Apple Pie

Lemon Meringue

When we lived in Houston, there was a 24 hour pie shop nearby.  Any time of day or night you could get delicious pies.  One of the best there was lemon meringue.  So, when I was choosing what pie to make, this was  natural choice.

There's nothing particularly complicated about making a pie like this.  I did this to get some practice.  The meringue is fairly labor intensive if, like me, you don't have an electric mixer.  Come to think of it, I don't have electric devices in the kitchen besides a blender.  Anyway, the pie dough is made first.  A simple mixture of flour, butter, and water (dash of salt for flavor).   The ratio seems simple enough, but I'm not completely sure whether it scales well.  3:2:1 is the ratio, by weight for flour:butter:water, at least in US measures.  Since I like using metric in the kitchen, the ratio is still roughly the same, but with small adjustments  2.88:1.88:1.   This is something I'm noticing more and more, but the ratios seem to be more often nice and neat (i.e. rational) with "US" measures (pounds and ounces)  than when using metric.  I'm not sure why this is.

The dough is chilled so the butter can firm up again, it is scaled to about 284 grams per crust and rolled out into a rough circle.

If you've made any sort of custard or pastry cream before, the filling is pretty much the same sort of thing.  Instead of a cornstarch thickened milk/cream mixture, you have cornstarch thickened lemon juice, zest, and water, egg yolks, and sugar.

The topping is a basic sweetened meringue.  A little more sugar than I'm used to using (e.g. for macarons), but still the same sort of thing.  For this, it is 2:1 sugar:egg whites.  

I had a little trouble getting mine to stiff peaks.  It seemed to want to stay in a ribbon stage after getting opaque and silky, almost like a cooked italian meringue. I think I still got decent results, though.

Cream of Tomato Soup

Cream of Tomato Soup; chicken stock, mirepoix (small dice), mushrooms (small dice), blonde roux, sachet d'epices, canned san marzano tomatoes, salt/pepper, heavy cream. Sweat mirepoix in fat, add flour and cook roux. Mix in chicken stock, tomatoes, simmer 30 minutes. Add sachet, season, simmer. Blend until smooth. Strain. Finish with hot cream.

Croutons; homemade sourdough, olive oil, salt/pepper. Toss, toast.

Felt like being brief today.  I just want to note that I am really starting to get a sense of how to do things, without reference to recipes.  Many of the basic techniques are repeated over and over.  Most importantly after execution is how to get flavor into the product.   For instance, this soup would not be nearly as tasty without the chicken stock, the making of a sort of chicken veloute, for the base of the soup.

Dinner November 6, 2011

Lentil puree soup enriched with cream. Served with a homemade baguette:

For dessert I played with some techniques I've out of Grant Achatz' shop at Alinea.   

From bottom left. Hazelnut puree with homemade spiced cranberry jam, crushed toasted hazelnuts. Granny smith apple capsule filled with gran marnier cream and topped with a hazelnut "chip"" made from dehydrating hazelnut puree. Apple shortbread with cinnamon streusel.

I think I would serve just the cake with the capsule in the future (you'll see why in the next photo). I wanted to play with different plating ideas though.

Crack open the capsule and the gran marnier (orange flavored cognac) cream mixture pours out over the cake. In the future Im going to make the cream mixture more viscous and the walls of the capsule thinner.