. It's a head-scratcher for many people, since outside of fruitcake-making, few people ever encounter it. But the reality is that outside of fruitcake-making, there are very few uses for the citron. It's a citrus fruit (as I'm sure you can guess), though calling it a "fruit" is rather generous, since there's really no fruit in it. It's almost entirely pith. Yet the skin is rich in essential oils, and has been prized for its fragrance since antiquity. Brined and boiled, it's awfully darn good for candying. As for what becomes of the rest of the thing once the rind is taken off, I'll be darned if I know.

I adapted it, actually. This is a variation on a formula I came across a few years ago and loved. Notice that the dried and candied fruits are all light in color. No raisins or currants, not even any brown-skinned nuts. This is intentional, since unlike an English-style fruitcake, a light, golden crumb is part of the aesthetic of a perfect stollen. Like fruitcake, however, it is a two-day process.

Day 1:

The fruit mix:

2 cups golden raisins
1/2 cup candies orange peel
1/2 cup candied lemon peel
1/2 cup candied cherries, chopped
1/2 cup candied citron
1 cup slivered almonds
3 tablespoons dark rum
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
zest of 1 lemon

Combine all in a large bowl and toss until combined. Cover with plastic wrap and macerate at room temperature overnight.

Day 2

Preheat your oven to 375.

The sponge:

7 ounces all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons sugar
4 1/2 teaspoons (2 envelopes) instant yeast
2/3 cup milk, room temperature

Whisk together the flour, sugar and yeast in the bowl of a stand mixer, then stir in the milk until a thick batter is formed. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap let sit for 30 minutes until bubbly.

The dough:

10 ounces all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg, room temperature
5 egg yolks, room temperature
3 ounces milk, room temperature
10 tablespoons butter, room temperature

then:

6 ounces marzipan, chopped

Whisk the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Lightly beat the egg, yolks and milk together. Attach the dough hook and turn the mixer on low. Add the dry ingredients and the egg mixture, turn the mixer up to medium and knead until the dough is fairly smooth. Add the butter tablespoon by tablespoon, letting each be incorporated before adding the next.

Turn the mixer back down to low and add half the marzipan and then the fruit mixture from day 1 (draining off any excess liquid first). If necessary, turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead by hand until all the marzipan and macerated fruit is evenly incorporated. Let the dough rise for half an hour more.

Cut the dough in half and roll each half out into an oval roughly 12" long and an inch thick. With the rolling pin, make a depression in the dough running end to end and fill each trench with halk the rest of the marzipan pieces. Fold the dough in half to enclose the marzipan. Place the breads on a sheet pan or cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Let rise a further 20-30 minutes.

Bake for 30 minutes, then rotate the pan and bake for 20-30 minutes more until the outside is well browned. Cool on a rack, then paint each stollen liberally with butter (about half a stick) and dust amply with powdered sugar (about a cup).

Check this out.

So then, to continue the Seinfeld-esque theme we’ve established: what's the deal with stollen? Well it's German, that much you probably know already. It hails from Dresden, the capital city of the German state of Saxony, which is located far in the east of the country on the border with Poland. Like I care, Joe, are you close to making a point? I have a meeting in six minutes!!!

Actually no. However I am wondering this morning why, since Germany (and northern Europe in general) is chock-a-block with rich, eggy, fruit-filled breads, the only one that ever gets any real attention is stollen. It's darn good eating, but well…what’s the deal with that?

It's not as if Saxony was ever a major player in German history. Back before the German Empire was formed in 1871 it was just one more German kingdom, before that just another territory of the Holy Roman Empire, before that just some run-of-the-mill duchy of the Carolingian empire, yadda yadda yadda.

If Saxony is known for anything in European history, it's for changing sides smack in the middle of wars. Back in the day, I'm told, Saxony's coat of arms featured a mounted knight with a knife sticking out from between his shoulder blades. Saxony. Watch Your Back!. (That last bit was written in Latin, obviously).

The pity of all that cold calculation and backstabbing was that it never seemed to much work much in its favor. Saxony typically found itself on the losing side of conflicts, forced to cede more territory and towns. Even so, it did experience something of a cultural high water mark in the eighteenth century. Two of Saxony’s kings (Augustus the Second and Augustus the Third) became great patrons of the arts, building gorgeous castles and cities, especially Dresden. Saxony’s universities at Leipzig and Wittenberg flowered, becoming centers of both music and literature.

Of course the golden age didn't last very long. Saxony shortly joined in the French Revolutionary Wars, first with the Prussians against Napoleon, then later — in true Saxon style — with Napoleon against the Prussians (who won). Fifty years after that they fought on the losing side of the Austro-Prussian war. As part of the German Empire they were on the losing side in World War I and as part of the Weimar Republic, on the losing side of World War II, during which the city of Dresden was firebombed to ashes. Perhaps the ultimate humiliation then came in 1952, when Saxony was dissolved by East Germany, at which point their long and mostly depressing history finally came to an end. Or so it seemed.

When Germany was reunified in 1990, Saxony became a state again, and since then it has undergone a kind of rebirth. Although parts of it are heavily polluted from rampant Soviet-era coal and uranium mining, it's one of the most economically vibrant of the former GDR states. Here's hoping that the coming thousand or so years are kinder to Saxony than the last thousand.

What the hell does all this have to do with stollen, Joe??? I wonder the same thing, friends, believe me. What I'm trying to figure out how a sweet bread from a region like Saxony came to be world famous...on your time. Was it Saxony's brief moment in the sun as a cultural powerhouse that spread stollen's fame far and wide? Or is stollen just that good? I'll let you know if I ever figure it out.

On with your day...

Reader Thomas weighs in from the Continent:

Interesting to read about fruitcakes... there is no such thing over here in Austria (and to my knowledge, in Germany). Well, there are some fruitbreads and yes, there is stollen... but all with no booze. I take it that your fruitcake is an offspring of the "drunken" english christmas-pudding (but that one is steamed, not baked)?

Anywho... I was wondering: If you're not into booze or if you simply can't have any alcohol, you also can't have any fruitcake?

I'll take the first part first. It's my belief (though I don't know for certain) that fruitcakes are indeed New World descendants/iterations of English sweet puddings. Those can be quite boozy as well, also and of course for (ehem) medicinal purposes. But no, booze is not essential for a dark, English-style fruitcake. They're perfectly good without it, though if they're made that way, there's really no need to cellar them. They can, and probably should, be eaten fresh, since they'll stale to some degree if made a month early. I can however imagine a cellared version of a dark fruitcake in which you'd use simple syrup instead of alcohol to keep the cake moist. That would very likely yield a excellent fruitcake with a nice, mature flavor.

Pretty much any time you set out to buy dried or candied fruit you can count on seeing signs that say things like "Naturally Unsulphured!". Which has to be good, right? But then what is "sulphuring" anyway? Well it all has to do with plant enzymes. Enzymes are and always have been a major headache for fruit lovers, since they cause all picked fruit to eventually brown and soften. Shutting them down is critical if a fruit is to last. But then what are these enzymes doing in fruit in the first place? The answer is because they're a key part of a plant's natural pest control system.

Imagine for a moment an ant biting into a nice juicy pear on a tree. Once the cell walls that make up that pear rupture, several very interesting things happen. First, ethylene gas, an anesthetic that doubles as a plant hormone, is released to make the ant dopey and slow (the gas also triggers accelerated ripening). The rupture further causes enzymes in the cells to mix and bond with plant phenols like chemicals in a glow stick, forming browning pigments and causing further softening. The whole chemical cascade is designed to cause the fruit to shrivel and fall off the tree in a hurry (thus keeping the ant infestation from spreading).

But brown, soft fruit isn't very appetizing (to humans at least), which is why fruit preservers spend a lot of time and energy trying to defeat the whole process. As mentioned, heat is a great way to destroy enzymes, but boiling is of limited utility where fruit is concerned, since heat has a way of cooking fruit and turning it to mush. This is especially true of fruit that's been cut into small pieces. But what if there was some way of stopping enzymatic action without exposing fruit to heat? Enter sulfur dioxide, a gas which prevents browning by conveniently bonding to phenols in the fruit's flesh before the enzymes get a chance to do it. This is what "sulphuring" is.

Is it artificial? If by that you mean it takes place via a man-made chemical that doesn't commonly exist in nature, then no. Sulfur dioxide is created any time something containing sulfur is burned. Volcanoes produce a lot of it, so do forest fires. But then so do cars, since gasoline contains a fair amount of sulfur. And then I suppose when you really get down to it, sulfur dioxide is one of the main components of acid rain, since it bonds to water vapor in the atmosphere to create sulfuric acid.

Is sulfur dioxide toxic? Definitely not in the miniscule amounts that are used in processing fruit. Would we be better off without it? Eh, probably yes, since depending on how carefully it's applied, it can give dried and candied fruits a faintly chemical flavor.

Create that transparent neon color you mean? The color comes of course from food coloring which is added as the fruit pieces are tumbled in syrup (I mean, how else could the pineapple possibly be green?). The transparency is a factor of the fruit flesh being suffused with clear sugar syrup, which allows more light rays to pass through. A pretty darn neat effect, if you ask me.

If Jerry Seinfeld were doing a stand-up routine on fruitcake (and I'm certain he has at some point), it would surely begin: so what is that funky colored fruit all about?

Earlier I wrote that fruitcake makers of old used dried fruit, and indeed they did. The trouble with dried fruit, though, is that once you re-hydrate it, it can once again become fair game for microbial n'er-do-wells. In the absence of liberal dosings of alcohol, that can severely limit the keeping ability of the cake. This is part of the reason bakers eventually migrated over to candied fruits, which are not only much sweeter and better looking, they keep far, far longer.

Humans have been preserving fruit in sugary substances for millennia. The ancients preserved whole fruits in honey, since not only is honey an extremely dense sugar, it also contains acid, which helps shut down the browning and ripening enzymes in the fruit's flesh. But while preserving in honey can be a very effective technique, honey's relative scarcity made it impractical for large-scale preserving. Likewise with sapa, a kind of intensely boiled-down grape juice that the Romans used for the same purpose.

Thus large-scale fruit candying had to wait for the arrival of crystallized cane sugar, which came on the European scene around 1500 (the earliest written fruit-candying recipes date to that time). The process is as straightforward as it is time-consuming. Ripe fruit is first boiled or simmered to soften it up a bit (the heat also helps destroy those pesky ripening enzymes I just spoke about), then immersed in a thin sugar syrup for a day, after which the fruit is drained and immersed in a slightly stronger sugar syrup for a day, after which it is drained and immersed in a still stronger syrup and so on. Why is it done this way? Because soaking fruit in an intense sugar solution right off the bat causes it to pucker up like a prune. The longer and slower the process, the more tender and delicate the end product. Some artisanal candied fruit makers (mostly European) still employ this painstaking method. It can take months, but the finished fruits look like they were just picked off the tree.

The vast majority of candied fruit today is of course produced by industrial means. Sliced or cut pieces of prepared fruit are tumbled in vats as they're sprayed with a sugar and/or corn syrup solution. The process still takes days, but it's considerably quicker than the old-school method. Afterward they're left to dry, then either given a final coating of a thick syrup (for a finish known as glacé), or given another tumble in sugar, in which case they go by the name of crystallized fruit.

My mother-in-law has gotten years of mileage out of that pun. As I understand it, German-style fruitcake — stollen — was always a big thing in my wife's family, and I find that interesting since they're a very Irish lot. But then Stollen was also a big thing in my own mother's family, especially where my grandmother was concerned. She was Irish as Paddy's proverbial pig, yet it simply wasn't Christmas unless she had a slice of stollen from Meyer's deli up on Chicago's northwest side (even today the counter help are mostly German speakers).

I've always wondered at that, i.e. why stollen is so popular among the Irish (or at least the ones I know) in Chicago. Germans and Irish were the largest immigrant groups in Chicago until the Italians, and then later the Poles, arrived. And while they technically did get along, there was always a certain tension between them, tension which was at least partly due to the fact that Protestant Germans cheerfully drank beer in the parks on Sunday afternoons, while envious Irish Catholics grudgingly had to go without.

Immigrant Irish were also generally poorer as a group than their German counterparts, so there was probably more than a little resentment there too. And of course that disparity revealed itself in the way they celebrated Christmas. From my own personal observations, Christmas in Irish households was always a more austere event than in German ones. On Christmas Eve particularly, most Irish families I knew ate plain (sometimes even cold) soup while the Germans busted out the gingerbread and mulled wine and toasted one another by the fire, singing songs. Of course it wasn't all economic. Meager Christmas Eve celebrations have deep religious symbolism for Irish Catholics. But I've come to wonder if just maybe sneaking a piece of stollen was the Irish way of horning on a bit of the German fun. Quietly though, so the Pastor of the local parish wouldn't notice.

Reader Sandra weighs in on the aging of sweets:

Today you say 'Or maybe it's simply that "ripe" fruitcakes just taste better than young ones.' I don't know about fruitcakes, but brandy balls/rum balls (etc.) most *definitely* improve with age. I remember making some with my roommate a good many years ago (no, I don't still have them :-)), and tasting the dough before wrapping them and setting them aside. The raw, almost burning flavor was rather unpleasant. Several weeks later, however, they were delicious.

The natural question to ask at this point is: can a fruitcakes really be kept at room (or cellar) temperature for weeks, even months without spoiling? Yes, my friends, they can. Well-made fruitcakes have been known to keep for years, even decades if you can believe it. And you probably can.

One of the big reasons is that they're so darn sugary, and as has been often discussed in this space, sugar in high enough doses is as lethal to microbes as salt. This is why some of the really old fruitcake recipes call for a thick sugar glaze to be poured over the top. It forms a nigh-impenetrable bug barrier, provided it's kept dry (the same goes for dustings of powdered sugar...they do more than make a cake look pretty, believe me). Inside, the crumb itself is usually quite sugary, and that serves to keep microbes down. But what else might we use to keep any critters that still might be hanging on from growing out of control?

Anyone? Anyone? Yes, you in the back with the high ball. Right! Booze! For alcohol is the ne plus ultra, the sine qua non, if you will, of bug-killers. A liberal soaking, therefore, combined with periodic turning to keep it well distributed, will keep a fruitcake "pickled" almost indefinitely. Thus the old tippler's retort to his wife's complaint about too much liquor in the cake: What, you want me to die of botulism?

In order to take full advantage of the preservative power of liquor, it's important that the good stuff (or more of the good stuff) be added after the cake is baked. Otherwise most of the alcohol will simply evaporate out in the oven. Spritzed-on spirits will soak in and remain if applied regularly. However there's also the more direct approach. My old man, as previously mentioned, uses a horse needle. However a few little holes made with a skewer or toothpick accomplishes pretty much the same thing. Just dribble a few teaspoons on every few hours, for as long as you think necessary. Then turn the loaves every few days to keep the alcohol distributed.

All this begs the question why preserving a fruitcake is such a big deal to begin with. In all honesty, I can't say I know. Back in the day of course (and we're talking pre-industrialization) long-keeping foods were highly prized. A sweet and boozy fruitcake would have been an excellent source of nutrition for a traveler say, or just to have on-hand during a lean winter. Or maybe it's simply that "ripe" fruitcakes just taste better than young ones. Bread bakers, vintners and cheese makers have long known that controlled microbial activity is a fabulous flavor-producer.

There are true aficionados out there who think of fruitcakes like fine wines, "laying them down" for anything up to a decade, fortifying them with a little extra liquor every so often to make up for anything that might have evaporated. That's going too far in my opinion. But then I've never tried one. I may be missing out.

Another day where I meant to post more, but didn't. I'm in a new work situation, you see, and still trying to achieve a state that one might call "normalcy". That of course is no excuse — fruitcake makers await! So let's get down to it.

Start by whisking together your dry ingredients.

Then cream (as best you can) your butter and sugar. I do it with a wooden implement since it helps me better get into that Old World spirit.

Add your eggs one or two at a time and beat until you have a soupy mess that looks like this:

Add it to the dry ingredients...

...and stir until you have a thick batter. Don't worry that it'll be too thick for a fruitcake, because once you add in your fruit and nut mixture, it'll loosen back up again.

See?

Now then. Taking your prepared pan, put in half the batter (a quarter if you're doing the full recipe).

Mine came out to 2 3/4 pounds per loaf (that's serious cake, man).

Bake as instructed until the fruitcakes look like well-fired fruit and nut bricks. Like so:

After they're cooled down, it's time for the fun part. Grasping the nearest spritz bottle full of rum — and who doesn't have one of those lying around? — spritz the loaf liberally on all sides.

Swaddle in a double layer of cheese cloth to keep the loaf from sticking to the outer layer of foil...

...then apply the outer layer of foil.

Ta-da! A fruitcake ready for cellaring. Of course you can also put it in the fridge if you want, but a basement is traditional and still best. If you fear rodentia or other types of cake-eating vermin, you can put the cakes in a plastic tupperware container. That'll have'em stymied. Check the cakes every other day or so to check for drying (you don't want that) and spritz and rotate as you see fit. See you on Christmas Eve, boys!

That was fast. Not one, but TWO complaints that I referenced veal on a blog ostensibly devoted to pastry. I guess I'm not surprised (though I am shocked at the speed of the responses), since I've noticed that several vegetarian blogs link to me (big dessert hounds, those vegetarians). Here's an excerpt of one that captures the gist of both:

I'm saddened and disappointed that you would promote the consumption of veal, which has nothing whatsoever to do with pastry, and is the cruelest practice of an immoral industry. I[n] future I suggest you stick to the stated purpose of your blog. As for me, you have lost a longtime reader.

Well, that's a pity. And while the last thing I want to do today (or any other day) is get into a debate about the ethics of meat eating or veal production, I have to politely disagree that pastry and veal have nothing to do with one another. In fact the two are intimately related. Not many people realize this (except maybe vegans) but there would be no pastry in a world without veal.

Why? Because veal calves are the male offspring of dairy cows. They're the inevitable result of the practice of dairying, since cows don't produce milk unless they have at least one calf first. Female dairy calves grow up to be more dairy cows, but male calves don't. And because they're members of a breed raised for milk and not meat, they aren't good for anything (cruel as it may sound to say). So they're slaughtered early as veal.

That's what veal is, and there's really no getting around it unless we're going to genetically engineer dairy herds so they only produce female offspring (a whole different can of worms). I personally don't like the way veal calves are treated, and think we can do a lot better on that front. But in for a penny, in for a pound as they say. The same food production system that gives us butter for Danishes gives us veal. It's pretty much always been that way, and probably always will.

Now on to cheerier topics.

THIS EXCELLENT UPDATE, from reader Amanda:

Even if we only produced female calves, there would be veal. You see, some calves are vealed because they break a leg. Female calves are often vealed because a dairy usually runs at about 100% capacity. You can't double your herd every year, you don't slaugter your adults every year to make room for the new girls. There isn't a heck of a big market for dairy calves. The highest and best use for the animals is veal.

MORE GOOD COMMENTARY frmo Chef Tim, a regular contributor:

Amanda has it right. Your other (former) reader is sadly blinded by his/her values. And you too have it right, our very consumption of dairy products condemns calves. Veal itself is not evil. The vast majority of veal/meat is treated ethically in its albeit short lifetime (as much as one can when you know it will be killed for your survival). Yes, we get the occasional idiot that likes to kick around a few turkeys for fun. Animal husbandry for consumption is not a happy thing for any animal overall, especially in concentrated animal feeding operations where the biggest dilemma is what to do with all the feces that run off into water sources. Instead of treating it like a dairy "by product" I believe we should consume even more veal. It is a much more efficient source of meat than beef. Pound for pound, it takes fewer resources to get veal to market that a 1000 lb steer.

Ryan, astute observer of all things fruitcake, wrote in over the weekend to comment:

Joe...I noticed you're not using those colored candied fruits in your fruitcake recipe. According to your story, that's not in the tradition of your father's fruitcake recipe, now is it?

True enough. What can I say, I was going for a more Old-World sort of affair (while still keeping firmly to the Pastry family traditions). Have no fear, the wife informed me over the weekend that I'll also be making stollen this week, since she can't do without it at Christmas time. So, I'll put some in that. Fair enough?

