Author: joepastry

Reader Irena asks if I wouldn’t mind clarifying just why it is that a very evenly mixed, extremely homogenous dough or batter yields a stronger piece of pie, cake or pastry than a less-evenly mixed one. Irena, I’d be delighted.

I brought up fat distribution a couple of times over the last week, pointing out that a British pie dough, in which the fat is thoroughly blended into the flour, is both stronger and more flexible than an American pie crust in which the fat is “cut” in in large, uneven pieces. Both doughs have very similar characteristics until they’re baked, at which point the fat goes liquid and the crust starts to resemble a brick wall that’s losing bits of its masonry.

High-end food store chain Eataly has announced that it plans to open a food-based theme park in Bologna called “Fico Eataly World”, a 20-acre $55 million park that’s being described as a “Disneyland for gourmets”. If all goes according to plan the park will open in November of next year. As a member of the food-entertainment complex I suppose I should be excited about that, though the whole idea leaves something of a, oh what’s the idiom I’m looking for here…a bad…I don’t know. Something.

And that’s the truth. I’ve been drinking dark beers since 7:00 a.m. across the river in Indiana, for the opening of the Gravity Head beer festival. The whole morning I’ve been surrounded by hipsters in long beards, ball caps and “Liver Olympics 2014” t-shirts. One seriously pierced beer dude from Indianapolis was sporting knuckle tattoos à la Night of the Hunter, only instead of “love” and “hate” across his fingers

That’s a great question, reader Kaitlin! After all, we Americans were the Brits to a large extent prior to the Revolutionary War. Does it not stand to reason we’d have a British-style pie tradition in this country? It does, and at one time we probably did (at least on the East Coast), however over time it’s clear that our shallow, slope-sided, flaky pies won out over the Brits’ tall, straight-sided firm-crust pies. The question is: why?

The big reason is because we Americans had very different baking traditions from get-go. In Britain pies have pretty much always been made by professionals: by skilled craftspersons working either in bakeries or on large estates that operated communal ovens. Remember nobody owned such a thing as a “home oven” until about 150 years ago. Before that time if you wanted a decent pie, you bought one from — or had one made by — somebody who knew what they were doing.

Quite a few questions from some confused American readers on the pork pie crust recipe: is there no “cutting in” step? I thought pie crusts couldn’t stand water. And what’s with all the mixing? Won’t it end up rather tough with lots of developed gluten in it?

All very valid concerns from an American pie maker’s perspective. Our crusts aren’t built to stand up on their own. Rather they’re made to be fall-apart flaky, thus we take extreme measures to deprive our crusts of moisture and ensure that the fat isn’t evenly distributed.

Speaking of British pigs, did you know that Britain and America nearly got into a shooting war over British pigs in 1859? Actually it was just a British pig, which was owned by an Irishman by the name of Charlie Griffin and shot by an American settler by the name of Lyman Cutler. The whole episode transpired on San Juan Island, at tiny five-mile-long piece of land off the Washington State coast not far from Seattle. I know the story because I spent many months there after I graduated college, tending bar and doing my best to hide from work, responsibility and the grownup life generally.

That’s a big subject, reader Bobbi, no pun intended. I’ve already written about pigs in America but that’s a pretty easy since historians can point to a clear arrival date. The British pig is a lot harder to pin down. No one knows for sure when pigs or their wild ancestor, the wild boar, first got to the British isles. What is known is that boar were present there a minimum of 6,000 years ago, the time when neolithic humans arrived, as they appear in neolith art. Prior to that it’s anybody’s guess, for the truth is that pigs in their wild form are among the most widely distributed large mammals in Eurasia and Africa. Only the dog was

No not horses, reader Alec, that’s a myth. Hooves don’t have any collagen in them to speak of. That myth arose from the days when gelatin was made from cow’s feet — waste items from rendering plants (glue factories). The stuff looked awful and smelled worse, or so I understand, which is why cooks in those days had to clarify the gelatin they used, then add plenty of coloring and flavoring.