A New Shortening for Pie Crust

It's difficult for me to make a pie now. I used to make the best pies when I was a teenager. Meringue piled high atop creamy lemon curd encased in a shell so flaky it melted in your mouth. Golden two-crust apple pies so aromatic the squirrels would scratch at the screens to get in. I was so proud of my crust back then. I tried and experimented and tested until I made a crust so succulent people would eat the casing before the filling.

The secret to my days-gone-by flaky crust? Crisco. The reason I can't bring myself to make a crusted pie now? Crisco. A little knowledge can change your life. How can I bring myself to serve a pie chock full of fat originally designed to make soap? There are noxious chemicals sprayed on the plants to harvest the seeds (in the case of cottonseed oil), noxious chemicals used to extract, bleach, and otherwise eradicate any semblance of the originating food source, and heart-stopping trans fatty acids formed as a byproduct of an unnatural process of infusing oil with more hydrogen atoms than nature designed it to have. Even Procter and Gamble saw the writing on the wall and sold their once successful candle-making fat to JM Schmuckers in 2002.

Forgive me if I have curtailed the making of your future Crisco-shortened pastries. But there's a silver lining to my fatty story. No, not lard, which is a fine alternative to Crisco, if you can find some that's not itself hydrogenated, BHA and BHT-preserved, or originating from the lipid layer of an animal raised on growth hormone, pharmaceutical drugs, and animal byproducts. No, not butter, which isn't a fine alternative to Crisco or lard if you're hankering for pastry so flaky it could be served in the finest French patisserie.

Butter's natural water content will form gluten when it comes in contact with flour ... creating a dough that's more soft and chewy instead of brittle or flaky. Adding milk to a pie crust will do the same thing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I prefer a short crust over a tender crust. (I do add some butter for flavor.)

Back to the silver lining ... enter Spectrum Organic Non-hydrogenated Vegetable Shortening, made from mechanically pressed palm oil. I found this at the grocery store two weeks ago. Maybe I'm a little late to the shortening game, but I wasn't looking for a Crisco alternative when I saw this. It was an improvement over Crisco in absolutely every point that stopped me using shortening:

It wasn't hydrogenated. No trans fatty acids. No chemical altering. Naturally solid at room temperature.
It was organic. Grown, harvested, and processed without pesticides or other chemicals. No genetically modified organisms either.

Not even Crisco's new Zero Grams Trans Fat can claim this, since it's still hydrogenated and still likely laden with chemicals.

And for those who care:

Spectrum had slightly less saturated fat than butter. (Although when food composition is analyzed in various facilities using various products and is rounded to whole grams, the results aren't marked in stone.) And since it's a vegetable product, it's devoid of cholesterol.



I have my shortening. I have my apples. It's time to make a pie.

At the Produce Market

While we were at the produce market picking up our Thanksgiving turkey, I noticed the soon-to-close-for-the-season market had lots of apples for sale.

Husband: "You could make a pie."
Me (to myself): There's no way I have the time to make a pie!
Husband: "They have so many kinds. You could put some of each in a pie."
Me (to myself): All that peeling. And the crust! It takes forever!"
Husband: "Look, they have locally grown Granny Smith."
Me (as I'm putting the locally grown Granny Smith into my basket): "Hm, I rarely see Granny Smith with a reddish skin."
Husband: "Aren't they supposed to be good in a pie?"
Me (to myself) Well, they're tart, but you have to mix them with a sweeter apple, if...
Husband: "What are these?"
Me: "They're Crispin or Mutsu. They're supposed to be good in a pie."
Husband: "Why are you buying all these apples?"
Me: "I'm going to make a pie."



Clockwise from upper left: 5 Royal Gala, 2 Crispin (Mutsu), 2 Jonagold, 3 Granny Smith

Experimenting With Yeast

Manang asked me about the difference between active dry yeast and instant yeast. This is a great question, so I thought I'd liberate my thoughts from the comments to a post.

Active Dry Yeast
This is a granular product that has been dried using high temperatures that kill up to 70% of the yeast cells. The dead cells collect around the live cells protecting them and giving this product a long shelf life. To free and activate the live cells, the product is usually dissolved in warm water (proofed) before use.

Instant Yeast
This is also a granular product, although it has been dried using lower temperatures than active dry yeast. Only about 30% of the yeast cells are destroyed in the process. Because it contains more viable yeast cells, it can be mixed directly with the dry ingredients in a recipe. No proofing required.

Bread Machine Yeast, Rapid Rise Yeast, and Quick Rise Yeast
These are types of instant yeast. Like instant yeast, they work fast and don't require proofing. Mix them right in with your flour.



Note: Notice the larger granule size of active dry yeast compared to a rapid-rising yeast. The live yeast cells in active dry are surrounded by dead cells. Warm water will dissolve the dead cells away and hydrate the live yeast inside.

Since instant yeast is more potent than active dry yeast, less is needed. If all I have on hand is active dry yeast, I usually double the amount called for in a recipe using instant yeast.