I didn't get many posts up, or at least not the ones I was planning. Thursday evening my butcher called to tell me he'd been busy, and had twenty pounds of veal bones waiting for me if I wanted them. It was a windfall I couldn't ignore, and I spent the weekend making stocks and demi glace. Needless to say the house smelled great, save for an hour or so Friday morning, when I accidentally let my first pot of stock come to a full boil while I showered. The kitchen smelled like feet the rest of the morning. I don't know why that happens when you let a meat stock boil like that, I think I'll look into it. Anyway, back on track this morning.

Was fruitcake responsible for the discovery of the New World? Mmm...possible. The influx of exotica from Araby in the 1200's certainly did whet the continental appetite for spices. So much so that when the spice supply was squeezed with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, European heads of state were forced to take radical action.

You remember what I said about spices coming into Europe mostly by way of the seafaring city states of northern Italy. The key word there is mostly, for there was one other route through which spices from the East came in: via the Byzantine capital of Constantinpole. Looking at this handy map you can see how it worked. Constantinople (now Istanbul, like the song) sits on a skinny little land bridge separating the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. If you can't get across it you have to walk all the way around the Black Sea, and God only knows what kinds of long-haired freaks you'll run into so far away from civilization. So, from the East, if you want to get goods into Europe, you either took them by sea to one of the Italian trading cities, or walked them in via Constantinpole.

So imagine the hysteria that greeted the takeover of Constantinpole by the successors of the Mulsim caliphs, the Ottoman Turks, in 1453. How did this happen? Well, since before 1200 the Byzantine Empire had been shrinking. Once huge, by 1453 it had been reduced to just a handful of isolated territories. The fall of Constantinpole marked its official end, not to mention the end of the only land route to the Far East. A so-called "Muslim Curtain" (and they really did call it that) subsequently descended, separating West from East. Since Europe and the Ottomans world weren't exactly on speaking terms then, the events of 1453 gave the Italian city-states a de-facto monopoly on the spice trade (and you can pretty much imagine what sharks those guys were). For Europeans, there was only thing to do: find another way around.

"For Christ and Spices!" was the rallying cry of the explorers as they set off in search of a new route to the Indies. And well, you pretty much know what happened after that. Just how big a factor was fruitcake in all that? We'll probably never know.

Now there are the makings of one fine fruitcake (actually two, I cut the recipe in half). You may notice there are cranberries in there. The reason for that is I couldn't find any figs at Kroger yesterday afternoon. I could have gone somewhere else, but I'd already spent enough time in the supermarket. The first Wednesday of each month is old folks day, you see, and the place is packed with cranky octogenarians bumping their carts into one another. Slowly. It took me almost half an hour to navigate around them all to pick up what I needed for this shot. Fortunately none of them could figure out the self check-out computers, so I was out of there in a flash after that. Still, I'd had enough. And anyway, you think Medieval fruitcake makers were choosy? They took what they could get, bub, and so did I. Anyway cranberries add a nice color.

So then, once you've got your fruits and nuts measured, your zest zested and your spices in, pour in the wet ingredients...

...and stir to combine.

Easy. Wrap and let macerate overnight. What's the difference between macerating and marinating? The former involves sweet ingredients and the latter, savory. That's all I know.

This week's New York Times features a recipe, not for a fruitcake, but a gooey chocolate bundt cake that apparently works with just about any type of whiskey added. Looks like one hell of a way to fall off the wagon (whichever one you happen to be on).

...something like this comes along and blows your tiny mind. It looks like real flowers set into a clear mold of Jell-O. In fact the flowers aren't real, but pigments somehow inserted into the mold before it sets, creating this unbelievable effect. And I thought color-layered Jell-O shots were impressive. This Mexican pastry chef is operating in a whole different universe.

No, not my ample 1-year-old daughter, I mean of course fruitcake.

It's the 12th century and newfangled dried fruit, plus spices of all kinds, are pouring into Europe by the (ox)cartload. Suddenly the continent can't get enough of fruitcake — and everyone's getting into the act. The English are making their cakes and puddings, the Scots their Black Buns (I said no snickering from the back of the room!), the Germans their stollen, and the Italians their pannettone, all of which were variations on the same basic idea, not to mention minor miracles considering what it would have taken to assemble all the ingredients in one place at that time. Eggs had to be collected, spices procured and ground, dried fruits washed, pitted and soaked, sugar scraped from cakes (then pounded and sieved), butter washed and soaked in aromatics to take off the funk. No wonder that when the Medievals decided to go to the trouble of making a fruitcake for a wedding or high holiday, they didn't mess around. Cakes that tipped the scales at 25 pounds weren't unusual.

One myth that's common regarding heavily spiced baked goods like fruitcake is that the Medievals made them to show status, in the same way your neighbor might cruise by in his custom Mustang GT at the moment you're washing your Ford Focus (jerk). Fashionable historical revisionism is what that is. While it may be true that only the wealthy could afford to buy exotic imported ingredients in those days, employing them was a way of marking special events, like breaking out the last of the good beer when your best friend announces he's getting married. The more special the occasion, the more liberally the good stuff was dispensed. Hence some of the wacky original fruitcake recipes, which seem to call for more spice and candied fruit than flour. Must have been one heck of a taste sensation (and one hell of a party).

More than a few food scribes will tell you that fruitcakes date to the Greeks and Romans (doesn't everything in a newspaper food column?). But that's only true if what you mean by a fruitcake is a cake with fruit in it. It's sort of like trying to put a fixed date on, oh, let's say pizza. If, for you, pizza is any kind of round flat bread with savory somethings on top, you can probably date it back to when bread was invented, around 10,000 BC. If, for you, pizza is a thing that has cheese on it, then to the Etruscans or the Greeks. If pizza is only pizza if the cheese is buffalo milk mozzarella, then the date moves up to eleventh century AD. Tomatoes? Then the Age of Exploration, and so on. Fruitcake is like that. Even though the Greeks and Romans technically combined fruit and cake (really bread) well before the Year 1, it took until the High Middle Ages for the fruitcakes we moderns know to appear on the scene.

For that was the time (around 1200 or so) that dried fruits first made their way to Europe from the Middle East via Italian traders. These intrepid folks (hailing from city-states like Venice, Florence and Genoa) made a fortune trading goods with the Islamic Caliphate while the rest of Europe was busy trading flaming spears. Then, Muslims ruled over pretty much everything from the Middle East over to India, down around to North Africa, and up into modern day Spain. The Byzantines (Greek-speaking Christians whose empire then covered portions of modern-day Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece and Turkey) were all that stood between the gigantic and immensely strong Muslim world and weak little underpopulated Europe. Interesting times for Christendom indeed.

But I digress. One thing that was true about the Arab world of the day was that its residents were much further advanced in nearly all the sciences — including the food sciences and agriculture — than their European counterparts. They ate well and traded widely, which made them the go-to guys for commodities like sugar and spices from cloves to nutmeg to ginger to cinnamon, all of which came overland to the Islamic world from Asia. All became highly prized (not to mention very expensive) foodstuffs among Europeans, who as I mentioned tended to use them liberally in celebration foods like fruitcake. Today a Christmas fruitcake wouldn't be a Christmas fruitcake, no matter what its stripe, if it didn't have at least a little cinnamon or ginger in it. Which I suppose makes Christmas fruitcakes at least a little bit Islamic, even though our distant ancestors would scarcely have wanted to admit it.

You mean what sort of spirit should you use in a fruitcake? It all depends on the cake really, since they can obviously vary in style quite a bit. But as long as the liquor is hard, you can't go too wrong. I'd say for a lighter cake, one that's more yellow and buttery, I'd go for a brandy of some description, maybe even a fruit brandy if you're going to get all fancy with your fruits (and really, why not get all fancy with your fruits?). For a darker cake, chockablock with spices and molasses, whiskey is the way to go. For some reason I tend to like Scotch when there are a lot of nuts involved, and bourbon when the cake is fruit-heavy (probably because that's what my parents put in their very fruity fruitcake). I've never had rye in a fruitcake, but I can imagine it, since rye works so well with sweet vermouth. Whatever you do, no gin. I'd also avoid vodka since it doesn't add much aside from a pure alcoholic zing. Don't spend a lot of money. Fruitcakes have an awful lot of flavors going in them as it is, and whatever spirit you add needs to be able to play well with others.

I ran into this once again this year: turkey dinner leftover pizza, made by a pizzeria by the name of Pluto's in the town of French Lick, Indiana (no off-color jokes please, I haven't had my morning coffee yet). As you can see, this monster features a "crust" of turkey dressing, on top of which is a layer of sliced mozzarella cheese, then shredded turkey meat and a "sauce" of gravy on top. You'd have to have staged one heck of a dinner to have leftovers in this quantity, but if you've got it, what they hey? I have to admit that it kinda works.

Outta here until next Wednesday. Happy Thanksgivings to all!

Reader Barbara supplies a more contemporary recipe, which, judging from the ingredient proportions, is more like a pound cake with lots of good stuff added in. It's not the dark, chewy stuff I'll be making next week, but never let it be said I was dogmatic about fruitcake! She writes:

I usually don't like fruitcake, but this is one that I LOVE!!!!

1 pound of butter
2 c sugar
6 eggs
4 c self-rising flour
1 t of each: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice
1 pound of candied cherries,rough chopped
1 pound of candied pineapple,rough chopped
1 big box of raisins
6 c roughly chopped pecans
5 oz. orange marmalade

Preheat oven to 350*
Cream butter and sugar, then add the eggs. In another BIG bowl add the flour, spices, fruit and nuts. Stir to coat. Add this mixture to the creamed mixture, mix well. Place batter in a pan. Bake for 15 minutes, take out and stir. Bake 15 minutes, take out and stir. Bake 15 minutes, take out and stir. Bake 15 minutes more, stir and pack down in a greased tube pan. I used a potato masher to pack it in. Let set on the counter overnight. This is really good!!!! My Kitchen Aid 4.5qt wouldn't hold all of the batter. I put the batter in a 13 by 18.5 inch pan, the biggest pan I had.I added the rest of the flour,fruit,nuts and orange marmalade by hand. I baked as directed. The cake weighted 8 lbs. 9 oz.

Thanks Barbara!

You know you've got hold of a good, solid traditional fruitcake recipe when the ingredients list is as long as your arm. These recipes date back hundreds of years in America, but their pedigree goes back to at least the High Middle Ages, when European bakers emptied their pantries of every last good thing they could possibly think of, and put them all into one giant, dense, dark cake: candies, fruits, sweeteners and spices of all kinds. That, my friends, is when you knew it was a party. Is this my old man's famous fruitcake recipe? Of course not, I don't even know it. This, however, is a very close match:

Day one:

2 cups golden raisins
2 cups currants
2 cups dried apricot halves
2 cups dried figs, halved
2 cups pitted dates
4 cups chopped walnuts
2 cups chopped pecans
Zest of 3 oranges
Zest of 3 lemons
1/2 cup candied ginger, chopped
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon mace
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 cup molasses
2 cups brandy (or rum)
1/2 cup orange juice

Combine all the dried fruits, nuts, zest ginger and spices in a large bowl (my father uses a roasting pan). Toss well to mix. Add molasses, brandy (or rum) and OJ and mix well. Cover the mixture and let it macerate at room temperature overnight.

Day two:

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 lb butter, softened
3 cups dark brown sugar
8 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 275. Spray the inside of four 9"x5"x3" loaf pans with nonstick spray and line with wax paper or parchment. Spray again with cooking spray

Whisk dry ingredients together in a bowl. Separately, cream the butter with the brown sugar until light in color. Add eggs one or two at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the vanilla.

Add the dry ingredients to the butter and egg mixture and beat until the batter is smooth. Pour the batter over the fruit and mix well. Divide the mixture among the pans and bake for 2 hours. They're done when a toothpick or sharp knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Allow to cool completely on a rack, dribble more brandy (or rum) on top (or spritz with a spray bottle) then wrap each individual loaf, first in cheese cloth, then in foil. Every 2-3 days inspect the loaves. Check for dryness and spritz with booze as needed (hey, it's medicinal). Do this for a minimum of two weeks, over which time the cake's flavor with develop enormously.

...is how most of us imagine the first Thanksgiving, though in fact that's mostly just a romantic image. The national holiday was actually conceived during the American Revolution. A terrific article on that subject in today's Wall Street Journal. Go here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122765806822958269.html.

As if you didn't have enough to do with all your Thanksgiving preparations, this is the time of year to start thinking about your Christmas fruitcake. I know, I know, but good fruitcakes are well-aged beasts. They require at least 3-4 weeks to ripen. So add some candied fruit to your last-minute Thanksgiving shopping list and I'll be back next week to help you get it all in gear. Next week? Yep, I'm leaving town for the holiday, then heading off on a short business trip. It'll be next Tuesday before I'm back. In the meantime, I'll put up the fruitcake post that's become something of an annual tradition around here, kinda like when the Chicago Tribune used to publish the John McCutcheon poem, Injun Summer each fall. Curse the forces of political correctness, who've put and end to all that. One day old stoner health food store owners will probably organize and sue to stop me from putting this up every year. Until then, I'll keep right on doing it.

A happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

- Joe

You could never interest my father in much that happened in the kitchen. Except when it got to be fruitcake making season, at which point his attention suddenly became focused on baked goods like a Labrador stalking a pheasant. Even now I'm not sure where my parents got their special secret recipe, though Mom and Dad's fruitcake was a much desired item in the neighborhood, even by the Swedish baking queen who lived two doors down. Which was, you know, really saying something.

The process always started the same way, with a trip to the local co-op (still a novelty in the Chicago suburbs in the 70's) to acquire candied fruit in bulk. I can still remember the sense of confusion I felt there, how I could scarcely identify any of the products on the flimsy shelves, and how the people who shopped there smelled funny in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. Due to all the traffic that time of year, every inch of linoleum within fifteen feet of the bulk section was covered with syrup, to the point that when you were standing directly in front of the candied fruit bins you could barely pry your feet off the floor. Even so, Dad took his time, carefully examining each neon fruit as a vintner would grapes for a cuvée.

When everything had been selected, bagged and paid for, we headed back home to start the production line. My twin sister and I would be seated at our little wooden turtle-shaped table, given plastic scissors, and directed to start cutting the maraschino cherries in two while my parents went at the tougher citrus rinds with kitchen shears. The cutting alone took hours the way I remember it, and culminated in the making of the batter: a thick, brown Christmas-smelling goo that dad mixed in a tub until he was sticky up to the elbows. The panning and baking I don't remember quite as well, probably because my sister and I were in the TV room watching Scooby Doo by then.

After the baking was of course the cooling, and then the critical part: the injecting of the booze. This was where Dad got truly clinical about his cake. There was a time I'd have sworn he wore full surgical garb for the procedure, scrubbed himself sterile, and demanded clamps, sponges and retractors from my mother at regular intervals. More light! MORE LIGHT! Though looking back now I can see it was all in his attitude. He had a special syringe that he used specially for the occasion. A horse needle I think, and every year it seemed Dad had to march down to the drug store and cajole a new plunger out of the pharmacist. The fellow was always reticent to sell him one, even though no one in town could have told you what a junkie was then, and the needle was of a gage you could sip a milk shake through.

Needle in hand, dad injected the fruitcakes with bourbon the way a mad scientist might insert frog DNA into a dinosaur egg. Half an hour later he would emerge from the kitchen and announce that the procedure had been a success, that the patients were resting comfortably, and we could all go home and relax. Whew! Since it was usually bed time by then I don't remember much of the wrapping, only that going up the stairs I could see dad swaddling the loaves in cheesecloth as if each one were its own baby Jesus.

From that point forward the loaves were stowed under the cellar stairs to ripen, which on good years went from early November all the way to Christmas, with Dad turning them at least once a day. Looking back I'm convinced that giving those precious loaves away was harder on him than giving my sister away at the altar. But such is the passion of a dedicated baker, even if it only happened once a year.

There's been so much wild speculation, it's nice to have a little real-word perspective. This article from the News & Observer, at last, provides it. Read it and you'll see why cooking at the White House ain't no celebrity gig.

A lasagna-pizza? Though I hail from a town known for mile-high pizza, this, I think, is going too far. Still, ya gotta admire his dedication.

In order to get a sense for where to anticipate problems in pumpkin square and/or pie bakery, we must first know what a pumpkin square and/or pie actually is. Anyone? Anyone? That's right: a custard. A very thick custard to be sure, but one that's susceptible to all the same problems as, say a crème brûlée. Chief among these problems: overcooking, which leads to cracking and weeping. Too much heat causes the egg proteins in the pie — which are responsible for thickening it — to clench up into little balls, squeezing out the water in the filling. The result is a clumpy, grainy filling and sodden crust.

However the nice thing about a thick custard like pumpkin pie filling is that there is lots of stuff in it that helps keep it from curdling. Unlike a more delicate custard, in which the egg proteins are quite near to each other and wont to bunch up, pumpkin pie filling is chockablock with pumpkin pieces, fat and sugar. These bits of detritus dilute the proteins, preventing them from getting too tight a grip on one another (or the matrix as a whole). Thus an overcooked pumpkin pie is usually just a disaster as opposed to a catastrophe, though neither tastes very good with whipped cream.

Avoid these troubles by taking great care with it. Use a straight-sided vessel if possible, since the sloped sides of a pie plate invariably cause the outer edges to overcook and crack (this is one area in which a square has a big advantage over a pie, Mr. Hans). The newer "deep" pie plates are good for this, but of course so are tart pans and even rings, if you happen to have one around. Bake low and slow, checking frequently to see how jiggly the center of the pie still is, and remove it at once after the center stops sloshing.

Reader and long-lost commentator Hans checks in with this comment on pumpkin-caramel bars:

Ok, so what's so cool about bars? Getting pie crust into a rectangular dish is like a round peg in a square hole. What's so wrong with caramel pumpkin pie? (They were delicious by the way, but I'm never doing it in bars again. I'll stick with nice round pies.)

Break out of the round pie mindset, brother, and embrace the new! Actually, I guess I'm just so enamored with the filling, the crust only gets in the way for me. The filling quantity I provided will make a nice, extra-deep pie if you wish to treat the filling the way "The Man" would prefer you do. Use the smaller of the two crust quantities.

I'm an organized fellow, but have great empathy for the organizationally-challenged among us. In fact I'm married to such a person, a college professor, a member of a demographic segment that often suffers from shocking disability in this area. Mrs. Pastry's IQ is in the top one percent of civilized society, however where organizational acuity is concerned, her abilities rank just below those of the great apes. That's why, when I was sent a press release from this organization, which specializes in helping those with party and/or hospitality needs to formulate and follow through on their plans, I was determined to do all I could to publicize this important cause. If you or one of your loved ones suffers from chronic organizational disability (C.O.D.), please take a moment to familiarize yourself with this important new service. Together we can put an end to C.O.D. in our lifetime. Thank you and God bless.

Oh Lord, I'll be sleeping on the couch tonight for sure.

Dropping the girls off at school this morning, I was treated to a great, short read on the wall of one of the classrooms. It was a poster (really one of those giant sheets of notepaper) entitled "Things we're thankful for on Thanksgiving". Most of what was written there was what you might expect. "Josh is thankful for his dog, Max". Or "Lisa is thankful for Mommy and Daddy". In fact just about everybody said they were thankful for their parents, including little Josephine (I might as well lap that up now...someday she'll be a pre-teen). One little fellow, however, deviated sharply from from the rest of the herd. His entry read: "Stevie is thankful for bows and arrows and guns and Indians".

THAT, my friends, is the kind of perfect and honest little boy poetry that almost brings a tear to my eye. May it never perish from this Earth.

I'll confess it, of all the delicious, complicated baked things there are in this wide world to eat, these simple pastries are my favorite. They are more "squares" of caramel-pumpkin pie than they are cookie-like "bars". In pastry shops, pie squares like these are made on sheet pans (jelly roll pans), but I thought a 10" x 13" casserole pan would be better in this instance. It works the same way and doesn't produce an unwieldy amount. Start by taking your dough disk out of the fridge and laying it down on a lightly floured board.

