Tag Archives: baking

Pumpkin Pie is a Go!

westonbirt I bought a pumpkin at Leigh Court Farm the other day. I had this idea I was going to carve it with a Halloween poodle cut out and scare all those trick-and-treating dogs that come visiting; that was a little overambitious. I cut the lid off crooked and it was all downhill from there on, I failed miserably in fact…

…Time for Plan B

pumpkin pie

Pumpkin Pie!

The last time I made this I was nineteen and trying to impress a friend who was mad about all things American. I produced something so revolting that we had to go to a very expensive café instead to calm ourselves down and get rid of the taste. I decided on the strength of that experience that America was indeed a foreign country and that they ate some very strange food there. It occured to me briefly that I might have made it wrong but my ego was such that I simply relegated it to the little drawer of gustatory horrors (the one where the boiled pigs trotters that I was offered once in Greece resides) and thought no more about it.

Fast forward to November ’09 when Mandy invited me for a proper Thanksgiving supper at which there was turkey and corn bread and for dessert there was a pie like this one. Much to my surprise it was really good so I removed PP from the drawer of horrors and promised myself I would make it one day.

What did I do wrong all those years ago? At a guess I didn’t drain the pumpkin purée properly. If you use one of those big round orange jobs then you have to really drain the purée before you mix up the filling. I think that’s all there is to remember, it might be why Americans tend to buy the purée in tins. But I couldn’t find a tin of the stuff and I did have my failed Jack O’Poodle.

I read the Guardian piece on pumpkin pie but really didn’t fancy making a pie with 145 g of maple syrup. The recipe I chose in the end is more or less the one Mandy recommended from the hummingbird bakery cookbook There are some great looking American cakes in there! And the recipes are all in grams not cups which suits me fine.

To prepare the pumpkin purée: We cut the pumpkin into chunks, roasted them in the oven until they were soft for 45 minutes at 170 C. Then I scraped the flesh off the skins. Puréed the flesh in a food processor till smooth. Put the whole lot in a sieve and let it drip overnight. I toasted the seeds separately and have been doing my impersonation of a gerbil ever since.

I found a dish as near to 23 cm in diameter as I possessed; a flan dish with a drop out bottom, a proper pie dish is on my wish list now!

I used the Hummingbird pie crust which is made of

260 grams plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
110 g unsalted butter

The pastry is made by rubbing the above ingredients together to a sandy consistency and then bringing the pastry together with a little water, maybe a tablespoon or so. The Hummingbird book talks about beating the pastry until you have a smooth even dough. I followed all this and the crust that results is what I would call a hardish pastry, the sort that you can hold in your hand without it collapsing. I think if I was going to make the pie again I would use a pastry with more butter and not mix it so much as I prefer a shorter textured pastry, but this was good. I am not such a pastry expert anyway. Whatever pastry you use, always chill it in the fridge after you have mixed it, and ideally once again after you have rolled it out for your dish. An hour is usually plenty of time for the first chill.

I roll out pastry these days between two sheets of clingfilm and it makes life a lot easier.

At some point measure out and mix the following ingredients together until you have a smooth lumpfree mixture.

425g pumpkin purée
1 medium egg
235 ml evaporated milk
220 g golden caster sugar
1/4 tsp ground cardamom ( instead of cloves which I don’t like)
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground cinammon
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1 – 2 tablespoons plain flour

Pour this into the pastry and bake in a preheated oven at 170 º C/325 ºF until the filling is firm. The book says 30 – 40 minutes but mine took more like an hour.

I left it to cool till the next day and we just had some for lunch with a big dollop of yoghurt and a sprinkle of cinammon on the top and it was so good I had two pieces!

Greed is my undoing.

