[Mike Nolan]

The chocolate cream pie, made with chocolate pate sucree and topped with meringue.

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[Mike Nolan]

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Busy day in the kitchen here, with dinner planned for 5:30, but I've got my schedule posted and there are plenty of rest breaks in it, so I don't totally wear out. Right now we're watching the Macy's parade.

I've got the chocolate pie filled and cooling, I'll make meringue once it is a bit cooler. (I'd prefer a Swiss or Italian meringue, but my wife prefers French meringue, even though it has a tendency to weep.)

I tried something a bit different when I was blind baking the pie. I cut a 12" circle of parchment, then made slits around a third of the way in all around so that when I put it in the pie pan the slits folded over each other, which avoids having parchment wrinkles. Seemed to work fairly well. I also chilled the dough after putting it in the pan, that's supposed to reduce shrinkage some.

I read an interesting article online about various ways to blind bake a pie, their preferred way was to use aluminum foil then fill it with granulated sugar and cook it at a lower temperature for an hour. It is supposed to reduce shrinkage and also results in making a batch of toasted sugar. I didn't do that because I don't have a lot of recipes that use toasted sugar, though some might benefit from it even if they don't call for it. (I'd also have to find a place to store it!)

[Mike Nolan]

Simple fare ahead of Thanksgiving here: macaroni and cheese. I added ground beef to mine, Diane added some ham and havarti cheese to hers.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got pie crusts on my to-do list for tonight, 2 bottom crusts, 1 top crust and 1 blind-baked bottom crust that is chocolate pate sucree, for a chocolate cream pie. I'll make my sweet potato pie tomorrow and blind bake the pate sucree but make the chocolate cream pie filling on Thursday morning. This will also give me a set of crusts for an apple pie after our son and granddaughter get here for Christmas.

[Mike Nolan]

I use my KA mixer to cut in the butter, and that takes less than a minute, so butter crusts aren't all that time-consuming for me. I weigh the butter and water, cut the butter up into cubes, chill both of them for a while, then throw the butter in the mixer, holding back about 25% of the flour until after the butter has been cut in and before adding the water.

I use a 5" or 6" ring with some plastic wrap in it to weigh out the amount of dough for each pie crust; that keeps the counter cleaner, all I have to do is fold over the plastic wrap. I use a coffee tamper to flatten the dough into a solid disk.

A trick I learned in a BBGA online class is to take some parchment and wrap it around the top of the bowl as a shield to keep the flour from spilling out before starting it, since I don't have a bowl shield for my mixer.

[Mike Nolan]

Using a bench knife for fraissage would be good for those of us with hot hands.

At SFBI, they had us use a chef's knife to cut in the butter the first time we made pie crust, to show us what the dough should look like. Afterwards we could use a mixer or a food processor.

[Mike Nolan]

Keep in mind that when you refrigerate the crust, the flour finishes hydrating and that draws some of the water from the butter, which also reverts to its 'cold' state. Shocking the butter by hitting it several times gets it back to a plastic state.

This is one of those areas where an engineering education is helpful in the kitchen. Civil engineers study how solids can turn into flowing plastics after a seismic event. That's how a seemingly solid clay hillside can all of a sudden collapse looking like it is a liquid. Snow avalanches can result from the same type of shift from a solid to a plastic state. (They often use loud noises to encourage unstable snow masses to collapse before they would trigger major avalances.)

Kenji Lopez-Alt has an interesting take on pie crust, he turns the butter and about 3/4 of the flour into a paste in a blender, then adds in the rest of the flour before adding the water.

I've tried it, I prefer having small visible pieces of butter in the crust, but it does produce a consistently flaky crust, similar to the 'mealy' crust recipe that SFBI had us use for a bottom crust most of the time, with the 'flaky' recipe for the top crust, it has a bit more butter in it. I don't know if many production bakers tend to keep two types of pie crust on hand, though, one for a bottom crust and the other for a top crust. I generally make just the mealy crust recipe.

I will say his method appears to require a little less water, which helps prevent excessive gluten formation.

I do, however, follow his suggestion and hold back about a quarter of the flour until after the butter has been cut in. I think that also helps limit gluten formation.

[Mike Nolan]

Yes, hitting the pie dough with the rolling pin several times helps to plasticize the butter, which makes it roll out easier. Butter is a fascinating thing, it has five different states: hard, semi-soft (plasticized), soft, liquid and congealed (ghee). Each of them has different properties when cooking and baking. (The butterfat in cream has several states of its own.)

Most fats have several states that often depend upon temperature.

Cocoa butter has six states that can co-exist, though they melt at different temperatures; beta-5 is the one you need when tempering it.

[Mike Nolan]

We've had a standalone induction unit for quite a while, it does take some adjustment. Ours only has about 8 settings, there are many times I'd like a setting in between two of them, keeping something at a slow simmer can be challenging, because you can't do what you can do on a gas range and use a spacer to lower the heat transferred to the pot.

[Mike Nolan]

We had BLT's plus some salad using the first pickings from my latest Aerogarden crop, some black seeded Simpson, some rouge d'hiver and some Salanova (a sweet curly lettuce developed for hydroponics), I haven't picked the buttercrunch yet, I'm saving that for Thanksgiving.

[Mike Nolan]

I haven't done any braided loaves for a while, it is a skill that benefits from regular practice.

I could always make Thomas Keller's dead dough for practice, he says it is usually good for about a week if kept in the fridge between practice sessions.

500 grams AP flour
1 gram yeast
25 grams salt
325 grams water

[Mike Nolan]

It appears to me that there are at least 5 different types of six-strand braids, and that doesn't count the one from Deli Man that has us baffled.

[Mike Nolan]

We had several left overs in the fridge, so of course we had Mac and Cheese for supper. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

Several stores have had butter on sale for $2.99 a pound here lately, so I'm stocked up for the holidays. And I have some rain checks for butter at under $2/pound at one store from last week.

[Mike Nolan]

A nearby hydroponics farm should be able to pick their tomatoes close to when they sell them, otherwise they have to pick them before they're fully ripe so they don't rot before they get to the markets. And post-picking ripening doesn't enhance flavor.

There are a half-dozen or so types of hydroponic systems, not all of them work well for tomatoes. You also need space to deal with vines that can easily get longer than 10 feet, and you need adequate lighting.

The determinate variety that Stacey grows in his lab are expensive, the seeds are $1 each!

Dinner tonight was left over pot roast.

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