It's a bit more challenging to roll pie dough out into a rectangle shape versus a circle, but don't worry, you can handle it. Just square the dough up a bit as you roll it out. Use your palm...

And your pinky to gently push it to shape.

Too many recipes, in the interests of preventing us from "working" pie dough, make bakers afraid to touch, push and squeeze it in this way. But where is it written you can't manhandle your dough a little? OK, lots of places. But let's be real here, as long as you're not working your pie dough like a lump of silly putty over the Sunday comics, you'll be alright. Keep rolling...

When it's about the right size, lay it into the baking pan...

...then gently press it into the contours.

Trim it with a sharp knife (if you wish), leaving an inch-plus lip (this will compensate for any shrinkage).

Lay down your foil...

...and add your weights. Some people like ceramic weights, others like dry beans. Me, I'm a change jar man. Don't worry, the money never touches the crust (and it gets sterilized in the bargain!). Bake for 25 minutes in a 375 oven, then remove the weights and foil and brown for 10.

As the crust is baking, make your filling. Why not do it before? Because you want your filling warm, and you want to be able to pour it into the crust while the crust is hot. The first measure is to help prevent cracking, the second to prevent a soggy crust. Trust me, this really works. Start by swirling your cup of sugar and quarter cup of water over high heat until it turns to bubbling syrup.

It'll turn light amber, then dark amber. A few seconds later a tell-tale brown-black spot will appear, letting you know the caramel is at optimum burnt-sugar flavor (but not bitter).

Quickly kill the heat and start adding your cream in a slow stream, whisking all the while. If you go too fast the sugar will cool too quickly and harden into candy. If that happens it's no big deal, simply return the pan to low heat and whisk it until the hard candy melts.

Whisk in the last of your ingredients, reserving the eggs. Keep the mixture warm — not boiling — as you wait for the crust to finish.

When the crust comes out of the oven, thoroughly whisk in your eggs and pour the mixture into the shell. No, I couldn't take pictures of that, I was moving too quickly. If I was a human squid and had another set of hands (or two), believe me, I would have.

Drop the heat to 350, return the pan to the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Turn the pan, then bake for another 10 minutes or until the center no longer sloshes but jiggles firmly.

Allow to cool for a minimum of an hour before cutting. Or chill, then cut (and eat).

I'm including two different dough recipes. The first is the skimpier quantity I use, since it makes bars that I think have the optimum crust-to-filling ratio. However since rolling that quantity of pie dough out thin enough to cover the interior of a 10" x 13" baking pan can be a bit challenging (especially for those who've never done it before), I'm including another version, which ups the quantity by about 25%. This rolls out to a thicker sheet, but it makes an easier job of the process. Here's the standard quantity:

8 ounces all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
¾ teaspoon salt
10 tablespoons butter, chilled
2 ½ tablespoons lard (or vegetable shortening), frozen
2-3 tablespoons ice water

And now the "upped" quantity:

10 ounces all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons, 1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
12 ½ tablespoons butter, chilled
3 tablespoons lard (or vegetable shortening), frozen
3-4 tablespoons ice water

Treat them both the same way, as you would a typical pie dough recipe. Whisk the dry ingredients together in a bowl until combined, then rub in (or "cut" in with a pastry blade) the fat. The texture should be like coarse meal with a few pea-sized pieces left in it. Add the ice water — the smaller quantity first — and if that's not enough to bring the dough together into an almost-crumbly ball, then add the rest. Try to avoid "working" the dough which will develop gluten and cause the dough to shrink up in the oven. Pat it into a disk.

Rest the dough in the refrigerator for at least an hour. Roll out to size, lay into a 10" x 13" baking pan and trim. Put the pan into the refrigerator to further rest the dough — a minimum of half an hour (this will further relax any gluten). Preheat your oven to 375. When the crust has rested, remove it from the fridge and line the pan with tin foil. Pour in a few cups or pie weights or dry beans, or scatter loose change over. Bake for 25 minutes (during which time you will prepare your filling). Remove weights and the foil and bake for 10 minutes or more until lightly browned.

Now for the filling:

1 cup sugar
¼ cup water

2 cups cream
2 tablespoons dark rum (optional)
1 15-oounce can pumpkin pureé
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground allspice
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 eggs

Moisten the first cup of caramel with the 1/4 cup water in a sauce pan and swirl over high heat until it turns light amber, then dark amber. For a more pronounced caramel flavor, wait for a brown-black spot to appear in the center of the pan before you remove it from the heat and start adding your cream slowly in a steady stream, whisking all the while (watch out, it'll foam and sputter a bit).

Once all the cream is in, whisk in the rum, pumpkin, sugar, spices and vanilla. Keep the filling warm on a very low flame until the crust is nearly ready. It should NOT be bubbling/boiling.

When the crust has about a minute to go, take the filling off the heat and whisk in the eggs. Remove the crust and immediately pour the warm filling into the hot crust to create a water-proof seal. Put the pan into the oven and drop the heat to 350. Bake for 20 minutes, then turn the pan, jiggling it to see how "sloshy" it still is in the middle. Bake another 10 minutes or so, just until the center no longer "sloshes", but jiggles firmly. Cool for a minimum of one hour before slicing and serving. I prefer mine chilled.

For all of you who may have already bought pie pumpkins for next week and are (perhaps) wondering what to do with them, reader Mary Sue has chimed in with an outstanding idea:

The only thing I’ve ever found fresh pumpkin good for is Calabaza en Tacha (pumpkin in syrup), a Mexican dish that’s typically made for Dias de los Muertos. I find it’s a show stopper when I bring it to Thanksgiving.

4 to 5 lbs Pumpkin
8 Cinnamon sticks and 4 cloves
½ c Orange Juice
4 cups water
1 lb raw sugar and 1 lb brown sugar, or 2 lb palm sugar

Cut the stem off the pumpkin, cut the pumpkin in half and scoop out the seeds and pulp. Cut each half into several strips and peel them. Cut the pumpkin flesh into medium 2½" to 3" squares or triangles. With a sharp knife make diamond designs over the pulp if you wish.

Put the sugar in a pan with the cinnamon, cloves, orange juice, and water. Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar has dissolved.

Place the first layer of pieces of pumpkin upside down so they absorb as much juice as possible. The second layer should be with the pulp upwards. Cover and simmer. When ready the top of the pumpkin pieces should look somewhat glazed, and the pulp soft and golden brown.

Let cool and serve with the syrup.

Wonderful! Thanks Mary Sue!

...to refresh your spices. Which is a more civilized way of saying: pitch out your old ones and buy new! I'm betting those ground cloves haven't seen the light of day since last December. If you've got whole nutmeg hanging around, that's OK, it'll last three years. But the ground stuff isn't reliable after three months. So put'em on this weeks' shopping list: ground cinnamon, ground ginger, ground allspice and ground cloves. Cardamom too (if you're Scandinavian). That'll keep your Thanksgiving pies and Christmas cookies tasting their best. I won't bust your chops about savory spices, but ya know, that ground poultry seasoning of yours has definitely seen better days.

It's an odd fact that a little bit of pre-cooking can rid a batch of canned pumpkin of any of its vaguely metallic or musty flavors. It's something I didn't actually believe until a couple of years ago, when I tried it for myself. Like rinsing and "steeping" canned whole tomatoes before puréeing them into a Neapolitan pizza sauce, this little added step has an almost transformative effect on canned pumpkin. Simply put the quantity of pumpkin you plan to use in a saucepan of appropriate size and place over medium-high heat. Stir until the pumpkin begins to sputter and steam and give off a sweet aroma. Let it cool, then use it as your recipe directs. Whether this step actually cooks off undesirable odors or simply releases the pumpkin's essential oils, I can't say. In my experience, however, it makes a difference.

In fact it's not the sum total of the weight that Oprah's lost following fad diets the last 25 years. It's the weight of the 2008 world record pumpkin that was grown this year in by Thad Starr of Pleasant Hill, Oregon. Though that's ample to say the least, it's over 150 pounds shy of the current all-time world record pumpkin that was grown in Massachusetts in 2007. The 1,689-pound goliath was taken to New York City for carving, and the seeds distributed to locals so they could grow their own. I made a mental note not to visit New York City this past summer, when I figured those suckers were going to start dropping out of their high-rise window boxes.

"Pumpkin" is an Indian word. You hear that a lot during the holidays, but no, it isn't. It's Greek. Did the ancient Greeks have pumpkins? No, but they had melons and gourds, which is what the original root word pepon meant. The later Old French version is pompon, which sounds a bit more like the word we know. How did an Old French word get applied to a new world food? Well might you ask. The thing is, while pumpkins were introduced to Europe from the New World, they were similar enough to European gourds that people adopted them readily and simply called them by a familiar name (the poor tomato wasn't so lucky). Anyway it was a whole lot easier to pronounce than askutasquash, which was the original Narragansett word for pumpkin, which basically means "a thing that you eat raw". So in both languages we seem to have a precision issue. Oh well, so long as the pies are good...

Every year I get questions from readers asking whether they should consider using fresh pumpkin in their baking. It is, I suppose, the gourmand's reflex to want to prepare everything fresh and from scratch. However I have yet to meet a professional baker or pastry chef who's ever recommended getting their pumpkin fresh out of the squash versus simply opening up a tin. Short of serving up a strip of fresh-baked pumpkin flesh on a plate with brown sugar and whipped cream (which sounds pretty OK to me, actually), I can't think of an instance where fresh would be an advantage. I have personally failed two side-by-side, blind taste tests, in which I much preferred the canned version. It's a texture thing, mostly. Canned pumpkin is both finer and more consistent. Flavorwise, canned is a more intense and pumpkin-y experience. In fact I've known at least two prominent pastry chefs to buy canned pumpkin a year ahead of time, and let it age in their storerooms. They claim the aging gives it a more developed flavor, and who am I to argue? Even though I can't help but feel a little cheap and dirty recommending a canned fruit over a fresh, local one (yes, pumpkin is technically a fruit), my advice to bakers out there is to make things easy on yourselves and just buy the Libby's.

I'm changing the name of this blog to The Star of Mumbai.

We're well into the week and I'm done with s'mores, so we need a quickie. I've been craving — and I mean seriously craving — caramel pumpkin bars. They are, no exaggeration, my favorite "pastry" ever. They work like pumpkin pie, only they're flat. Plus, they're easy. I'm gonna go for it.

For about a year now, I've been trying to locate some inexpensive furniture for my garage/office out here in the back 40 of the Pastry family estate. What's a garage/office? you may well ask. Well it's more comfortable than it sounds. The previous owners of our house ran a hot sauce business out of this little building, which they built at the back of the lot, next to the house's original 1-car garage. Technically (and, I'm sure, as far as the Louisville zoning and health commissions were aware) this place is and always has been a garage. However until the Pastry family arrived, it wasn't used that way. When the former owners occupied it, the parking area was filled with hot sauce making and bottling equipment, and the third of the structure closest to the house was walled off, insulated, carpeted and made into an office. It's got windows with shades, a drop ceiling, AC and heat, and it's the location from which I am blogging to you now. I know it as the Joe Pastry Global Operations Center, but the wife simply calls it "The Man Room".

Since we moved in two years ago, I've wanted to cozy this 10' x 20' space up a bit. A small couch, I always thought, would go a long way toward making it feel like a real room versus a mostly empty fallout shelter. However couches are expensive, and used ones...well, I've never really wanted to go there. Sure you can find them in lots of places, but you never know whose cat may have used it as an alternate litter box, if you know what I'm saying. Still, I've scanned Craigslist off and on over the last year, hoping for some sort of miracle. The day before yesterday I found it: an ad for a brand new love seat, still in the plastic, never used. No smoke, no pets...for a hundred bucks. Sounded like just the thing I was after, so, yesterday I went to have a look. It was exactly as the nice Indian fellow had advertised. He'd bought it about a month ago when he arrived from Chennai, he said, and never unwrapped it. Now he was being transferred to a new job somewhere else, and didn't want to move it. It wasn't Chippendale of course, but c'mon man, it's garage furniture. We haggled a bit, I paid him ninety dollars and he helped me get it into the back of my SUV.

Well it's been about twenty hours now, and I can tell you that the couch is working out even better than I'd hoped. Not only does it fit in perfectly with the decor I have going out here, it's made my office smell like a really, really good Indian restaurant. Plastic wrapping doesn't keep out spicy cooking odors, it seems. I suppose I should have put that together when Mr. Couch introduced me to his attractive young wife. She didn't seem to speak much English, but judging from the aromas in here in my office this morning, she is one hell of a cook. I wonder if I can invite myself back over to their house for dinner one night this week? Failing that I'm certain to be craving carry-out all month.

It's all well and good to prepare an assortment of premium homemade s'more components, but putting them together, that's the critical last step. It can be a bit tricky. Certainly, given the freshness of the ingredients, there are more than a few folks out there who'd be just as happy to whip together a plain, unheated chocolate and marshmallow sandwich and eat it as-is. Others might be inclined toward the oven. Both methods are valid, yet they leave out what I think is the final, critical flavor and textural element: the charred, crackling skin of the roasted marshmallow.

And that, my friends, can only be had by the application of flame. But in absence of a camp fire, where to find one? There's the gas flame of the stove top, though in my experience a gas burner doesn't have the heat output to quickly char the outside of a homemade mallow before it totally melts. My preference?

The blowtorch. What, a blowtorch isn't standard equipment in your kitchen? Oh, for shame. Julia Child would be so disappointed. But if you have one, or are inclined toward getting one (they're not the least bit expensive), here's what I recommend:

Lit torch in hand, put your first graham cracker down:

Put down marshmallows to cover and apply the torch lightly. You want to gently brown the outside, so as to get the interior a little bit melty. The blackening can come after...you can even set the marshmallows afire if that's your thing.

Put on your chocolate pieces promptly.

Here I'm using Ghiradelli, which is a bit fancy for this application. However I find Hershey's (as much as I like it) rather too sweet and a little bit chalky for a really good s'more. A decent 60% chocolate like this is just about ideal.

As a last step, you'll want to wave the torch over the chocolate a few times to soften it. Don't turn the flame on it directly, since you don't want to burn the cocoa solids (which unlike marshmallow, tasty nasty when blackened...even a little). It shouldn't take too much since the heat from the marshmallows should be doing its job from below.

Apply your top cracker and consume immediately!

Warnings about a microwave: just a few seconds in a microwave is all it takes to turn a homemade marshmallow back into flowing fluff. Use one if you must, but only to soften the chocolate.

This from reader Ellen on making your confectionary life easier:

One trick I found that works for cutting marshmallows is to use a pizza
cutter. It slides through sticky fluff like a dream.

Thanks Ellen!

Mrs. Pastry, being the truly die-hard sweet tooth of the family, was overjoyed to have so many homemade s'mores components in the house this past weekend. The marshmallows were particularly interesting to her, since they're uncannily similar in texture to the store-bought kind (only much, much fresher). But what is that strange je-ne-sais-quoi she's been wondering...that ineffable, almost chalky mouthfeel that marshmallows have? Egg whites? No. Sugar? No. Gelatin or vanilla? Couldn't be. But that's everything, except for the water, so where does that texture come from?

The answer: corn starch (corn flour). But that's not an ingredient...is it? Well, sort of. Corn starch is actually a hidden component of powdered sugar (also know as confectioner's sugar, also known as icing sugar), which is what I used to "flour" my marshmallows to keep them from sticking to the cutting board, and later, each other. Corn starch is added to powdered sugar to absorb moisture and keep it from caking, usually in a proportion of about 3 percent. Not terribly much, but enough to give marshmallows that faintly floury flavor and vaguely chalky texture.

I had a short email conversation with a reader over the weekend. She'd commented on how odd my cubical marshmallows appeared, which prompted my reply: well, what shape should they be? For marshmallow is like fudge, or peanut butter or jelly: it doesn't have a "shape", per se. Marshmallows are cylindrical in the grocery store because, well, that's the way confectioners make them. Contrary to myth, the white cylinder bears no relation to the root — or any other part — of the marsh mallow plant. So then why the stout, round form?

I suppose if you think back to the marshmallow's heyday, the early 60's, the odd shape makes a sort of sense. True, it was 1940's-era extrusion techniques that originally created the marshmallow's cylinder shape, but it took a culture in love with progress and scientific advancement to truly champion it. The early 60's, let us recall, was the era when Kennedy set the nation on the path to the moon. Freud's psychoanalytical theories were all over popular culture (think Hitchcock movies). People scratched their heads over Warhol, and debated whether John Coltrane and the Classic Quartet had pushed atonality to the point that modern jazz had become unlistenable. High abstraction, in short, was the order of the day.

In the kitchen this aesthetic translated to convenience (electric stoves, canned and packaged foods of all types), but also into space-age looking food. Tube-like asparagus rolls, cube-shaped meat aspics (the great aunt I mentioned last week couldn't get enough of those — even into the 80's) and of course Jell-O molds of every description and shape...from cone to ovoid to torus.

The marshmallow fit perfectly into this geometric, inorganic framework. Sure, before long the late 60's and 70's would arrive, and pop cuisine would be all brown rice and tamari. But for a brief period, in an other-worldly food universe, the marshmallow was king.

Oh, the simple pleasure of a marshmallow. That taste takes you right back to being a kid. No wonder they're so in vogue in food catalogues and in pastry departments these days. Making them is quite simple, though it's a bit of a kitchen ballet. Ideally, you'll have all your ingredients at-the-ready so you can execute the steps in prompt succession. Begin by lining a small pan with parchment paper (the size doesn't really matter) and giving it a light spritz of cooking spray.

Now put your syrup on the boil over high heat.

When the syrup starts to bubble, get the egg whites whipping in your stand mixer. Whip to the stiff peak stage:

...and turn off the mixer. Once the syrup reaches 235-238 (which should take about 5 minutes) ...

...take it off the heat. Pour the two tablespoons of water you have standing by into the powdered gelatin...

...and stir.

Then add the mixture to the hot syrup and, once again, stir.

Turn the mixer back on to medium-high and add the syrup to the whipped egg whites. Don't worry if some spatters onto the sides, since you can easily scrape it down, back into the main mass.

And whip...and whip...and add your vanilla (or other flavor or color)...and whip...

...for five full minutes or more until you have...well, you can probably guess what you need to have:

Scrape the fluff into the pan, not worrying too much about even distribution. This pan is bigger than I need, however because marshmallow sets up so fast, I can form it up into a fairly even slab without it spreading much.

See?

Now then, having succeeded in executing your marshmallow dance, it's time to kick back and enjoy a little bit. Remember what I said about the advantages of making marshmallows at home? Little Joan is here to testify:

At this point I usually refrigerate my marshmallows, uncovered, since that helps them set up faster. When ready, simply flip the slab out onto a cutting board which you've dusted generously with powdered sugar:

And cut'em up! Does size or uniformity matter? Why, not at all.

Quite a lot of spirited discussion after yesterday's post on turkey! I received about twenty emails on the subject, which I won't post for fear of turning my blog into a Thanksgiving discussion board. Overall the emails broke down into two camps: those who essentially said "Rock on Joe!" and others who took offense, mostly because they didn't feel I was taking either them, or the craft of good turkey roasting, seriously. For the latter group, let me assure you that I take my food seriously (I mean...just look around here). I'm the last person who'd encourage anyone to take a cavalier attitude toward food preparation. Also, I wasn't trying to call you a jerk if you brine your turkey or cut it up prior to roasting it. The point I was trying to make is that no Thanksgiving cook should ruin their day trying to produce a turkey that's perfect according to some outside "professional"'s standards. Not Harold McGee's, not Mark Bittman's, not Thomas Keller's or Ferran Adria's...not even mine. One star chef in the kitchen (and by that I mean mom, or grandma, or uncle Pete, or you) is all that any Thanksgiving day needs.

And with that I trust the matter is put to rest, since I have s'mores to make.

And they say everything's been done. Witness the dawn of Indian fusion.