Challah for Mellow Bakers

Journeying through the wonderful collections of breads in Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman, from time to time I come across a bread that simply doesn’t resemble the bread I associate the name with. This challah is a prime example of this. Challah in my childhood was a soft, dense white bread, plaited tightly and tasting of poppy seeds. Whether England was still in the post-war egg rationed mode in the early 1960s, I don’t know. Today’s American challah bread I can only describe as a butterless brioche, light as an angel’s feathers and almost ethereal. I doubt my grandparents would recognise it.

I have put off making this bread. Everytime I looked at the recipe, I thought, hmm, I don’t have enough eggs, or I’m going to have to think very hard about braiding and so it has gone on till this morning, when there were indeed enough eggs and I had thought long enough about braiding. It’s a bit like when you are learning to drive and it just seems impossible that anyone will ever give you a licence. You just have to look around you and say, “Hey, all those people can do it, it might be difficult, but it can’t be impossible.”

Celia has created a beautiful tutorial showing how to braid a Winston Knot. How could I fail with that guide? I printed it off and kept it close by while I made the first braid. I almost panicked when at the bottom of page 1, I could only find page 3 – I squawked and then found page 2 which had got stuck to the back of page 1. Disaster averted but it was close.

So here are the pictures of my challah adventures for Mellow Bakers this morning, not quite as hard as it looks but still required some serious concentration.

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Notes:

I mixed the dough in a Kenwood mixer. I put the eggs, water and oil in first, added the salt and sugar to that. I added the yeast to the two flours separately and then added the dry to the wet, that’s the way the Kenwood likes it. I also hand kneaded the dough for about 3 minutes once the Kenwood started rocking about. The dough was left in the fridge for a couple of hours, but there is so much yeast in it that it still had to be knocked down every 40 minutes or so. I am sure one could make this with less yeast!

I made the braids for the Knot 150 grams each and rolled them out to 60 cms long having been forewarned. This left me with 800 grams of dough for the 6 strand plait so they were smaller at 133 grams each. Even so both loaves were huge by the time they had proved and baked. I showed them off to my neighbour and then gave her the Winston Knot to take home. Too much bread for us and no room in the freezer for such a monster.

The other bread which was a 6 braided loaf was easy by comparison.

So don’t be afraid, well don’t be too afraid, if a braid-phobic like me can do this, you can too ! This was one of the October breads for Mellow Bakers. Thank you to all those of you who have already baked this, by watching and learning from you all I have gained so much.

Can you freeze dough?

You know how you can buy frozen pastries and bake them. For some reason I thought that commercial stuff must have some mystery ingredient which allows this to happen. Surely any dough I made at home would not survive being frozen? So up to now I have never tried. A few weeks back I made a big quantity of a sweet enriched dough, and froze two portions of it wrapped up tightly in clingfilm.

I came across it on Friday evening and took one lot out of the freezer, put it in the fridge to defrost (as advised by Susieq on Dan’s forum) and then forgot it till Sunday night (not as advised but I’m very forgetful).

Feeling guilty I moved it into the kitchen while we had supper to come up to room temperature, thinking all the while this is going to be hopeless. So after supper, I rolled it out, part of the dough had gone a little bit hard, but I sort of ignored that, like you do. Then I brushed the dough with melted butter, sprinkled on a mixture of old cake crumbs (slices of cake, baked, and whizzed and frozen), vanilla sugar, cinammon, patted some sultanas on top. Rolled it up into a log. Sliced it into chunks, flattened them into 10 cms rounds, left them to rise (they didn’t rise much) for an hour, sprinkled a bit more sugar over the top and baked them at 180 Fan for 18 minutes and this was the result. It works! Yummy! And the dough takes up a lot less space in the freezer than bags of frozen buns…..

Sultana Buns from previously frozen dough

A Quick Edit to this post in September 2010:

Happiness is a well risen loaf of bread!

I have also very successfully frozen pizza dough and used it for pizza three weeks later and last weekend I used a ball of frozen pizza dough as the paté fermentée element in this delicious five grain bread I made for Mellow Bakers.