I know, it's not baking and pastry-related, however there were two separate articles on preparing the perfect turkey in this week's New York Times. Add those to the ones in all the cooking magazines, plus the ones that are being published even as we speak in daily papers all over the country, and you've got what seems like turkey-day hysteria. Take the NYT articles. The first was on brining (or not brining) turkey by my food science hero, Harold McGee. He ultimately seemed to come down on the side of not brining, but then took a turn into the bizarre by discouraging the making of gravy, and calling for each individual slice of bird to be dipped in a thin pan sauce just before serving. Mark Bittman went even further into left field by suggesting that cooks cut up their birds into pieces before cooking, so that the white meat and dark meant can be individually roasted. What the...? It put me in mind of Thomas Keller's beef Bourguignonne recipe, which calls for each ingredient to be prepared separately to perfection and then combined before serving. I know he's America's greatest chef, but beef Bourguignonne is a stew, man. A stew!

This to me is the dark side of the new, modern foodie culture we've created, in which the pursuit of perfection becomes pathology. That sounds funny, I know, coming from a guy who's making his own graham crackers and marshmallows this week. However an obsessive experiment in food is one thing, the obsessive ruination of a time-honored family ritual is another. Creating a roast turkey fit for the table of El Bulli is, I think, to completely miss the entire point of a Thanksgiving dinner, which is the friends and the family, obviously. The bird is just the excuse to get them all together in the same room. If the breast meat's a little dry, the potatoes a little lumpy and the gravy a little sticky — who cares? It's that good old home cookin' man. Anyway it's the quirks that, for me, really make the memories. Dry-as-a-bone white meat makes me think of my great aunt, who roasted and sliced her bird the day before to save time. Salty gravy puts me in mind of my mother's mother, whose taste buds started to go when she was in her 80's. Gooey gravy reminds me of my father's mother, who detested cooking, and put so much starch in her gravy it could have been served with an ice cream scoop.

Ridiculous follies all of them...but what I wouldn't give to be able to go back in time and have some of those Thanksgiving meals over again — warts and all, as they say. I'm by no means the the first person to make this observation, but what a Thanksgiving dinner really is is a kind of metaphor for family. It isn't perfect, can't be perfect, shouldn't be perfect. So skip the brine and skip the bird-beautiful restaurant techniques, just put the darn thing in the oven. Then pour yourself a tall glass of wine and go talk to your great aunt Rose, because she hasn't seen you since you were this big.

After a mind-blowing day Tuesday with over 15,000 visitors, the numbers are getting back down into the sane range (not that I minded the attention one bit, of course). Still, spikes like that always bring a few permanent converts into the fold. So — welcome new folks! Help yourselves to the complimentary buffet.

The made-from-scratch marshmallow is truly a creation to be celebrated. I remember the first time I told a customer I made my own marshmallows. I got a look as though I'd told her that where respiration is concerned, I prefer to breathe my own small-batch, artisan air. I don't do the mass-market stuff. Surely for many, to presume to make one's own marshmallows is to try the very patience of the gods.

Marshmallows are basically a mixture of whipped egg whites and sugar syrup held together with gelatin. Of course that's the modern version. The original marshmallow thickener was the glue-like root sap of a plant called (what else) the marsh mallow, a kind of hollyhock common to Europe and Asia. The original is still made on the continent, where it's known as pâté de guimauve. Powdered marsh mallow sap can be had here in the states if you're truly dedicated/obsessed.

I personally like marshmallows just fine out of a bag (they're the only kind that are tough enough to toast over an open fire on a stick), but homemade marshmallows are a unique treat. Not only are they lighter and gooier, you can flavor them any way you wish with a little extract of one sort or another...mint, orange, lemon, strawberry, coffee, you name it. You can even infuse the water in the recipe with herbs (like lavender) if you feel like going high-brow. Oh yes, amazing things they are, these marshmallows.

Shape-wise, I like mine cube-like, which also happens to be the easiest way to go. I notice Gale Gand calls for piping them into "kisses" with a pastry bag which would also be delightful, though in my view marshmallow making is a messy enough process to begin with. Who needs that nonsense? I just dust a casserole generously with powdered sugar, pour the warm marshmallow fluff into it, and level it with a pastry spatula (of course I leave plenty of marshmallow on the whip so I can lick it off afterward...what?). A few hours later the mass will have cooled enough to turn out and cut into squares with a bread knife. Oh, the joy.

I swiped the graham cracker recipe from Gale Gand, why not this one too? As a one-time employee of one of her pastry shops, I'm sure she won't mind. That or she'll march down to Louisville and give me what-for with a number 230 tip. I guess I'll take my chances. Thanks Gale!

4 tablespoons water
4 tablespoons light corn syrup
12 tablespoons sugar
2 egg whites
1 tablespoon gelatin
2 tablespoons cold water
1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Combine the water, the corn syrup, and the sugar in a saucepan fitted with a candy thermometer. Bring to a boil and boil to "soft-ball" stage, or about 235 degrees F.

Meanwhile, whip the egg whites until soft peaks form. Sprinkle the gelatin over the 2 tablespoons cold water and let dissolve. When the syrup reaches 235 degrees F, remove it from the heat, add the gelatin, and mix. Pour the syrup into the whipped egg whites. Add the vanilla and continue whipping until stiff and mostly cooled. Transfer to a pastry bag with a large plain tip. Pipe directly onto powdered sugar-covered cookie sheets and let set until ready to use, at least 1 hour or overnight.

Another gray day in Louisville. Oh well, the pictures aren't sunny but the procedures still work. Begin by combining your dry ingredients in the bowl of your mixer, the paddle affixed:

Mix for a few second to combine your ingredients, then add your butter pieces.

You want pieces of butter remaining about like so:

Now add your wet ingredients (I combine them all together in a bowl since it's easier to pour them that way):

And mix for about a minute until the dough comes together.

Here I deviate from the recipe and neither wait for the dough to chill, nor sandwich it between sheets of wax paper for rolling. I simply roll it out on parchment and dust the top with a little whole wheat flour to prevent sticking. Once it's rolled out to about the size of a cookie sheet, I'm done.

Then all there is to do is trim the dough up into a rough rectangle and cut.

Lastly you want to "dock" the crackers with a fork, since you don't want any bubbles forming in there...

This is the point where I do chill the crackers, since it's much easier transferring them off the parchment when they're firm. Why transfer them at all? Why not bake them in one large sheet? Primarily because you want a little browning around the edges, both for flavor and for texture. Spread them out on one or two sheet pans like so:

Bake in a 350 oven for ten minutes, rotate them, and give them 5-10 minutes more. Done!

As mentioned, Sylvester Graham was a prolific (if extremely graphic) writer. His books and pamphlets were almost literally gobbled up by his fanatical adherents (high in fiber, don't you know), though they predictably enraged others, especially those engaged in traditional culinary pursuits. One such group were Bostonian bakers who, driven to hysteria by Graham's 1837 anti-white bread screed A Treatise on Bread and Bread Making, attempted to storm one of Graham's speaking events at the Marlborough Hotel and lynch him. They were joined in no small number by city butchers, whose customers Graham was turning into vegetarians by the thousands.

Warned in advance that a riot was in the works, the mayor and police department informed the Grahamites that there weren't enough police in the city to protect their leader. Only emboldened, the Grahamites barricaded the hotel and braced for the worst. When the assault came, it came in surprising strength, and the front line defense of wan and spindly vegetarians was quickly overwhelmed by the beefy, butcher-baker onslaught. Retreating to the reinforced upper floors of the hotel, the Grahamites poured buckets of caustic lime down on the rioters. Eyes burning, the bakers were forced to retreat, yet not before they'd succeeded in underscoring the point that when properly provoked, even a jolly pastry maker will kick your flippin' can.

Seems due to the worldwide credit crisis, white truffle prices have tanked. Truffle lovers, this could be your moment.

I'm one of those people who takes solace in the fact that the human species never changes much. Far from being dismayed to discover that our ancestors displayed the same silly behaviors we do today, I'm deeply comforted. If I could have a piece of hieroglyphic art hanging on my wall, it would feature an image of an ancient Egyptian father, who, having just stubbed his toe on his daughter's bronze age Big Wheel, would be depicted hopping about on one foot, a stream of pictographic obscenity issuing from his mouth.

I'm similarly comforted whenever I think about the Reverend Sylvester Graham, by all accounts one of the most obnoxious and irritating popular figures of his era (that being the early 1800's). A Presbyrtarian minister and lecturer of great renown, he was the prototypical fad diet promoter, a sort of Dr. Robert Atkins on a pulpit. He was a prominent vegetarian and inventor of the so-called "Graham System", a complete, morning-to-night lifestyle program that emphasized vegetarianism, fresh foods, frequent bathing, good cheer (especially when eating), hard mattresses, open windows during sleep (no matter what the weather), and abstinence from coffee, tobacco and liquor. He believed that the animal human beings most closely resemble is the orangutan, and that ketchup and mustard cause insanity.

While it's certainly an oversimplification to claim that the centerpiece of his "system" was sexual abstinence, it's fair to say that he worried a lot about people having sex. Meat and spicy foods, he felt, led to unnatural lust. And unnatural lust, well, that led to everything from indigestion to epilepsy. Male masturbation was especially problematic for Graham, since he believed it led to premature death (particularly of one's offspring, whom he believed would be conceived from worn-out sperm). For this reason, he took an avid interest in young people, especially teenagers. He preached to them widely, and even succeeded in implementing his dietary regimen in schools, most famously at Oberlin college in Ohio. There, his diet was briefly implemented on a campus-wide basis, though discontinued when students stopped eating on campus, and a faculty member was fired for sneaking contraband pepper into the dining hall.

Still, Graham's conviction and charisma made him a lifestyle celebrity of the highest order. His lectures drew thousands, though they were so frank and graphic that polite women fainted by the score at his discourse. His books, best sellers all, were no better, and at the time were dubbed the most disgusting works yet composed in the English language. However by the 1840's "Grahamites" were everywhere. Restaurants and hotels served Graham diets, and Graham boarding houses, where people could retreat to immerse themselves fully in the Grahamite lifestyle, dotted the East Coast.

Eventually, of course, the trend peaked. Graham faded from the public eye and died in 1851 at the age of 58. Even so, his legacy can be seen everywhere today, especially on daytime television, where thanks in part part to Graham, talk show hosts never run out of things to say about about erectile dysfunction, irritable bowel syndrome and nocturnal discharges.

People look at you slightly askance when you tell them you make your own marshmallows, but they gather their children and move hastily away when you tell them you make your own graham crackers. Why? I dunno, since not only do homemade graham crackers have both better flavor and texture, they help you get back in touch (if only a bit) with the man and his philosophy. Graham, who was the foremost "physiological reformer" of his day, would have abhorred the fatty, heavily sugared, white flour-based semi-shortbreads that pass as graham crackers today. Graham's originals were lean, bland and tough, made solely from his signature flour grind, and definitely — definitely — not meant to be enjoyed.

Graham flour, as I mentioned, has all the base components of whole wheat flour in it: germ, bran and endosperm. The big difference is the way it's ground. Graham believed that in order to be properly absorbed by the body, the endosperm of the wheat berry must be finely ground. So, like conventional millers he separated it out and ground it to a talcum powder-like consistency. But because he also believed that wheat germ and bran were most healthful when consumed in relatively large pieces, he ground them separately and only slightly. The result, when he mixed the whole mess back together, was a coarse meal that journalists of the day compared favorably to sawdust.

It made heavy bread (because the big bran pieces kept gluten strands from forming) and still heavier crackers. Just the tonic, so Graham felt, for quashing our unhealthful desires for white flour, meat, sugar, spices and sex. This week's recipe certainly wasn't designed with such repressive goals in mind. Rather it contains plenty of sugar and fat, which should both make fantastic s'mores and keep your libido intact. Ms. Gand does however call for an interesting mix of white, whole wheat and rye flours, which at least will put you in the spirit of the thing.

You mean you're going to make your own graham crackers? Yes, my friends, I am. You thought I was kidding about my s'mores-making skills? I wasn't. Real-deal s'mores aren't made with those poncy, crumbly things you buy in a store. Rather they're held together by good, honest crackers, made at home and with some chew. And anyway, graham crackers aren't hard to make. The trouble most people have is finding the flour. Graham flour, you see, is it's own special thing, invented by — who else — Reverend Sylvester Graham, about whom we'll learn much more later. His flour was what you might call a sort of whole grain pastry flour, low in gluten high in bran and germ. It's nice stuff, but impossible to find unless you get it off the web. The following recipe — which is courtesy of Gale Gand — substitutes whole wheat and rye flours, which are a lot easier to come by.

Graham Crackers

2.5 ounces (1/2 cup) all-purpose flour
6.25 ounces (1 1/4 cups) whole-wheat flour
2.5 ounces (1/2 cup) light rye flour
3.5 ounces (1/2 cup) sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup (1 stick) cold butter, cut into pea-size bits
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoon molasses
1/4 cup cold water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350. In a food processor or the bowl of an electric mixer, mix together the flours, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Add the cold butter and mix or process until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the honey, molasses, water, and vanilla. Mix until the dough comes together in a ball.

Between 2 sheets of waxed paper or plastic wrap, roll the dough 1/2-inch thick. Chill for 1 hour, until firm. Set a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees F. Lightly flour the dough and roll 1/8-inch thick. With a sharp knife or cookie cutter, cut into 2-inch squares. Arrange the crackers on nonstick or parchment lined cookie sheets. With a fork, prick several holes in each cracker. Bake for 10 minutes, rotate, and bake about 7 more minutes, until lightly browned at the edges. Remove from the oven and let cool in the pan.

Every year in the late fall, Mrs. Pastry gets the same look in her eye, it says: this is the perfect time of year for camping! Coincidentally, it's usually the same time I re-discover the winter maintenance instructions for the lawnmower and head out to the garage. For I, my friends, am an outdoor sissy. The mere thought of camping takes me back to my brief tenure as a Boy Scout, of the long nights I spent shivering in my government-issue sleeping bag, the inside of which one of my tent mates had either drizzled with maple syrup or slathered generously with butter. What to say other than we baking science nerds tend not to be popular in middle school.

Looking back, however, I think what really intimidated those poor kids was my daunting s'mores-making skills. Seeing the mouthwatering, melty chocolate and marshmallow sandwiches I whipped up by the fireside, how could they not have been consumed with envy? Really I pity them. I do. So, in their honor, I think it's high time I tried to replicate some of the deep woods triumphs of my youth, only at home where I have access to both syrup-free bedding and a shower (just in case the wife gets any ideas).

A good question came in over the weekend, which in summary said: if that is how balsamic vinegar is made, how come I can get ten ounces of it at the Valu Mart for $2.89? The reason is because the really cheap stuff is nothing more than conventionally-made wine vinegar with added sugar, thickeners and caramel color. Of course there are a lot of in-between balsamic vinegar products too. Among the more expensive are mass-produced versions from Italy. These come in two designations, Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena, and Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale de Reggio Emilia (each town has its own labeling system, you see). A white or red label means the vinegar has aged for at least 12 years, silver for 18 and gold for 25 or more (sell the kids).

On the lower end are several domestic varieties that deliver pretty well. Young 3 to 5-year-old vinegars run about ten bucks for eight ounces, and are all the muscle you'll need for a baking adventure like last week's pear tart. Of course if you feel like going over the top, go for an eight year. You won't be disappointed. Twelve year and older vinegars should be appreciated solely for what they are, and served as simply as possible. Dribbled on a plain panna cotta, for example, or even sipped straight from a liqueur glass. This is how the very best balsamic vinegars are consumed in the old country today, though I should add they they haven't always been produced for pleasure. Traditionally (and by that I mean back into the Middle Ages) they were given as medicines. And in fact that's what the name "balsamic" means: "health giving".

This highly complimentary note came in over the weekend, from reader Lynette:

I just had to write in and tell you how much I Iove your site, Joe. The recipes and the photographs are fantastic. Also do you know you have very elegant and sexy hands?

Why thank you, Lynette. Very nice of you to say! I suppose I get my hands from my mother, who — believe it or not — was a part-time hand model for Sarah Lee in the 60's. Her hands were on those frozen coffee cake packages they used to do...the foil tins with the cardboard round on the top. Remember those?

I remember in high school my twin sister thought that she might follow in her footsteps, and pursue a life of luxury as the Christie Brinkley of tabletop photography. It was not to be, however, and today she is a banker (albeit one with very attractive hands). I hadn't thought about that particular facet of Pastry family history for quite some time, so thanks for the compliment!

Oh, and here's one more picture of my hands, which Mrs. Pastry asked me to put up as a point of clarification:

Goodness gracious me it was a big weekend at joepastry.com. On a normal working day I can expect a few thousand visitors. Over the weekend traffic went through the roof — to over 12,000 yesterday. It's all thanks, once again, to some kind soul who put me up on Stumbleupon.com. All I can say is: welcome all you new folks! Kick back, put your feet up and stay a while.

Oh and...try the pizza.

Sheesh! That's the last time I try to make excuses! One wise-gal wrote in to tell me she'd checked doppler radar, and the front would be passing by Louisville by 11:00! I guess there are some serious galette fans out there. My showcase photo doesn't have that golden, sun-dappled look I like so much, but oh well. Here goes.

Combine your dry ingredients and add your butter pieces.

Then stick your hand in there and start rubbing. Don't spend too much time, lest you warm the butter too much.

You want all the flour buttered to some degree, but with some big chunks still in there. That'll create a laminated dough-like effect, making the crust flakier.

Add your ice water...I see I have a little bit of ice cube still in there. No matter:

Then mix gently. First with a spatula:

Then with a little light kneading to bring it together into a ball. Tart dough is a little wetter than a pie dough, but it'll still seem a bit cumbly at this point. If it simply won't hold together add a bit more water and work the dough as little as possible to incorporate it.

Pat it into a disk and refrigerate for an hour or more.

Now then, to the filling. Put the sugar and balsamico in a sauté pan and heat gently until the sugar melts.

Add your spices and stir them in.

Now the pear slices.

Toss them until they're well covered (a word to the wise: put an apron on).

To assemble, fetch your disk of dough and roll it on a floured board.

You want a disk somewhere around 14 inches across. Don't worry if the edges are a little ragged — this is a rustic tart, remember?

Sprinkle on your absorbent layer of crumbs. These are some crushed 'Nilla Wafers.

Arrange your fruit slices, or just pour them in a heap if you want, that's perfectly fine too. I'm doing this in concentric spirals because some other wise guy out there requested that I make this as difficult on myself as possible. Lord. Note to self: never diss the readership!

In that spirit, I also did a slightly more elaborate "gusseted" edge. Just pinch the dough every couple of inches all the way around. If that's more than you're comfortable with, then fold in the edges toward the center one at a time. I've seen square galettes, pentagonal ones, whatever gets the job done. Just squeeze your folds down a bit to prevent leakage of any juices.

Pour any remaining syrup over the fruit and bake. That's it, you feisty pastry people, you.

It amazes me that there aren't more desserts out there that call for balsamic vinegar, since when it's good it's not so much a vinegar as it is a syrup — an impossibly complex and delectable syrup. Run a "balsamic" search over at the Food Network site and you'll come up with over 1300 different recipes, all but about 40 of them savory. But then the fact that so many American recipes — whatever their stripe — use balsamic vinegar is pretty darn impressive all by itself, especially when you consider that balsamic vinegar was virtually unknown outside the Italian towns of Modena and Reggio Emilia until around 1980.

Up until that time balsamic vinegar making was...well, it wasn't a secret exactly, just something people in some northern Italian towns did in the privacy of their own homes. Go up into the attic of a typical house around Modena and it's not unusual to find a small collection of casks of different sizes. In them are various distillations of grape juice, the smallest containing a dark, thick nectar that's taken decades to mature.

Authentic balsamic vinegar takes more time to produce than any other foodstuff I can think of. Unlike regular wine vinegars, which were traditionally made by exposing wine to air until bacteria converted alcohol into acetic acid, balsamic vinegar starts with grape juice, simmered gently until it's reduced to a thick, sweet liquid called mosto cotto, or "must". This "must" must be first made into "wine" before it can be made into vinegar. Being very sweet, however, it's too sugary for conventional bread or beer yeasts to live in. So, a special sugar-tolerant strain (zygosaccharomyces) is added to initiate fermentation, which can take anything up to eight months.

Once the alcohol level of the must reaches about 9%, acetic acid bacteria are allowed to move in to start the acidification process. The must is poured into the largest of the series of casks through a square-shaped hole in the top (a hole that's never plugged, just covered with cloth). All the casks in the line have holes like these, so air can get in and moisture can get out.

Once a year (usually in the cold winter months when the bacterial activity is down and the vinegar is nice and clear) a little — and it's always very little — finished balsamic vinegar is drawn from the smallest cask. That amount (plus the volume of whatever water has evaporated) is replenished by pouring in a little vinegar from the next biggest cask. That's replenished by vinegar from the next biggest cask, and so on, until the very largest cask is topped of with fresh-fermented must. As you can imagine, if you only draw off a few ounces of vinegar a year, and the smallest cask holds a gallon or more, that stuff sits there for quite some time.

Over the years the vinegar not only develops its own flavor, it absorbs it from the wood of the cask. That being the case, each cask in the series is usually made from a different type of wood. More and different woods, after all, mean more and different flavors. A typical balsamico maker might employ casks made from oak, chestnut, cherry, ash, juniper, mulberry and acacia. The order in which those casks are employed varies from family to family, and (as you might expect) is the subject of much debate among the balsamic vinegar cognoscenti.

Of course finding some of this really, really good stuff is pretty darn near impossible for a mere mortal. If you do you can expect to pay upwards of $700 for a mere 3 1/2 ounces (100 ml.) of it. But of course you'd never waste a vinegar like that on something like a pear tart. You'd just sit it on your mantlepiece, where it would be guarded by trip wires, attack dogs and laser-beams, forever.

Terrible for photography, in other words. Since I really don't like using a flash, that may mean I won't be making my galette today. But we'll see. In the meantime I'll do my best to keep you entertained with glittering prose. ;)

Under slightly different circumstances, could America have become a pear nation instead of an apple nation? Baseball, hot dogs and pear pie?

It could have happened that way, sure. Or well, no, probably not. Pear trees do behave in much the same way that apple trees do. Like apples they're hardy and adaptable to a variety of climates. Yet the best eating pears can be fussy, which made a difference in the pear's popularity as a fruit crop on the American frontier. But then as all those who were with me during my recent apple posts know, most apples on the American frontier weren't eaten, they were drunk (no pun intended), and as a juice crop the pear was also at a disadvantage. For while pear squeezings can be made into a hard cider, "perry" as it's called in England, the process is more involved than it is for apples. Thus the apple was the shortest distance between two points (those two points being sobriety and inebriation). I suppose, had Americans really had a taste for perry, you might have had the huge cider mills that produced the gigantic amounts of waste pulp and seeds that a Johnny Pear Seed might have used to start a fruit and real estate empire. I donno though, sounds a little too much like one of those freaky alternative history episodes on Star Trek.

Got a good question a few days ago that (sort of) plays into today's discussion of pears:

Can you tell me? Why do some fruits get better tasting after days in the fruit bowl while others don't? Also, do fruits lose their nutritional value as they sit?

Firstly, as far as I know, fruits don't lose their nutritional value sitting in your fruit bowl. But let's back up a bit. Fruits are divided broadly into two types: climacteric and nonclimacteric. The first type rely on ethylene gas (which they themselves produce) to stimulate their ripening. These kinds of fruits (bananas and apples and pears are good examples) continue to ripen and develop flavor after they've been picked. The second type do not depend on ethylene, and instead rely on the plant they grow on for their development. They get no sweeter, riper or better tasting after picking (think strawberries and pineapples). Climacteric or no though, both types of fruits will eventually decay and rot, at which point they will of course lose all their nutritional value. But until they actually get overripe, I don't believe they lose nutrients in any significant amounts.

Apples and pears are like two siblings with nothing common. They may have sprung from the same family, grown up in the same household, but when it comes to their disposition, pastimes and taste in friends, they couldn't be more different.

Both the pear and the apple call the mountainous areas of modern-day Kazakhstan home. Both traveled the Silk Road west to Europe and east to China and Japan. Both are so-called pome fruits (members of the rose family along with quinces and Asian medlars and loquats). They're climacteric (more on that in the next post) and heterozygous (see The Great Apple Crap Shoot). Aside from that they're barely on speaking terms.

Where one is firm and crunchy, the other is soft and yielding. Where one is feisty, tart and working class, the other is juicy, buttery and sophisticated. Where one is at home in pie, the other luxuriates alongside the finest chocolates, wines and cheeses. Where one makes hard cider, scrumpy and applejack, the other makes eau de vie de poire.

No, it seems there is no reconciling these two. Let's just hope they at least call each other on their birthdays and at Christmas.

Once you make your first galette, you may never go back to your tart pans, the things are that easy. The trick is to resist over-filling them. A thin layer of fruit not only cooks more thoroughly, it keeps the galette from getting the over-stuffed "flying saucer" look. Remember: a galette isn't a pie, it's a tart, which means it's going to have a higher crust-to-filling ratio.

For the Dough:

5 1/2 ounces all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
4 ounces chilled, unsalted butter, cut into pieces
2.5 ounces ice water

Mix the flour, sugar, and salt together in a bowl. Add the butter pieces, and rub in by hand quickly, still leaving a few big pieces. Add the water and mix gently, bringing the dough together in a ball (don't knead it). Flatten the dough into a disk, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for an hour or overnight.

For the Filling:

2 ripe pears (Bosc, D'anjou or Barlett)
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons sugar
pinch cinnamon
a few gratings fresh nutmeg
about half a cup of crushed cookies or cake crumbs

Peel and cut the pears into thin slices. In a sauté pan over medium heat, combine the balsamic vinegar and sugar. Heat until the sugar melts, then turn off the flame. Stir in the spices, then add the pear slices and toss gently until the pears are coated.

Assembly:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Roll the dough out into a disk about 14" across. Transfer to a piece of baking parchment. Sprinkle the cookie or cake crumbs over the dough, leaving about a 2-inch border around the edges. Arrange pears in a spiral pattern in the center, then fold up the outer edge to partly cover the fruit. Bake for 40-45 minutes until the crust is golden.

Good question. In much of the English-speaking world, the term "galette" is associated with a sort of free-form pie or tart. This isn't so in France, where a galette is a thick, savory buckwheat crêpe. How the word ever came to describe a free-form fruit tart is a mystery (at least to me). It's not as though the French don't make these sorts of rustic tarts. They do — and in great quantity. They just call them "tarts". 'Nuff said.

New World galettes start with a round of pastry dough. A quantity of filling (usually fruit, but it can be things like potato or roasted vegetable) is placed in the center and the edges are folded up to partially enclosed it. That's pretty much it. The pastry is most often pie or tart dough, but can also be puff or flaky pastry for those who wish to get fancy.

This note comes in from reader Jilly all the way down under in Ozzieland. It reads:

I'm from Australia and I'm just astounded by the immense softness of
so much American bread, I love to go to the grocery and poke it! My
favorite was when I picked up a loaf of supposed "sourdough" only to
find it was like a pillow!

I'm still confused as to what makes it so soft! Also, do you know why
most American supermarket breads contain over 20 ingredients, mainly
chemical it seems??

Jilly's email reminded me of the old Wonder Bread commercials from when I was but a lad in the 70's. All of them ended with a shot of a woman's hand giving a loaf of Wonder a good wholesome squeeze. "Squeeze Me, I'm Fresh!" was the slogan, as I recall. It's been discontinued for years, probably due to smart aleck kids like me who took the invitation a little too much to heart. However that was the major selling point for big bread makers like Wonder and Holsum: that their products stayed fresh and soft — for weeks!

That of course is where some of the additives come in, however the majority of them aren't intended to keep the bread soft and fluffy, but to boost its nutritional value. For indeed that was the other side of Wonder bread's appeal — that it was fortified. "Builds Strong Bodies 12 Different Ways!" was another one of the ad slogans from those days. Today of course we take fortification for granted, since even Twinkies are fortified to the point that a person could probably live off them for years and never suffer a vitamin deficiency.

Yet even though fortification is old hat, the idea of increasing the nutritional value of packaged foods has gained renewed currency in the nutraceutical movement. What are nutraceuticals? In short, they're nutritional ingredients that (supposedly) offer benefits that go beyond traditional essential nutrients. Things like Omega-3's, flavonoids, beta glucans and assorted other polysaccharides, lipids and proteins that are thought to have almost medicinal effects on the body. We're seeing a lot more of them referenced on food packages these days, but to my mind "Contains Diadzein and Genistein!" just doesn't have the same zing as "Squeeze Me, I'm Fresh!" Could just be me.

Seems so. However I have a hankerin' for another dessert I like to make in the fall: a galette. More than that, a pear galette. And even more than that, a pear and balsamic vinegar galette. Anyone care to join me?

...make all different styles of crimps. That's one of the really fun things about an empanada-making party. The Spanish section of the Modern Languages Department at the university has been hosting one for years now in preparation for their annual Day of the Dead party. Normally it's organized and run by one of the adjunct faculty, a Puerto Rican woman who's an experienced empanada maker. This year, for reasons that I still don't fully understand (I'm only married to faculty), I got the job.

The order was for 650 empanadas, and even though I had plenty of help, it was still a huge undertaking. I began preparing ingredients Friday night, spent Saturday making the fillings with another volunteer (fortunately, from Argentina), held the assembly party on Sunday, then spent five hours yesterday morning baking them off. Thank the powers that be that I was able to secure a commercial kitchen for the long weekend. That made the process a whole lot easier.

The only down side was that I wasn't able to secure the usual small army of little old Hispanic ladies that usually help out. My team was all young women, about a dozen, culled from the various Hispanic studies exchange programs. It was a good group, though they were nowhere near as fast and artful as the abuelitas (grannies) of years gone by. Still, most of them had at least made empanadas before, and that was a huge boon. Here's a snap of some of the crew at work on Saturday. These women were a combined force of Brazilians, Colombians and others, with an Eastern European thrown in for good measure. It's amazing how many Central and South American (and Caribbean) cultures make empanadas (I think all of them do), and as for Eastern Europe, pierogis are pretty much the same thing.

It's hard to get a picture like this without at least one person blinking. Oh well.

Just about everybody had their own style. Whether that was a result of differing national identities or just grandmothers with differing opinions, I never found out (my Spanish stinks). And yes, those are store-bought empanada skins back there — what do you think I am, a miracle worker?

We collected them in foil pans and refrigerated them overnight. Then yesterday yours truly got up at the crack of dawn and went to bake them off (I really didn't mind, it reminded me of the old days) . The empanadas on this pan are all fork-crimped. Though that style doesn't exude either the authenticity nor the grandmotherly love of the hand-made crimps, it still does the job.

The good news is that Mrs. Pastry and I managed to deliver them all to the university by noon, which was when the party began. I hadn't attempted to pull off anything like that in about three years. Nice to know that ol' Joe still has a little of the hustle left in him.

If any of you were wondering where I was yesterday (and clearly some were, since I got a few complaints), I was making empanadas, a lot of empanadas. Enough, in fact, to feed the entire complement of revelers at U of L's Day of the Dead party yesterday. It was a big job and frankly I'm bushed, but I'll tell you all about it a bit later on.

I like all kinds of bread. I like rye bread I like wheat bread I like raisin bread I like 9-grain bread (well, sort of). However in my world the sun rises and sets on white breads, and after last week's posts I think it's clear why. It's not because I'm afraid I'll contract ergotism. It is, rather, because white breads are light in texture, tender, and a general pleasure to eat. I'm not the first human being on Earth to discover this. It's only been lately (the last forty years or so) that various types of whole grain breads have been lionized, not only as the healthier choice in bread, but as the more politically correct one. Fine white breads, it's said, are the breads of "the rich" and that is indisputably true. Historically it's only been the rich who could afford top-quality grains, plus the precision milling and bolting that it takes to turn those grains into a fine, uniform flour.

People wonder why we in America eat so much fluffy white bread. Indeed it's become a kind of national embarrassment for some of the more worldly among us. But America is a country founded and populated by very poor people — or rather people who were once poor and have since made good. Is it any wonder that most of these folk, who were saddled with the heavy, digestion-challenging, tooth-eroding breads of the Old World would want a taste of the good life in the New World? I hardly think so, and that's where brands like Wonder Bread and Pepperidge Farm come in, for inexpensive, snow white, mass-market breads of this kind were considered miracles by immigrants in the 20th century. People took to them readily and hungrily, since they represented the good life. It was only later that they, or more often their children (in search of a little edible authenticity), gravitated back to the breads of the old world — only this time made with top quality flours, fast-rising commercial yeasts and in nice, hot ovens. As a result all but the densest of today's artisan "peasant breads" are probably more toothsome and delectable than anything that ever graced Louis XIV's table.

I quite like them, as I said. They're more flavorful and interesting than anything that comes in a plastic bag at the supermarket. However I do find it funny the lengths we're willing to go to convince ourselves that we're carrying on in the footsteps of our peasant ancestors, when a scoop or two of whole grain flour or a little corn meal in the mix (for interest) is about as authentic as most of us are willing to get.

So, here's the rye bread crop from yesterday's (and last night's) bake. I actually made three kinds: one a very light (about 15%) rye, the next the sandwich rye from below (about 30% rye), and finally the sourdough, all-rye "pumpernickel" experiment I blogged about yesterday — that little football right there in the middle.

For those wondering how that came out, I can tell you that it is exactly as the reference books described — coffee brown all the way through, with a classic sweet/burnt/tangy pumpernickel flavor. However what the books don't say is that this stuff, after spending 12 full hours in a low oven, is dry to the point of being almost rock-like. Yowch. Now, this could be a problem with my own process. My brick oven might have been too hot. I put the bread in when it registered 260 on my laser thermometer. Maybe the next time I do it I'll wait for the temperature to drop to 225, or lower.

The other possibility is that this is what the pumpernickel of old was actually like. As I've mentioned previously, very little bread prior to the 20th century — especially in Europe — was eaten fresh. There were no sandwiches among the peasant class. Much of the time bread was employed as an ingredient, crumbled (stale) into soups and stews, soaked and formed into dumplings of various kinds, as a thickener for sauces, etc. A very dry bread would have been useful for all those purposes, plus it would have kept a lot longer. Who knows though? I'll have to keep experimenting.

And should I not post again before this evening — happy Halloween to all!

If there's one great risk to a rye-intensive bread, it's mixing. The thing about pentosan gums is, once they start absorbing water, they get gooeyer and gooeyer. So the longer you mix, the gummier and stickier the dough gets. When that happens, most inexperienced rye bakers just say to themselves: Oh that's OK, I'll just throw in a little more flour until the dough firms up. Which of course is like trying to put out a camp fire with lighter fluid. The more flour (and gum) that's added, the gooier the dough gets until it's all but overflowing the mixing bowl. So if and when your pumpernickel dough gets to the sticky point, just remember that the dough isn't over-hydrated, it's just replete with goop. Dust your hands and your surfaces with extra flour and carry on as usual.

Pumpernickel is deep, dense stuff. Over 300% as dense as a sturdy white loaf. This is due to the botanical differences between rye and wheat. While wheat's gluten is composed of two types of proteins, gliaden and glutenin, rye's gluten is made up of gliaden and glutelin. Unlike glutenin whose molecules readily form strong end-to-end bonds, glutelin molecules form only very weak bonds, which keep a rye dough from forming those nice bubble-holding protein networks. All those active enzymes don't help either, since they pre-digest the bread's starch structure as it rises.

The one thing rye does have going for it, however, is a sticky goo called pentosan gum (arabinoxylan), basically microscopic balls of weird sugars that can soak up huge amounts of water (around eight times their weight). The effect of the pentosan is twofold. First, since pentosan makes up about 10% of rye's total carbohydrates, it renders the bread incredibly moist. It also makes it resistant to staling since pentosan doesn't crystallize the way ordinary starch does as it ages. Second, it helps leaven the bread a bit, since pockets of steam and CO2 get stuck in the all that sticky muck.

Another interesting thing about pentosan is that when it finally dries, it becomes a sort of natural appetite suppressant. It's all that absorptive power, you see. Once it lands in the moist environment of the stomach it expands to eight times its previous weight, creating the sensation of fullness (or satiety, as food chemists like to say). So, chalk up one important advantage rye offered to the peasantry of the old world. Of course it offers the very same advantage to today's dieters. Rye crisps, anyone?

Pumpernickel may be the poorest bread on Earth, made by people so poor they couldn't afford wheat, so poor they couldn't afford decent milling, so poor they couldn't even afford oven heat. That, my friends, is poor.

What's amusing about modern day pumpernickel is how far we now go to imitate something that the people of the time probably didn't even enjoy. But then I guess it's that way with quite a lot of foods. What was once a necessity is now an aesthetic. Indeed, we are very, very fortunate people.

So what steps do modern bakers take to imitate the conditions of peasant Europe? First we use a lot of rye, the reasons for which should be clear from this week's posts. Next we coarsen the mix to approximate the uneven, rough-and-tumble milling of the dirt poor countryside. Some contemporary rye recipes call for rough "clear" flours which you can order from catalogues. Others call for adding stale bread crumbs to the dough (something the peasantry actually did to keep from wasting precious food) or even corn meal, which isn't very authentic, but the gritty effect is similar.

Lastly, there's color. Originally pumpernickel was baked in extremely cool ovens for between 12 and 20 hours. Why? Well, because in the day of communal ovens, you had to pay the local oven operator to bake your bread (which you made on your own at home). Not terribly much usually, but enough to purchase fuel and pay the bakers. Given that wood-fired brick ovens start out hot and slowly cool down, people would bring in different things at different times to be baked. Typically breads went in first and things like pies last, when the oven was cooler. The poorest of the poor (frequently Jews) brought their gritty, rye-heavy breads to be baked when the oven was even too cool for pies, when it cost little or nothing to bake, when there was nothing but waste heat left.

How did this affect the bread? Well, because of the extended bake time and the low heat, active enzymes in the flour (and rye flour has more active enzymes than any other type of flour) have plenty of time to go on breaking long chain sugars down into simple sugars. These simple sugars then have plenty of time to caramelize as the temperature of the bread slowly rises. The end result is that the bread turns brown — and not just on the crust, but all the way through. This is what gives pumpernickel its characteristic color, as well as its strangely sweet, yet also vaguely bitter and burnt flavor. Nowadays we approximate that flavor and color by adding molasses and usually a little bit of cocoa powder or coffee.

Why won't a commercial bakery try to make pumpernickel the old fashioned way? Simply because they can't afford it. Big commercial ovens cost tens of thousands of dollars. Tying up 20 hours of their baking time with loaves of pumpernickel is a sure-fire recipe for bankruptcy. But me, just a guy with a brick oven in his back yard, I can do it. I waste that useful, pumpernickel heat every time I bake. Today though, things are going to be different. I'm going to put some loaves of naturally-raised, all-rye bread in my cooling oven and let them stay there all night.

Why on Earth am I going to all that trouble when I can walk to the corner and buy a perfectly good loaf of tender white bread? That is surely something the ghosts of my long-departed European ancestors will certainly be wondering this Halloween.

Sure, it's fun to eat pumpernickel, but it's even more fun to say it: pumpernickel. It sounds almost crass. And in fact, it is. The word "pumpernickel", most etymologists agree, is derived from the Westphalian word for the state of flatulence, pumpen, and the pseudonymous term for the Devil: "Old Nick" or "Nickel". Put the two together and the result is a word that pretty much describes the aftereffects of a bread made from poorly milled, whole grain rye. Chockablock with sugars that are indigestible to us — but not to some of the flora that live in our guts — the bran and other seed parts ferment in the digestive system, resulting in large volumes of gas.

How did a bread that causes such, er...distemper, ever get to be so popular? You might as well ask Heinz why people eat beans. Yet as I've mentioned, truly dark ryes were born primarily out of necessity, a product of crop failures or some sort of disaster that undercut the wheat supply. Pumpernickel arose in the aftermath of the devastating Thirty Years' War, a conflict that englulfed all of Europe (though primarily the region we now know as Germany) from 1618 to 1648. By the time it was over, some 20% of the German population had been wiped out, to say nothing of their homes and crops. If you can gauge the depletion of a society by the proportion of rye that its citizens put in their bread, then pumpernickel represents a rather sad testament to the state that Westphalia was left in after thirty straight years of fighting.

Why am I attempting two different rye breads this week, do you mean? Primarily because one of the two recipes is to eat, and the other is an experiment. Since before I built my brick oven (though I suppose it's more accurate to say "had it built"). I've been interested in long-baking, low-temperature peasant breads of the kind we simply can't buy any more. One of these is pumpernickel, a rye bread notable for a.) the coarseness of the the crumb (due to the meal-like grind of the rye grain) and b.) the darkness of the interior (due to the manner in which it's baked...more on that soon). The fact that I don't have true pumpernickel flour on-hand will drive down the authenticity factor a bit, but I'm still hopeful of a good result, a kind of "city pumpernickel" if such a thing is possible.

You might be wondering if ergot is a risk today. The answer is not really. Though no ergot-resistant strain of rye has ever been developed, a variety of measures are taken these days to minimize the risk of ergot infection. Rye seeds are carefully screened for evidence of ergot, rye fields are plowed extra deep to keep ergot from germinating after harvest, and different crops are rotated in and out on alternating years. All combined, these various strategies do an excellent job of keeping ergot, and by extension the risk of ergotism, down.

In fact it's been 55 years since the last known outbreak or ergotism, which occurred in France in 1951. One hundred or so people, most of them immigrants to France from central Europe, became sick with delusions and other symptoms. Of course the connection between the fungus and the disease had been known for 100 years by that time, and it seems the outbreak was due to an unscrupulous local farmer (and miller) unloading bad grain on new arrivals who didn't know any better. The only major outbreaks prior to that came in 1927, when 200 people in England and 10,000 people in Russia were afflicted.

Nowadays you scarcely ever hear of ergot, except in pharmaceutical quarters where derivatives of the fungus are used to make the drug ergotamine (a migraine preventative) and ergonovine (used to reduce postpartum bleeding). Interesting, isn't it, how something so deadly and horrible actually has a modern, constructive use. Another monster brought to heel.

Of course ergot has also caused plenty of trouble right here in the good ol' US of A. Immigrants from Central Europe never traveled anywhere without their native crops, of which rye had become an important part. By the late American colonial period, rye (and also ergot) was being cultivated widely. Colonists were fortunate that for whatever reason, ergotism didn't wipe people out on the scale it did in the Old Country, perhaps because the climate didn't favor ergot quite so much. However a theory has been advanced that ergotism was to blame for the famous witch trials in Salem, Massachusettes in 1692.

The trial drama, as you probably already know (this being Halloween week) centered around a group of seven girls (aged 6 to nineteen years old), all of whom were supposedly afflicted with symptoms that very much resemble convulsive ergotism: delusions, trembling, pricking sensations, and other nervous disorders. Whether they actually were, or whether they were simply a gaggle of bored and vindictive teenagers looking for attention (my personal bet), has been a matter of some debate for some 300 years.

In 1976 a researcher and author by the name of Linda Caporael was the first to suggest that the girls may have been suffering from ergotism. The idea was later expanded upon by author Mary Matossian in her book Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics, and History. In it, Matossian does an impressive job of drawing an historical connection between ergot and witchcraft. A suspiciously high number of European witch trials, it turns out, were clustered in areas known for rye cultivation, and more than that, had just the kind of damp, cool climate that the ergot fungus likes. Since ergotism causes all sorts of bizarre behavioral symptoms (since it restricts blood flow in the brain), it's easy to see how preindustrial folk came to see ergotism sufferers as victims of bedevilment.

Whether or not that's what happened in Salem to one of the girls, some of the girls or all of them is a matter of pure speculation, though Caporael and Matossian do point out that there had been a bad wheat harvest that year and a cold, wet spring — the classic circumstances that drove agrarian peoples to consume more rye flour. Still, there's no hard evidence. What isn't speculation is that some 24 people died as a result of the girls' "symptoms". Nineteen were hanged as witches (none of them the original seven, who accused others of bewitching them), four died in prison while awaiting trial, and one other, an old man in his eighties who refused to be tried, had a bunch of big rocks piled up on top of him (a circumstance that's largely non-conducive to breathing).

Sure, ergot might have been the cause of it all. My bet though is that it was just blasted teenagers.

...is what gangrenous ergotism was called when it first appeared in Europe in the ninth century. "Fire" of course because of the burning sensation the disease caused and "holy" because it came to seen as a divine punishment. Yet within two hundred years or so the named changed. By about 1050 an order of monks became known for treating the disease, the Order of St. Anthony. The brothers were highly skilled at formulating and applying plant balms that healed wounds and relaxed blood vessels (though they also excelled at performing amputations when those treatments failed). At their peak they had some 370 hospitals in France alone, conducting all manner of therapies, among them, change of diet. Yet since the connection between rye and ergotism wasn't understood, and because most of their patients were poor and had few if any other food options, the ergotism usually returned. However from the high Middle Ages onward, ergotism was known "St. Anthony's Fire".

I don't know about you, but all this talk of insanity, amputation and plague really makes me hungry. This week I hope to make two different rye breads: one a conventional "sandwich rye", light and fluffy and flavored with caraway, the other an old-world peasant rye...dark and dense to the point of being almost crumbly. The recipes are based on two rye formulas by Peter Reinhardt, changed somewhat to suit my own purposes. They go like this:

Sandwich Rye

For the sponge

7 ounces starter
5 ounces rye flour
4 ounces water
2 onions diced, sautéed and cooled

For the dough

2 pounds high gluten or bread flour
5 ounces rye flour
1 ounce brown sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons instant yeast
2 teaspoons caraway seeds
1 ounce vegetable oil
1 cup buttermilk
up to 1/2 cup water

Procedure: One day ahead, make the sponge. Combine all ingredients, cover and ferment 3-4 hours, until bubbly. The next day remove the sponge from the refrigerator and let warm up for one hour. To make the dough, pull to the sponge into pieces, then combine them with the rest of the ingredients except for the water in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a paddle (you can also do this by hand with a large bowl and metal spoon). When the dough starts to clump up, begin adding the water slowly, adding just enough to get it to come together in a ball. Let sit for 5 minutes.

Switch to the dough hook (or to a floured counter) and knead for 4 minutes in the mix, six if kneading by hand, but no more lest the dough get gummy (more about that later). Let rise for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Divide the dough into two or three equal pieces and shape into sandwich loaves or torpedo-shaped bâtards. Proof 90 minutes and bake in a 350 (for sandwich loaves) or 400 (for bâtards) oven for 40 minutes, rotating once. Transfer to rack and cool.

Old World Rye

This type of rye bread is usually made with coarser ground rye which more closely resembles the flours that peasants of old would have had to contend with. It is possible to find pumpernickel flour, rye meal, even whole cracked rye out there, but unless you're in a town that's home to a lot of Jewish bakers, you'll probably have to order it off the internet. As things are I can barely find rye flour here in Louisville, so, like the peasants of old, I'll just have to make do

For the starter

3.5 ounces starter
4.5 ounces rye flour
2 ounces water

For the dough

2 ounces whole wheat flour
13.5 cups rye flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
about 1 cup water

Procedure: Make the starter the day before. Combine the ingredients in a bowl adding just enough water to bring the starter together into a shaggy mass. Cover and ferment for 4 hours, or until doubled, then refrigerate overnight.

The next day take the starter out of the refrigerator and let it warm up for an hour or so. Cut it into pieces and add it to the flours and salt in a stand mixer (like the other recipe, you can also do this by hand). Again, stir in just enough water to form a ball. Knead for 4 minutes in the mixer, 6 minutes by hand until the dough becomes smooth and tacky — but not sticky. Ferment for four hours, divide into two pieces and shape into torpedo-shaped bâtards. Proof for two hours and bake for 25-30 minutes at 425 degrees. Transfer to rack and cool.

I've spent enough time around musicians and kitchen workers (who oftentimes are one and the same thing) to know that there are at least a few of you out there right now saying to yourselves, dude, you mean there was a time when you could trip just by eating toast? That is so cool. Yeah well, let's remember that ergot-infected rye was a far cry from the synthesized, purified LSD that Jimi Hendrix sprinkled on his corn flakes in the morning. What we're talking about is an unrefined chemical, one that was mixed with a variety of other toxins, the cumulative effect of which was a disease known as ergotism.

The symptoms of ergotism are classified in two types. There's convulsive ergotism, a nervous disorder in which sufferers can be subjected to anything from muscle spasms and hallucinations to violent contortions, trembling, shaking, vomiting, mania and psychosis. That, however, is just the beginning, since ergot can also cause blood vessels in the body to constrict, leading to a condition known as gangrenous ergotism. In this, blood flow is cut off to the extremities, causing infections, hideous burning sensations and gangrene (with all its associated losses of fingers, toes and limbs). Not the way even the most committed stoner would want to spend his weekend.

Did these kinds of symptoms occur every time Medieval peasants consumed ergot? Certainly not. Even uneducated, preindustrial peoples would have been smart enough to notice a connection between such extreme illnesses and their diet over time. The insidious thing about ergotism, you see, is that it only occasionally strikes that hard: during a particularly wet spring, let's say, when rye flowers stay open longer...or after an especially bad wheat year, when people made their bread with a higher proportion of rye. In a worst-case scenario it might be a combination of both. Just such a year killed an estimated 40,000 people in southern France in 944. Though even that is small potatoes when you consider that some historians blame mild ergotism for softening up the European immune system in advance of the Bubonic Plague, which as you may recall did a number on Europe to the tune of two-thirds of its population. That is what you call one serious bad trip.

So what makes rye the world's scariest cereal? Without question, it's its high susceptibility to infection by the fungus Claviceps purpurea, otherwise known as ergot. Yeah, I know what you're thinking: oooh fungus! I'm terrified! Well, this ain't no garden variety fungus, buster. It does a lot more than cause unsightly yellow toenails. It's killed hundreds of thousands of people over the course of Western history, caused the fall of kingdoms, and is the likely source of what generations of Europeans and Americans thought was demonic possession. Oh, so NOW you're interested. Kids today...I swear.

But let's start at the beginning, shall we? For rye has an interesting pedigree as a food. A relative latecomer to the gastronomic scene, rye didn't come into widespread cultivation until about 400 A.D. (compare that to wheat, which has been cultivated for almost 20,000 years). The reason may be that while rye is a close cousin of wheat, it doesn't possess many of wheat's critical bread-making qualities (we'll get into that later in the week). Where rye was widely grown, it was almost always used as a supplement to wheat, not as a total replacement, except perhaps in a very bad crop year. A food for the poor, in other words.

As long as there's been rye, there's been ergot. In fact just about everyone whoever grew rye before about 1850 simply thought ergot was a natural part of the rye plant, not the infectious, disease-causing fungus it really is. Ergot is a spore than enters the rye plant through the flower in the spring. As it grows, it replaces some of the grains on the end of the stalk, producing long, dark brown growths known as "cockspurs". It is these growths (technically known as sclerotia) that are the source of the problem in humans. However since no one understood that until the industrial age, they were simply treated like a normal aspect of rye grain, and ground up with the rest of the healthy rye to make flour.

The sinister detail is that ergot contains a variety of highly toxic alkaloid compounds, one of which is lysergic acid, a compound whose chemical cousin is lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD.

I've been racking my brain to try to figure out what would be best to blog about for Halloween week, and determined that the scariest ingredient in the baking world is, hands-down, rye flour. More on exactly what's so scary about rye as the week progresses.

Another good comment comes in this morning from a reader:

I do believe you when you say that fried items aren't unhealthy just because they're fried. But doesn't it depend on how you fry them? If what you say about temperatures and the age of the oil are correct, it would seem smarter to eat fried foods at home. I can't imagine that fairs or even restaurants would do such a good job at it.

Indeed so. You never know how old the oil might be in any restaurant (or food stall) fryer. Just this past weekend I had some of the best french fries I'd eaten in years — at a little no-name restaurant in rural Kentucky. They were better than the vast majority of the frites I've eaten in fancy, big-city bistros. A big part of the reason: because they really knew how to handle their oil. However it just goes to show that as in most things culinary, good frying is an art best practiced at home.

(And if you're not one, why on earth are you reading this blog?) There's a great new book on baking science just out, Bakewise by Shirley O. Corriher. Actually I don't know for a fact that it's great, since I don't own it yet. However if it's anything like Ms. Corriher's kitchen science title, Cookwise, I'm sure it'll be well worth the investment. Well, back to the oven...

A good frying question came in late last night (in fact about 2:30 A.M. — who are these all-night deep frying enthusiasts?). The question was whether it's OK to combine fresh oil with older oil. The writer said he'd seen several recipes where he was specifically instructed NOT to do that. And yes indeed, plenty of recipe writers hyperventilate about NEVER mixing old frying oil with new. All I can think is that none of these folks have done very much frying, for not only CAN you combine old fry oil with new, you absolutely, positively should.

Which of course raises the question: why? The short answer is because oil and water don't mix. Drop a wet food like a fritter into a pan of hot oil and the two will instinctively repel each other: the fat will want to stay with the surrounding fat, the water with the water-laden food. That's good to a large extent, since that action, combined with the outrush of steam that I talked about in yesterday's post, is what's responsible for keeping food free of soaked-in oil. Over time of course, that mechanism breaks down. Heat and oxygen exposure take their toll on fat molecules, breaking them into smaller pieces. Some of these pieces are chemical soaps. What do soaps do? Why, they allow fat and water to mix of course. So as the proportion of soaps in the fry oil increases, oil starts sneaking past the steam and water barrier, soaking into the food and...well, you know the rest of the story.

The thing is, while you don't want to fry in oil that's too old and soapy, you also don't want your oil to be too totally fresh either. No soap whatsoever means the forces of repulsion will keep the oil so far away from the food (molecularly speaking), you won't get the drying and browning that deep frying is so famous for (you'll also sometimes get a funny, almost synthetic aftertaste).

Avoid the trap of pathologically fresh fry oil by cooling, storing and re-using it. A single two or three-quart batch should be good for half a dozen uses, provided you're not frying up five pounds of fritters at a go. Just top it off to whatever level is appropriate and carry on with confidence, knowing that you can tell too-old oil by its dark color and its fishy smell (not actually caused by fish but by smelly chemical compounds called ketones, a by-product of oil breakdown). When it finally comes time to throw it out, save a couple of tablespoons to "seed" the next batch with soap.

Oh and, you know never to deep fry in cast iron, yes? Iron speeds oil breakdown by about 100 times over stainless steel. A sure way to ensure your oil will only last you for one use.

As as rule, you want fruits that stand up reasonably well to heat and aren't too wet, so citrus is out altogether. Of what remains I'd say bananas are a good choice, fresh peaches, pineapples, even firm ripe pears will work. Stay away from berries, despite what some recipe writers will tell you (they melt and/or explode in the fryer). I've also heard of people making fritters out of dried fruits like prunes and dates, but have never tried them.

Instead of a frit-ter you mean? No, it can't. I know, there's a certain contingent of food alarmists out there that is forever seeking to de-joy life's most elemental pleasures, but there's simply no cooking technique out there that rivals frying for things like fritters or doughnuts. Oh yes, I can just hear some of them out there now: You're just saying that because like every other flabby American you're addicted to fat, Mr. Lardo. But the truth is that frying isn't about eating fat so much as it is about cooking in it. For foods cooked in fat possess properties unlike any others.

When frying is done well, which is to say at the proper temperature with reasonably fresh oil, it is actually much closer to steaming. Immersed into a hot, dense environment, deep fried foods take in more heat faster than foods cooked by other methods. The effect is to turn any water they contain — almost instantaneously — to steam. What does that do? Well, for the exterior, the outrush of moisture creates an insta-dried (read: crispy) skin. For the interior it means lightning-fast steam cooking that leaves the interior tender, moist and (in the case of bready items) fluffy. That unique combination of crispiness and tenderness/fluffiness can be found nowhere else in kitchendom.

Sure you can replicate the steam cooking by, well, steaming your fritter. But then being such a wet cooking method, there's zero hope it'll end up crispy. What about the oven? The trouble there is that by the time you got the outside of your fritter crispy, the inside is a dried, mummified husk. Nope, if you want crispy-plus-moist (and fluffy), there's only one place to get it: the deep fryer. What price will you pay? Maybe a teaspoon or so of residual cooking fat for a fried food the size of a doughnut. That's small, in my estimation, for that inimitable hot and crunchy fried food sensation.

Interesting you should ask that since there's quite a lot of confusion on the matter. What shape should authenitc fritters be? Should they be more doughy or more crispy? Sweet or savory? Fruit or vegetable? Unfortunately there is no authoritative answer to any of those questions, since a fritter is literally just a "fried thing". The word comes from the Old French friture, which has its roots in the Latin frigere which, unsurprisingly, means "fried".

There are two basic types of fritters: those that are made from dough, and hence are more closely related to doughnuts and funnel cakes, and those that are made by dipping something (just about anything) in batter. Of the two, it's hard to say which came first. Apple fritters are some of the oldest fritters known and they're batter-dipped. On the other, hand fried dough pieces date back to at least ancient Rome in the West and well before that in the Middle East and India.

Here in the States we enjoy both styles, as evidenced by the near equal popularity of the aforementioned dipped apple fritter and it's dough-based Southern cousin, the corn fritter. Of course one is sweet, the other savory, one dipped, the other made from dough, one made from a fruit, the other from a vegetable (really a grain), one is ball-shaped and the other is flat. Yet we call them the same thing. Why? I dunno. They're both fried finger food. Get that quizzical look off your face and eat.

Why not indeed? Ever since friend and reader Kristin wrote in to suggest I employ my bread starter to make onion rings, I've been battering everything in sight with Kentucky sourdough. Of course, not being made of San Francisco critters, my Midwestern starter can't properly be called "sourdough", but "sourdough apple fritters" sounds a lot better than "natural levain fritters", donchathink? Here you go:

1 1/2 cups sourdough starter
1/4 milk (or water or beer)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground cinnamon
A few gratings fresh nutmeg

Stir until blended, dip and fry!

Now there's a picture of fall, if I do say so. I usually get these (or something very much like them) at the Covered Bridge Festival in Rockford, Indiana. I didn't make it there this year, sadly, but a warm plate of them on the back porch this morning — accompanied by a hot cup of cider of course — really put me in the spirit. NOW it's fall!

Start by putting your flour, sugar, salt and spices into a bowl...

...and whisk until blended.

Add your beer.

And a little more elbow grease.

Now then, get your oil heating. You want to use vegetable or canola, in a deep pot that's no more than half way full. When the oil reaches 380 degrees, dip your apple slices (you want to use fairly thin slices so they cook all the way through...these are Granny Smiths, but just about any baking apple will work):

And gently lay them into the oil, being careful not to splash. Fry for about two minutes, then, using your spider, give them a turn and fry another two minutes.

Lay them out on a paper towel-lined plate to drain. Serve while still warm, dusted with powdered sugar.

What discussion of apple agriculture in nineteenth century America would be complete without at least a couple of paragraphs devoted to Johnny Appleseed? Oh yes, he was a real person, proper name Jonathan Chapman, born in 1774 in Leominster, Massachusettes, and one of the most eccentric characters ever to set a bare foot on the American frontier. Part freelance nurseryman, part missionary, part real estate speculator, he was ALL kook, known to wear a tin pot on his head, put out camp fires to keep from burning mosquitoes, and punish his guilty feet (which once stepped on a worm) by throwing his shoes away. Yet he was also an extremely canny businessman who traveled Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and parts beyond planting makeshift nurseries for Westward-heading settlers.

The popular image of Johnny Appleseed traveling the countryside like an early American flower child scattering seeds is utter hogwash. There was great method in his apparent madness. His strategy was to collect apple seeds by the bushel (throwaways from Eastern cider mills) and travel the frontier looking for stretches of real estate where frontier families might settle. Once there he'd plant his apple seeds, build fences around them to protect the shoots from deer, then move on to the next place. If all went well, by the time the settlers arrived, grown saplings would be there waiting for them. The land he claimed he kept (it was all free as far as the US government was concerned) and by the time he died he'd amassed a real estate fortune worth millions, even in 1845 dollars.

No one would ever have guessed that by looking at him, of course. He traveled on foot because he believed riding horses was a sin (he felt the same way about grafting apple trees). He wore rags, since he was constantly giving his clothes away to needy frontier families, whom he visited as he wandered. For them, Johnny Appleseed was a kind of celebrity, a fellow everyone had heard about, who just might drop in one cold evening for a meal and a sermon (his own). In that sense he also provided entertainment for lonely settlers, and probably more than a little solace too. Watching Appleseed head out to the nearest bush after dinner to bed down for the night — as he also known to do, even when warm beds were on offer — more than one dirt poor settler must have thought to himself: well, at least I'm not THAT guy.

Thinking about it last night, I realized it was unfair to characterize frontier apple orchards as being all about drinking. They weren't. They were also about gambling. (Albeit in a fairly harmless Powerball Lotto sort of way). How so? Well, these days we Americans are fairly complacent about apples. We shop at big markets and select from the few tried-and-true varieties that we use for eating, pies, baking and whatnot. But it wasn't always so. There was a period around the turn of the last century when America was on fire to discover the new hot "eating apple".

Where did they come from? Why, anywhere. That's what made it so interesting. For you see, apple trees are what are known in botanical circles as heterozygous, which means that, just as in humans, the genes of parents are "scrambled" (for lack of a better word) in their offspring. Thus whenever you plant an apple seed, regardless of what kind of apple it's from, you never know what the characteristics of the resulting tree will be, nor what it's fruit might taste like. The seeds from an apple tree that produces medium-large, medium-sweet red apples may give rise to offspring with tiny, green, mouth-puckeringly tart apples, giant bland and mealy apples, hard sweet and tangy apples, you name it. The only way to achieve consistency in an apple orchard is by grafting.

This wasn't a problem for frontier families, since all pretty much all apples of the edible type are good for juicing (sweet or tart, all the juice goes into the same barrel). Thus, they were just as happy to have a field full of different sorts of apple trees as uniform ones. However it was just precisely that diversity that gave them a strategic advantage for developing new apple varieties, since you never knew when some scraggly misshapen runt of a tree growing on your property might pop out some truly sublime piece of fruit.

And so, each fall, everyone — from professional botanists to dirt-poor subsistence farmers — would scour their lands, tasting the offerings of young sapling trees, praying for the random mutation that might deliver fame and fortune to their doors. For you see big commercial growers (not unlike today's packaged food R&D departments) were always looking newer, ever more exciting products, and willing to shell out big bucks for the agricultural equivalent of the double stuff Oreo. So each year the hunt was on for the new Pippin, Baldwin, Macintosh, York Imperial, Jonathan or Kentucky Red streak.

Seen in that light, what a classic example of American "strike-it-rich" entrepreneurialism the apple orchard is. And for that matter, what a great metaphor for America, where even the most common and unpalatable immigrant crab might be transformed into a shining Red Delicious if only Lady Fortune were to smile but a little.

All that talk of drinking made me think, well, why not do a beer batter? They're as good for sweet fritters as they are for savory fry-ups like fish. All you need is a little sugar in the mix, and to replace the herbs with spices. Like so:

1 cup all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
pinch of ground cinnamon (and/or a few gratings of nutmeg)
pinch of salt
8 ounces lager-style beer

Blend dry ingredients together, then whisk in beer. Done!

Oh, and for those of you who might be tempted to worry about the alcohol, don't. It cooks right out when the fritters hit the oil.

Had a few notes come in overnight, all saying essentially the same thing: are you pulling our legs, Joe? Did frontier children really drink? Oh yes, my friends, they did, for reasons I outlined yesterday afternoon: because alcoholic beverages were often safer than water. The reason should be fairly clear: microbes can't survive in an environment that's 10-15% alcohol. This is a fact that peoples all over the Eurasian continent and the Mediterranean discovered millennia ago (though of course they had no concept of microbes): people who drank beer, wine and other alcoholic drinks (like kefirs) stayed healthier than those who drank ground water. Sure, in time a lot of those people would eventually die of cirrhosis of the liver...but which is better: to die of liver failure at 50? Or of hepatitis when you're five? The question answers itself.

So early Americans were simply carrying on a tradition that had been proven to work in the Old World. In the North, where grain was grown, people drank beer. In the West, Midwest and the eastern seaboard, they drank cider. Down south, where corn was king, they drank, unfortunately, whiskey. That of course was far more damaging than ciders and beers, which at least contained a high proportion of water. The sight of poor southern children drinking large quantities of whiskey (up to a quart a day by some reports) horrified northern travelers and journalists in the 1800's, providing fuel for the temperance movement. The fact is, though it might seem otherwise, our forebears drank MUCH more alcohol than we do today, on average about 400% more. Was it for health reasons or out of addiction? Well, certainly it started out being the former and frequently ended as the latter. However it's beyond doubt that while alcohol does constitute its own scourge on our modern societies, the fact that we have societies at all is at least partly attributable to the consumption of hard drinks.

The poor apple. It's had a bad rap since just about forever. Sure, nowadays its image has been plastered over to create a wholesome veneer, but that can't fully erase centuries of bad PR. For over a millennium the apple has been synonymous with sin in the Christian tradition. No one knows exactly why. Genesis doesn't specify what the "forbidden fruit" actually was, in fact there are those who to this day argue that the forbidden fruit was a fig. So why the bad rap, historically speaking? Perhaps because the Latin word for apple, malus, is strikingly similar to the Latin word for "evil", malum.

An unfortunate nomenclature, however, hasn't kept people from eating and enjoying apples, from Khazakstan (where the apple is thought to have originated) up and down the Silk Road from Europe to Japan. I daresay it was when the apple reached North America that the real trouble began.

Ever wonder why the apple is practically synonymous with America? It's because wherever North American settlers went on the continent, apples were never far behind (in fact, as I will explain later, apple trees were often already there, waiting for them). Virtually every frontier homestead had an apple orchard on it. Because the settlers couldn't get enough of apple pie? Er, no...not exactly. What settlers wanted most from apple trees was not their fruit, but their juice. Frontier life, you see, offered very little in the way of beverage choices. Aside from rain or river water there was...there was, um...well, nothing. Apple cider was a welcome relief from all the sameness.

Extremely wholesome, yes? Except that when apple cider is left sitting around for a while it tends to ferment into "hard" cider, which (depending on how enterprising a person you were) could then be further distilled into apple whiskey or "applejack". What harm is there in having a little of the good stuff lying around the farm? Plenty if you were a woman living with a drunken husband, or worse, his drunken children, since it was common in frontier days for children to drink alcohol (mostly because like beer, it was a safe alternative to tainted stream or pond water). Thus as frontier towns came to be more civilized, all-female temperance movements began to spring up. Their number one target? You guessed it: apple trees. In fact the "logo" of one of the most successful temperance organizations, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, was a hatchet striking the trunk of an apple tree.

It wasn't until the very early 1900's when in desperation, American apple growers hired a New York advertising agency to change the apple's image. The slogan "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" was the result, and it's fair to say it worked.

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Having just finished a rustic, though still rather refined, French treatment of apples, I think I'd like to do something a bit more...oh, I don't know quite how to say it..."folksy". Fall weather seems to bring that out. So what about some apple fritters this week? Oh yeah, that's the stuff.

The wife loves to tease me about my dreams. Why? Because nine times out of ten they're the most boring internal narratives anyone has ever heard of. Mrs. Pastry wakes up most mornings reeling from some wild escapade she's been on. I'm always a good audience for the whatever-it-is, asking questions and offering up half-baked pop-psychology analyses. Of course once she's finished, she invariably asks "so what did you dream about last night?" Much of the time I can't remember, though when I can, I don't want to tell her because I know the teasing I'll get. Case-in-point last night, where I dreamt I was a security guard in a bank that never got robbed (I polished my shoes). The night before I dreamt I was sitting in a business meeting watching a power point presentation, and the night before that, that I was eating a grilled cheese sandwich in the student union building of my college alma mater. Rip-roaring thrill rides, all of them. Clear evidence of a dynamic inner universe. Sometimes I wonder, though, what does that say about me?

I got a very interesting email on this subject recently, from a pastry student by the name of Zach. It reads:

An interesting phenomenon has been occurring in class for the last 2 weeks. We are making apple tarte tatins with granny smith apples. These granny smiths seem to have been picked a bit too early. The sugar is not quite fully developed and there is a bit of astringent puckering in the mouth sensation (like from an unripe hachiya persimmon). However, the apples are not mealy. Now the strange part: the apples have been breaking down significantly and getting mushy during cooking/final baking of the tatins. Our instructor is great - certified master pastry chef who is very familiar with this recipe and technique - so the technique is there - just the apples are not behaving. We assume these are last years crop of apples, but it still doesn't account for their mealiness only after cooking. We are trying to research if there is any correlation between the age of an apple and its tendency to mush out after being cooked. It seems that if the apples were stored incorrectly that the mealy texture would be evident before cooking. I personally think it may have something to do with the possible premature picking of the apples. Anyway, if you have any ideas on this matter (scientific and/or anecdotal), your input would be much appreciated.

A very interesting conundrum indeed. And in fact the taste and texture problems are related, for it's sweet-tasting apples that tend to bake up well, while milder/tarter ones are better for things like apple sauce. Why? It all has to do with the behavior of starch molecules, which are of course abundant in apples. Starches, as you'll recall from other posts on the subject, are long molecules — chains of sugars — that plants use for structural purposes. Cold, they're usually quite rigid. Heat them though, and a funny thing happens: they start absorbing moisture. In a fruit, this has the effect of deflating cells (which are themselves bags of mostly water), which causes them to collapse and turn the flesh to mush. Here it helps to think of a potato: very starchy, hard when cold, mushy when cooked. Starchy apples behave in much the same way.

Granny Smith apples can be either sweet or starchy depending on when they're picked. Like all apples, they convert starch to sugar as they ripen, a process that begins in the inside of the fruit and works its way outward. If the apple is picked early and the process isn't complete, the result will be breakdown in the oven (especially around the outside of the apple pieces, giving the impression that they've "melted"). That makes Granny Smiths something of a dicey proposition for baking. If you go that route — as I did with my Tarte Tatin yesterday — make sure they're sweet-tasting and not too tart. Otherwise, it's probably safer to just stick with the tried-and-trues that I listed below.

Oh, and, in case you were wondering, mealiness in an eating apple is also related to moisture, but in that case the cells are leaking water (due to overripeness), which likewise causes them to collapse.

This is a very important question where Tarte Tatin is concerned. Pick the right apple and the result is a glistening, golden presentation of cooked apples on a rich, crispy base. Pick the wrong one and you get a smear of applesauce on a sodden slab of dough. The difference can be that dramatic.

In general you're looking for a firm apple that is also sweet. Golden delicious was a popular choice of yesteryear, and it's still the go-to apple for a lot of bakers (it's excellent for baking and easy to find). Lately, Gala apples have become popular for tarts, though I have a hard time understanding why...they tend to keep their shape (mostly), but to my mind lose an awful lot of flavor in the oven. Other decent choices are Jonathans and Jonagolds, Winesaps and Newton Pippins. Best of all, if you can find them, are Red Romes, also known as Rome Beauties, probably the preeminent baking apple.

Avoid at all costs Red Delicious and McIntosh or anything labeled a "cooking apple" since these types break down to mush with heat. The Granny Smith, though it's the first apple that pops into most peoples' minds when you talk about firm apples, is actually a rather so-so choice, for reasons I'll get into next.

I think I was.

There are a few variations on this very simple recipe, most of which have to do with how you prepare your caramel, and what size pieces of apple you employ. I'm a member of the make-your-caramel-first-and-don't-use-gigantic-apple-pieces contingent. We have strong representation in Washington and a muscular lobbying effort.

I like to make the caramel before I bake because I like darker caramels. So, I begin by putting about two-thirds of a cup of sugar into a 9-inch cast iron skillet (you can use a ten, or an eight...Tartes Tatins are casual affairs, just adjust your sugar quantity a bit to compensate for the size difference). I then moisten it with a couple of tablespoons of water (the quantity isn't important, you just want the sugar to have a "wet sand" look to it).

Turn the heat up to high and start swirling the pan as best you can (cast iron can be a bit heavy for "swirling").

After three or four minutes the sugar will begin to brown...

...then turn light amber, and shortly dark amber. Notice how the foam on top of the caramel is deceiving. It gives the appearance of a light amber when in fact the caramel underneath (as you can see over on the left there) is really a dark amber.

When the caramel is the color you like, turn off the heat and add 3-4 tablespoons of butter to the pan. It'll foam up some and maybe splatter, so, be careful.

When the splattering has died down, stir the caramel until all the butter has been incorporated. Be prompt with this step, otherwise the caramel will firm up in the pan to the point you won't be able to work with it. Should that happen, just return the pan to the heat for 30 seconds or so to loosen the caramel up.

What's the alternative to this? Simply, to spread your sugar out in the pan and scatter the butter pieces over the top — then add the apples and bake it all together in the oven until the sugar and butter turn bubbly. That works, but in my experience doesn't make a very flavorful caramel. Some people use brown sugar to give the caramel a little more character...I still don't care for the method, personally.

Let the caramel cool, then lay on your apple pieces on top of it. Some people use thin slices, others use anything up to half an entire apple. I like slices, but chunky ones, so I cut my apples into six pieces and use those. This is about four baseball-sized apples, roughly 2 1/2 pounds before slicing.

The advantage here is that you still get nice big pieces of apple in the finished tart, but the chunks aren't so large that you have to pre-bake them before putting your pastry layer on (should you decide you want to use quarters or halves, you'll need to pre-bake the apples in the pan with the caramel - or sugar and butter - for between 20 and 30 minutes).

While the pan cools, roll out your pastry. Here I have about a 14-ounce piece of homemade puff pastry. A single sheet of store bought works just fine too. Roll it out to about the size of your pan, then trim it roughly round with a pizza cutter (save the pieces for the puff pastry scrap ball you have going in the freezer...you've got one going, don't you?).

Then simply lay the pastry on the pan like so:

And bake in a 400 oven for about thirty minutes, or until it looks like this:

When the tart is done, remove it to a rack and let it cool for at least fifteen minutes before turning it out. To do that, just place a plate or platter over the pan, then, holding the platter on with one hand, flip both the skillet and the platter over. The tart will flop right out.

Here's it important to note that you can leave your tart fully baked and in the pan all day if you need to. Just keep about a 375 oven going around dessert time, and warm the tart back up for 15 minutes or so. Let rest, turn out, and presto — nice warm Tarte Tatin.

Traditionally this type of pastry is served with a dollop of crème fraîche — which is excellent. Ice cream is a great way to go too. Last night Mrs. Pastry served me a slice with a small scoop of her homemade pumpkin caramel ice cream (remember that batch of deep, dark caramel I made two weeks ago? There you go). I'll be biking and extra lap around the park this evening to compensate.

Culinary history, you mean? A lot of the myths you routinely hear about the history of food come, interestingly enough, from the legendary Larousse Gastronomique — which, if you don't own, you might seriously consider picking up. It's the grandaddy of cooking encyclopedias. Its focus is, of course, French food and ingredients, and it's chock full of all sorts of fascinating information including cooking techniques and recipes. It is also, however, the world's leading repository of culinary fable. In that sense, it's best suited to a spot on the bookshelf next to the Brothers Grimm.

Tarte Tatin has a somewhat odd history, having supposedly been invented in 1888 at a hotel owned by two spinster sisters (the Tatins) in the town of Lamotte-Beuvronin, just south of Orléans in north-central France. It's full and proper name is tarte des demoiselles Tatin, or "The Tatin Spinsters' Tart", but here in the states we simply call it "Tarte Tatin" out of sensitivity to the matrimonially-challenged. It is, quite simply, and upside-down tart of apples and caramel on puff pastry. There's nothing more to it.

The story behind its invention is standard food column fare. It was the busy season at the Tatin Hotel and the cooking spinster, I mean sister, Stéphanie Tatin, absent-mindedly prepared her famous caramel apple tart in a pan without a crust. As it was too late in the day for her to start over, she simply put a layer of pastry over the top, baked it and flipped the whole thing over before serving it. Marveilleuse! A star was born.

Those who've read the blog for a while know that I don't much go in for tales like this, since they're almost always fabrications, charming little culinary vignettes that read more like Smurfs episodes than real history. Upside-down cakes and tarts in fact have a very long pedigree, dating back at least to the 1700's, probably much further. The Tatin Spinsters — sorry — Sisters made a good one. So good, in fact, that their recipe for a caramel and apple upside-down tart was eventually put on the menu at Maxim's in Paris, where it became internationally known.

And actually, there's a story there as well. Supposedly the chef of Maxim's at the time — a fellow whose name remains a convenient mystery — so loved the Tatin's upside-down tart that he sent a spy disguised as a gardener up to their hotel to steal the recipe. That also strikes me as unlikely, since when those sorts of things happen, the recipe is usually re-named after the chef or restaurant that did the stealing. My guess is that the tart was already regionally famous when Maxim's found out about it, and they simply adopted in the same way all the famous restaurants of that era adopted "named" dishes...like Eggs Benedict or Beef Wellington. They probably kicked it up a proverbial notch as well, since variations like pear and pineapple were also well known around that time.

Having made a freezer-full of buttercreams this last week I have to say I've had enough of my mixer for a while. The good news is that I now have enough buttercream to see me through the holidays. Also, by happy coincidence, my advertiser, Foodbuzz, sent me a check for $50 yesterday, which will just about cover all the expenses. I knew I'd end up being happy I sold out.

So now I'd like to turn my attention back to the project I was intending to do before I got sidetracked by caramel and buttercream: Tarte Tatin. It's a very simple preparation that's perfectly suited to the fall: apples and caramel. And butter, of course, we can't forget that. For all you laminated dough makers, this is one of those easy recipes that makes you glad you've got a little home-made puff pastry hanging around in the freezer. For those of you who have yet to try your hand at laminated dough, fear not. It works awfully darn well with the store-bought stuff too.

That was fast. Reader Linda writes in to ask whether chocolate buttercreams are the same thing as chocolate frostings. The answer is no. Chocolate frostings — milk, dark, and white — are more like ganaches than they are like buttercreams, which is to say they are chocolates made spreadable by the addition of fat or oil. A standard chocolate frosting is simply a whipped combination of melted chocolate and soft butter. White chocolate frosting is usually a combo of white chocolate and butter, though it can also be made with a neutral-tasting oil. Myself, I tend not to like frostings so much on the outside of cakes, but enjoy them on the inside, as a filling, where their density is more of a virtue than a drawback.

Perhaps my favorite feature of real buttercreams, aside from their fundamental deliciousness, is the extent to which they can be manipulated. For the creative baker, there's virtually no end to it. A complete catalog is impossible, though I'll do my best to summarize some of the most common variations.

Extracts are obvious, and there are more of them on the market than you might think. All kinds of fruit and candy flavors are available, though to my mind very few of them are truly great for buttercreams. Exceptions are of course vanilla, then hazelnut, almond, coconut, peppermint, cinnamon, butterscotch, maple, and citrus flavors like lemon and orange (though for a true citrus flavor you'll want to add some real citrus zest as well, plus maybe a couple of tablespoons of juice).

Liquers and spirits are another natural fit. Add up to three or four tablespoons of just about anything. Classics include kirsch, rum, brandy, bourbon, Amaretto, Kahlua, Grand Marnier and many others.

Then of course there are chocolates of various kinds, in pretty much any combination you can think of. Melted, they can be added to any finished buttercream, up to about six ounces for a French buttercream, eight for a meringue buttercream (in general, the darker the chocolate the better). In that family of flavors is of course coffee. A couple of tablespoons of espresso powder dissolved in a teaspoon of boiling water makes a fabulous coffee buttercream (or mocha when added to a chocolate buttercream).

Fruit flavors are another classic buttercream compliment. I already discussed citrus flavors, but berry purées like raspberry and strawberry work great too. About half a cup does the trick. You can also use jam, but you'll need to heat it slightly to get it to a pourable consistency.

If you really want to get jiggy widdit, a quarter cup of peanut butter can be added to a recipe of meringue buttercream...though I confess I've never tried it (seems a bit much to me).

That's about all I can think of for the additives — though that's not even getting into the manipulations of the base ingredients that are possible. You can swap out your sugar syrup and use honey or maple syrup instead, or use brown sugar or maple sugar instead of white. You can supplement your syrups with a few tablespoons of dark caramel or caramel syrup — even molasses. There's really no end to it.

I should say at this point that while all these ideas will flavor your buttercream, very few will color it in a manner befitting, say, an orange or a raspberry icing. For that you'll need to add colorings. In my experience (though as I said, I'm no decorator) paste colors provide more intensity, though liquids, especially for the novice, are easier to control.

So then...what are you waiting for? Go nuts!

I've had several readers write in to ask that. In fact I posted them in my personal order of preference (for cakes) ...Italian meringue first, American-style last.

You know...cheese, bread, chocolate...buttercream? It's enough to give a food-conscious Yankee a complex. However it's really not such a bad thing when you consider that Americans (and other New Worlders) are and always have been consummate experimenters — forever ready to cast tradition aside and embrace the new. Sometimes this works out for the best (think peanut butter, light bulbs and artificial hearts), sometimes not so much (PCBs, Doritos, atom bombs). But there's an awful lot of stuff in the middle. Vegetable shortening leaps to mind. Sure it doesn't offer the same taste, texture and satisfaction level that butter does, but its functional benefits, you have to admit, are formidable. There's also the price point. Let's not underestimate the significance of that. But then that's really a big part of the American ethos, is it not? Making the comforts that were once the exclusive domain of the rich available to all? Clearly, the quality isn't always there, but you can't blame a rough-and-tumble frontier nation for trying, now can you?

When you're the father of two very small girls you ask yourself a lot of things, like: how many more games of "lost pony in the fairy forest" can I play before my masculine self-image completely implodes? By extension, you wonder what it might be like raising boys, whether your days of sipping tea from little china cups might be replaced with more guy-like activities...showing your son how to field a grounder, talking about shaving, things like that.

Well, this last weekend I was (once again) brought back to reality when the Pastry Clan paid a visit to Mrs. Pastry's sister's family at their vacation house in Michigan. The weekend was a delight, the weather perfect, Lake Michigan a pristine blue. A grand time was had by all. The kids had a particularly good time playing hide-and-seek and flashlight tag (my sister- and brother-in-law have two boys and a girl roughly the ages of our girls). The boys played great with the little Joan and Josephine, despite the fact that they're bigger and more physical generally.

However it was in the off moments between games that were the most revealing of their differences. Where the girls tended to retreat to a quiet spot to draw or play with books or dollies, the boys wound themselves into minor frenzies...running, jumping, throwing action figures and balls. At one point yesterday I went to fetch young Josephine a cup of water so she could play "tea". On the way I passed a bedroom, inside of which was one of her cousins in his batman pajamas, jumping up and down as high and energetically as he possibly could, shouting Poop! Poop! at the top of his lungs.

He's a terrific, well-behaved kid, he really is. This was just his boy-way of blowing off extra steam. However I thought to myself on the way back to the living room, cup in hand, that the fairy forest is really a pretty decent place to live.

Once you see how this is made, you won't wonder why American-style buttercreams have become the new standard — even in upscale bakeries — all over the world. OK, maybe not in the pâtisseries of Paris, but pretty much everywhere else. The reasons are primarily functional. Not only are the buttercreams in this family a snap to make, they stand up to adverse conditions that cause traditional all-butter buttercreams to run down and collect in pools on buffet tables. From the standpoint of commercial bakeries, therefore, they are a godsend. For the the rest of us...eh, not so much. The basic formula is this:

8 ounces soft butter
4 ounces room-temperature vegetable shortening
1 pound powdered (confectioner's) sugar
1-2 tablespoons water

Begin by putting both your fats in bowl of of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle (beater) attachment.

Beat until the two are incorporated and somewhat creamy.

Now add the powdered sugar in a steady stream.

Beat until it's all incorporated.

Now then, you can see from the texture that it's rather paste-like at this point. Nearly a frosting, but a little too stiff.

So, with the mixer running on high, dribble a tablespoon or two of water down into the bowl. This will soften and "fluff" the buttercream up.

And you're done.

As with other buttercreams, now is when you add flavoring or coloring as you wish.

One key difference that you can see with this buttercream is that unlike all-butter buttercreams, this one is perfectly, pristinely white. That obviously gives it a big advantage when it comes to coloring, since the decorator doesn't have to compensate for the normal yellow tinge.

It's also dynamite for piping, since as I said, it'll stand up to just about any environmental conditions. Especially when it's made with all shortening (as it frequently is in big supermarkets or chain stores), it's practically indestructible. It'll stand up to high temperatures and direct sunlight, and with a little bit of cornstarch (corn flour) added — a tablespoon or two for a quantity this size — to high humidity as well.

The sacrifice is of course taste and texture. Don't get me wrong: many, many people really like this kind of buttercream. Increasing numbers of people have never tasted anything else. However it is quite sweet compared to traditional buttercreams (it's 4-to-3 sugar-to-fat instead of 4-to-3 fat-to-sugar), and because all powdered sugar has at least a little cornstarch in it to keep it from clumping, a faint cereal aftertaste. It's also slightly grainy, since even though the sugar crystals in powdered sugar are so fine you can't see them with the naked eye, they aren't so small that our tongues can't detect them (an amazingly sensitive device, the human tongue). Further, it also creates that slick, fatty sensation in the inside of one's mouth, since shortening doesn't melt at body temperature.

So then, while as I said the functional benefits of American buttercreams are undeniable, to me they come at too high a price. That's why, given a choice, I'll go for a traditional buttercream every time.

Leave it to the French to find a way to make one of the richest preparations in all of pastrydom even richer. How do they do that? By employing egg yolks in their classic buttercream instead of an egg white foam. What impact does this have on taste and texture? As you'd expect it makes the finished product denser and still more buttery tasting, yet it renders this form of buttercream probably the silkiest and most luxurious of the lot. The ingredients are as follows:

6 egg yolks, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
1 pound unsalted, soft butter

Start by putting your room temperature yolks into the bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with the whip attachment:

Turn the mixer on high and whip the yolks for five minutes or so, until they appear light in color and somewhat foamy.

While the mixer is going, prepare your sugar syrup. Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan and bring them up to 248 degrees Fahrenheit. Oops, this is a little hot.

Immediately pour the syrup into a pyrex measure for easier handling.

Now then, as with Italian meringue buttercream, start drizzling the syrup into the yolks a little at a time. Do it with the motor off so as not to splatter it all onto the sides of the bowl where it won't do your buttercream any good. Drizzle a little, run the machine a little, drizzle a little, run the machine a little until all the syrup is incorporated.

When all the syrup is in, you should have something that looks like this:

Whip this sweet yellow "foam" until it's cool...about room temperature. Once that's achieved, switch to the paddle (beater) attachment and start adding your butter, a piece or two at a time until it's all in.

Oh no! Mayo!

Turns out my egg yolk and syrup foam was too warm when I started adding the butter, so my buttercream is almost soupy. What to do? If you said "beat it", you get an A for this course.

Ah, there we go, a few minutes on high and all is well.

Now then, you can see from the way this French buttercream hangs off the beater that it's not as good for piping as the meringue buttercreams. But then who says every buttercream has to be pipable? This stuff is a silken, butter lover's paradise, and as it happens, my favorite buttercream for cupcakes.

As with the others, this is the time to add your flavorings and/or colorings. A teaspoon or so of vanilla for starters, then just about anything you want.

You may have noticed that both of the meringue buttercream recipes I've put up have small amounts of cream of tartar in them. What's it for? Oh, it's just a little insurance policy, a bit of protective medicine in the event I get carried away with the whip while making my egg foam.

For you see the same action the creates a nice, light egg foam will transform it into a runny, clumpy pool of water and froth if applied with too much gusto. Again, the issue is proteins. As I mentioned yesterday, egg proteins are interesting and varied molecules. In addition to water-loving and water-hating regions along their length, they have bonding sites at various points. When the individual egg proteins are in their natural state (bunchy coils) many of these bonding sites are taken up, bonding the proteins to themselves (that's what keeps them in a bunches). Whipping breaks these loose bonds, freeing up the bonding sites on the molecules so they can hook on to other molecules into those bubble-protecting networks I told you about.

The trouble is that if you keep the whipping up too long, the proteins start bonding to one another a little too eagerly. More and more "attachments" occur, causing the network to tighten, ultimately squeezing out the water molecules and popping bubbles. The result is an irretrievable, useless mess — and you can get there quicker than you think.

The good news is that the baker can protect against this (to a point) by plugging up some of those protein bonding sites with other types of molecules: copper (which is why copper pans are so popular among egg whippers), silver (which is why silver pans...oh wait, no they aren't), or various types of acids like cream of tartar. None provide foolproof or lasting insurance against a ruined foam, but they will expand the margin of error should you be a little too free with the whip.

Looks a lot like Italian meringue buttercream doesn't it? In fact it is very similar, though a bit denser. Like Italian buttercream, it's excellent both for spreading and piping, since (as you can see) it stands up quite well on its own. The advantage SMBC has over IMBC is that it's somewhat easier to make. The formula goes like this:

4 egg whites
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 pound soft unsalted butter

Begin by combining the whites, sugar and cream of tartar the top of a double boiler set over simmering water.

Give them a good whippin' with a whisk to combine them, and keep it up intermittently while the mixture warms.

In about 5-7 minutes' time, your mixture should have reached 160 degrees Farhenheit (don't worry, your whites won't cook, the sugar will keep all those little proteins from clenching up). What's so important about this temperature? It's the degree at which Salmonella bacteria are killed.

So then, having created your egg white "syrup", pour the contents of the double boiler into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whip.

Turn the mixer on high. In a few minutes the mixture will turn white and start to build up into a foam.

In about 6-8 minutes, the meringue will come to stiff peaks, about like so:

Now then, all you need to do is add the butter. Switch to the paddle (beater) attachment and turn the mixer to medium high. Beat in the butter a piece at a time.

Ah yes! Here it is, the grainy "curdled" texture I was telling you about in my Italian meringue buttercream post. My butter pieces were a little cool in the center, and now I'm paying the price with this chunky, almost cottage cheese-looking buttercream.

No matter, just turn the machine up to high and beat those curdles right on out.

Much better. Again, this is the point where you incorporate your flavors and/or colors. A teaspoon or more of vanilla should again be your starting point. After that the sky is pretty much the limit.

Pastry student Nick writes in with this very good question about Italian meringue buttercream:

When making the IMBC, does the heat from the syrup at 245F fully pasteurize the meringue? Or do standard undercooked food warnings apply?

Friends, this is what gives me confidence in the pastry world of tomorrow. A student sees a delicious-looking egg-based recipe and the first thing he thinks to ask is: is it safe? Bravo.

The answer is that IMBC is a safe recipe — or at least so my references tell me — one that can be stored at room temperature for up to two days. Though I haven't measured it myself, I believe the reason is in fact because the hot syrup brings the temperature of the meringue up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which Salmonella bacteria are destroyed (the sugar in the meringue keeps the egg proteins in the whipped whites from "cooking", which would ordinarily start to occur at about 140 degrees).

Sugar is another bug-killer that works to the advantage of the buttercream maker, and Italian meringue has quite a bit of it. Then there is all the fat, which while it doesn't kill bacteria, doesn't provide a hospitable environment in which it can grow. Taken together, I believe this is what renders IMBC a "safe" preparation. However I am by no means the last word on these kinds of things, and you should take this up with a true food safety expert if you have more questions.

My good friend Sally C. writes in to ask:

You say you can freeze this? Wouldn't it separate?

The answer is a.) Yes and b.) No. Classic buttercreams freeze very well, though it often happens that they look a little droopy or grainy when they're thawed. This is easily remedied by, of course, beating them some more. Just make sure the buttercream is thawed completely before you do it, or you'll have the same separating problems that can occur when you're making buttercream and your butter is too cold.

It's not because of emulsifiers or anything like that (most egg emulsifiers are in the yolks, anyway). The reason has to do with torque, shearing forces and other physics terms that I don't really have a great handle on. Suffice to say that chilly egg whites are more viscous than room-temperature whites, and so the whip has a harder time puttin' the hurt on 'em. Room temperature whites are more liquid, which makes the whipping harder, faster and easier.

That's true, at least at the outset of a foam-making excursion. An egg foam won't form well if there's much fat present in the mixture. However you can bring plenty of fat to the party after the foam is formed with few ill effects. Why?

It all has to do with proteins, specifically egg proteins, the things that make a long-lasting egg white foams possible. These molecules occur bunched up in an egg white, but are uncoiled ("denatured" as they say in the hip, beatbox parlance of food chemistry) by whipping them. These long and languid molecules, it's important to note, aren't uniform. They have different structures along their length, some of which are attract to air (hydrophobic or "water hating") and others that are attracted to water (hydrophilic or "water loving"). The surface of an air bubble is therefore an ideal spot for them. They can stick their water loving parts in water, their air loving parts in air, and because they have other parts that like to bond to each other, they can hang onto other protein molecules in the bargain. Taken together, it all adds up to a bubble-encapsulating mesh that reduces surface tension and keeps the bubble from popping.

Fats have similar water- and air-loving parts, and if allowed into the mixture early, will compete for spots on the bubble surfaces, interrupting protein networks and rendering the bubble more likely to burst. However fat molecules can't break up protein networks once they're formed, so you can add plenty to, say, a chocolate mousse or a soufflé batter without wrecking the foam. You can, however, weigh it down with enough fat, which is what happens in a buttercream. A good deal of the bubbles pop due to their sheer volume and weight of all that butter. Enough remain, however, to keep a meringue buttercream quite light in texture compared to its non-meringue relatives.

Those who claim buttercreams are too rich, too heavy and too "buttery" have probably never tried a meringue buttercream. This Italian-style meringue buttercream is incredibly light and delicate, with a butter flavor that can be drastically de-emphasized (though it's beyond me why you'd want to) with subsequent flavorings. The basic components are these:

Meringue:

5 room-temperature egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/4 cup sugar

Syrup:

1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water

Butter

1 lb., unsalted, and soft

Start by separating your eggs, conserving the yolks for another purpose. French buttercream, if you're me this week.

Insert them into your mixer fitted with the whip attachment and turn on medium-high. When the whites get frothy, add the cream of tartar which will help stabilize the foam:

Increase the speed of the mixer to high and whip the whites to soft peaks. About like so:

Turn the mixer back on and add the sugar in a stream.

Meanwhile get those syrup components on a medium-high flame.

After about 30 seconds or so the whites and sugar should be beaten to a glossy "stiff peak" consistency. Let them sit while you turn your attention to the syrup.

Now then, heat your syrup to 245 degrees.

Then pour it into a pyrex measure for easier handling.

Add it slowly to the meringue by drizzling a little on top of the foam with the mixer off, then turning the mixer on high for five seconds. Add a little more syrup, turn the mixer back on for five seconds, etc., until all the syrup has been incorporated (scrape the last firming syrup out of the measure with a rubber spatula).

Why do it this way? Because if you were to simply pour the syrup into the bowl in stream with the mixer running, much of the syrup would splatter out onto the upper lip of the bowl and stick there, never making it into your mixture. So then, when you're done you should have a silky and luxurious meringue:

Beautiful, isn't it? Sadly it won't last — because it's butter time. However before adding your butter it's important to make sure the meringue isn't still hot from the syrup. Feel the outside of the bowl. If it's warm to the touch, simply run the mixture for a few minutes (up to ten) to cool the contents of the bowl off. When it's no longer hot (warm is alright) switch out the whip for the paddle attachment. Turn the mixer on medium-high and begin adding the butter about a tablespoon or two at a time.

The meringue will fall to a large extent as the fat is introduced. It may even become rather liquid-like. Keep beating. If there's one thing I've learned about buttercream over the years is that nearly all problems can be solved by continued beating. Is the mixture still liquid-y after all the butter has been incorporated? Keep beating. You'll soon hear the change as the emulsion suddenly comes together. The sound of the bowl will go from plop, splop, gorp, ploop to a sudden thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap and you know you're buttercream is ready:

Now then, I was lucky here that my temperatures were such that the buttercream achieved a perfect consistency without passing through a "curdled"-looking phase, which is what happens much of the time. Often this is due to the butter being cooler than the meringue, which causes it to collect together in masses. If that vaguely "chunky"-looking texture happens, don't worry and keep beating. In a minute or two the temperatures in the bowl will even out and the buttercream will turn smooth and spreadable.

At this point you may color and flavor it in any way you wish. A teaspoon or two of vanilla is standard, though a couple of tablespoons of just about any kind of liqueur can be added as well. There are many other possibilities that I'll discuss later in the week.

Reader and good friend Lisa writes in to ask:

Hope you don't mind fielding this, but I'm wondering about your caramel: Does this mean I can just try my hand at making caramel, and then dip apples into it for caramel apples (rather than melting the chunks of caramel you buy a the store)? Because you make making the caramel seem almost as easy as melting the caramel, and since we're going apple picking this weekend, I was just wondering....

I devoted a fair amount of thought to this yesterday. My first reaction was: absolutely! However the more I thought about it, the more I realized how difficult it would be to calibrate your pan caramel to a perfect apple-sticking consistency. A very light caramel and you'll get something more akin to a candy apple (which is of course delightful in its own way), a dark one and you'll likely have an apple sitting in a puddle — since one other thing I failed to mention about very dark caramels is that they're runnier than lighter ones (all that molecule destruction, donchaknow).

No, I think for something like a caramel apple you might want to go with some thing more conventional. But don't run off to the store and buy caramel chunks — heaven forbid. Try something along these lines and you'll be very happy with the result, I'm sure.

But I did redo my Neapolitan pizza how-to over on the right this morning, to reflect improvements both in the recipe and my overall technique. I'm finally getting used to the brick oven. The pizza is approaching excellent. Try the same thing in your home oven with high heat and a pizza stone!

...are putting the hammer down on me today. I'll do my best, but may have to pick up with buttercreams on Monday.

As I mentioned in my morning's post, a lot of people have historically had trouble making true buttercreams at home. The upshot of that has been that starting roughly thirty years ago, home bakers pretty much quit trying to make them altogether. The tragedy of that is that nowadays most people don't have the faintest clue what a real buttercream tastes like. No wonder, outside of an expensive wedding cake, they've probably never even tasted one.

This sad state of affairs was brought home to me one day about three years ago, when I threw together a quick batch of buttercream for one of our neighbors here in Louisville. Her quickie cupcake icing recipe had failed her, she said, and her son's birthday party was just hours away. As the Dudley Do-Right of baking, I sprang into action and appeared at her doorstep half an hour later, a quart-sized container of fresh-made buttercream in hand. She seemed terrifically excited until she dabbed her finger in and tasted it. Her face fell and she looked up at me and said "Oh. This tastes like butter." She forced a smile and a thank you and we both walked away disappointed.

Thinking back on that episode, it really wasn't her fault. She grew up in Berkeley where they seem to have a thing about butter...like it's bad for you or something. She'd never tasted a real buttercream in her life, and butter as it happens is what real buttercream tastes like. The pity is that the dietary scolds of the world have trained our internal alarm bells to go off at the taste of real butter...as though the imitation frostings of the world, or those made of shortening or cream cheese are somehow better for you. Some of them may be a bit lower in fat ounce-for-ounce, but because they aren't as satisfying, we end up applying them to cakes with a trowel in layers an inch thick. The same effect can be created with a mere 1/4 inch of the real thing...with fewer calories, about the same amount of fat, and no artificial ingredients.

Oh Lord, when with the heathen learn?

My good friend Mexico Bob writes in to ask:

On the CBS Early Show this morning a man said that in every cake and cookie recipe that you make involving white flour you should add a teaspoon of Cardamom. What's this all about? Is it something that we might use in a Danish?

Funny you should ask that, for in fact Danish dough (and by extension coffee cake dough) is the perfect application for a little cardamom. It adds a tough of that far northern European je-ne-sais-quoi. Just don't overdo it because cardamom can be very perfumy. As for cakes and cookies, I'd dispute that every recipe needs it (butter cookies spring to mind), but good baking is all about experimentation. Who knows until you try?