Having said all this, I'm rethinking the type of yeast I use in making bread¹, especially slow-rising bread. I usually use instant yeast in my recipes because it's more potent and doesn't require proofing. I'm pretty frugal with the amount I use, trying to get away with the smallest amount that will grow slow but still produce adequate volume. Manang's question is causing me to consider trying active dry yeast in place of instant yeast (ounce for ounce) in bread making since the reduced potency will encourage an even slower growth ... giving any wild yeasts or bacteria a chance to take hold. Thank you for this idea, Manang!


¹ The Baker's Catalog carries a few strains of slow-growing, dried, wild yeast starters. I've tried some of them and they do produce a more tangy, chewy, artisan-quality bread, as does creating your own starter from wild yeast spores that adhere to grape skins or that float around your kitchen. But I wanted to develop a (relatively) easy recipe that most people could follow using ingredients on hand. (Myself included!)

Wheat Batard

For Thanksgiving, I plan on making a traditional bread stuffing for a turkey that the local free-range fowl farm has set aside for me. (Another thing to give thanks for.) Chewy, whole wheat bread stands up nicely in stuffing, but grocery stores here in my suburb-of-the-suburbs sell only White 'N Fluffy commercial loaves. One whiff of moisture and these breads flatten like hosts served up at Sunday Communion.

So I made my own.

This recipe is similar to my Whole Wheat Sourdough Raisin Pecan Bread, but for the lack of nuts and dried fruit. I also replace some of the whole wheat flour with all-purpose flour, preventing me from calling this a "Whole Wheat Batard".


Day 1 - Evening

Ingredients:

¼ cup whole wheat flour
¼ cup all-purpose flour
1/16 tsp. instant yeast
pinch ascorbic acid (optional)
¼ cup water, room temperature

1    Stir together the dry ingredients. Add the water and mix gently to create a wet dough. Cover with plastic wrap and a clean kitchen towel. Let sit in an undisturbed area of your kitchen overnight or no longer than 12 hours.

Note: Don't substitute bread flour, high-protein flour, or high-gluten flour for the all-purpose flour. The starter will turn gummy and elastic, making further additions difficult to incorporate.

Whole wheat flour contains a small amount of naturally occurring oil. Depending on how old your flour is and how you store it (whole wheat flour is best stored in the refrigerator), these residual oils may have begun to oxidize. The process of making starter, incubating flour granules with warm water over a number of days, can accelerate oxidation. White flour, which has virtually all oil removed, will keep rancidation to a minimum.

Use room temperature water, not hot water. You want to discourage fast growth. Slow fermentation permits growth of wild yeast and bacteria that lend a distinct tanginess to the final product. Filtered water is preferred to tap water which, depending on where you live, may contain small amounts of chlorine or other chemicals that retard growth.

~~~~~~~~~~
Day 2 - Morning

Ingredients:

¼ cup all-purpose flour
¼ cup water

1    Add the water to the flour to create a paste. Combine this paste with your overnight starter and stir gently but completely. Cover with plastic wrap and a clean kitchen towel. Let sit in an undisturbed area of your kitchen no longer than 12 hours.

Note: The picture above is what the starter looked like before I gave it its first feeding today.

~~~~~~~~~~
Day 2 - Evening

Ingredients:

¼ cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons water, or as needed

1    Sprinkle flour over starter and stir gently but completely. If it becomes too gummy or difficult to stir, add 1 or 2 tablespoons of water. Cover with plastic wrap and a clean kitchen towel. Let sit in an undisturbed area of your kitchen overnight or no longer than 12 hours.

~~~~~~~~~~
Day 3 - Morning

Ingredients:

All of your starter
1 ¼ cup whole wheat flour
¼ cup all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. instant yeast
pinch ascorbic acid (optional)
¼ cup plus 2 tbls. water


1    Stir together flours, salt, yeast, and ascorbic acid if using.

Note: Below is my bubbling starter after a 2½ day growth.




2    Add the starter to the flour mixture and stir lightly. Incorporate the water in thirds, two tablespoons at a time, stirring after each addition until you form a shaggy mass. Cover with plastic wrap and a kitchen towel and let sit (autolyse) in an undisturbed area of your kitchen for 30 minutes.

Note: You may need more or less water depending on the humidity in your kitchen and the dryness of your flour. The dough before kneading should feel firm but moist enough to relax.

3    Sprinkle flour onto a work surface. Place dough on work surface and sprinkle lightly with flour. Knead approximately 8 minutes, sprinkling with flour if it becomes too sticky to handle. (You may need to start kneading with a bench scraper since the dough will be sticky at first.) Place dough into a clean bowl, cover with plastic wrap and a kitchen towel, and let rise in an undisturbed area of your kitchen for 2 hours (less if the temperature of the room is greater than 75° F).

Note: Below is my dough before its first rise, and after 2 hours. It has almost doubled in size.




4    Gently deflate dough. Fold over onto itself 2 or 3 times. Cover, and let rise for another hour.

5    Gently deflate dough and scoop out onto a flour-dusted surface. Slice dough into two equal pieces. Knead each piece about 10-15 times to reestablish a ball. Cover the dough lightly with plastic wrap and let sit for 15 minutes to relax the gluten. Then form each ball into the desired shape. For the batards shown, I roll the balls on the counter until they are about 8 inches long by 2 inches wide.

6    Place the shaped loaves on cookie sheets covered with parchment paper, dust lightly with flour, and allow to rise for another hour.

7    Place baking stone or tiles onto middle shelf of oven and preheat to 490° F for at least one hour.

8    Right before you're ready to bake, place a pan of boiling water on the floor of the oven, underneath the baking stone. I use a old 9-inch cast iron fry pan for this. The steam from the pan imitates a commercial oven. You'll have to remember to remove the pan after 5 minutes though or your loaf won't brown properly.

9    Cut away parchment under one of the loaves, leaving about an inch of paper around the dough. Place the loaf with parchment onto a peel or paddle. Using a razor blade, lame, or very sharp knife, make three slashes about ¼ inch deep into the top of the dough. Using a spray bottle, mist the loaf with clean water. Slide the loaf onto the preheated stone. Bake for 5 minutes, remove the pan of water, reduce the oven temperature to 450° F, and bake for an additional 12 to 16 minutes until the outside is very dark (or until the loaf gives off a hollow-sounding "thud" when tapped.) Remove from the oven with a peel. Cool on a rack or other non-solid surface. Repeat for second loaf.

Note: Don't forget to bring the oven back up to 490° F. before baking the second loaf.

If your oven has hot spots (mine does), turn the loaf halfway through baking.

Enjoy!

Ahh, I'm Home

Maybe I'm only a food fanatic because I was born and raised in the US. A Parisian birth would see me blending in like pear and cheese.

From an article in the Guardian:

"Compare our 'food experience' to that of the French: the time that the average British family takes to prepare a meal has shrunk from two hours to 15 minutes in the past few years. And, while we are speed-eating, cramming in a Kingsize Mars before the lights turn green, the French are taking smaller mouthfuls, resting their cutlery between bites, discussing the food - often because it is worthy of discussion."

"I eat up to five slices of bread for breakfast. For lunch, I'll eat salmon or sea bass with green vegetables. With that I have water (I rarely drink alcohol). At 4pm, I take tea - green tea and biscuits or dark chocolate. I eat healthy things in enormous quantities. I can eat a whole chicken for supper."
- Farida Khelfa, ex-model, now works for designers Azzedine Alaia and Jean Paul Gaultier, mother of two. Lives in Paris.

Take, For Example, Wheat Gluten

A vegetarian friend recently asked me a question about Morningstar Farms vegetable patties. Following is his question, and my reply.

~~~~~~
Fanatic,

Have you heard of the company Morningstar Farms? They make vegetarian products that taste like chicken, burgers, etc. (Really they're poor imitations, but ignoring that they mimic poorly, I think they taste really good anyway). I was wondering if you had an opinion on it. I noticed they use a whole crapload of ingredients to make the stuff, and I assume [those are] the ingredients to make it taste like hamburger/chicken/whatever and to give it its texture. Could that affect the nutritional value of the food?

Thanks!
~~~~~~
Yes, I do have an opinion. I'll try to sum it up in as few words as possible. Those few words are:

I believe the healthiest human diet consists of foods as close to their natural state and as minimally processed as possible. The greater the distance our food from its natural state, the less nutritional value it has.

The rest of this email just defends that statement.

Now, although Morningstar Farms Garden Veggie Patties appear to be chock full of the esteemed vegetables and grains touted by just about every person with nutritional bent (or not), their degree of processing puts them in a category of, well, filler ... something you might eat once in a while to pack in the calories, but not the makings of a good day-to-day food regimen.

Let's look at one of these foods' primary ingredients: wheat gluten. You start with a highly nutritious wheat berry (grain), full of vitamins and minerals and fiber and other phytochemicals some of which we still haven't identified. ("That is to say, there are things that we now know that we don't know but there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know." - Donald Rumsfeld). You grind it under heat and pressure to make flour. You filter out the bran and germ leaving a pile of powder to which you add (toxic) chlorine or bromine as whiteners. The remaining product is mostly starch. This is the flour most of us use for baking. It has so many nutrients removed, e.g. thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, iron, vitamin E, fiber, etc. that the US government requires manufacturers to enrich it, that is, put back some of what was taken out. You mix this flour with water, then rinse and rinse it until most of the starch is removed and you are left with a greyish rubbery proteinaceous product, gluten. Mmmm, boy. I don't know what this product has going to recommend it. Even its protein is difficult for many humans to digest. Speaking of its protein, wheat gluten is deficient in many of the specific amino acids considered essential (lysine, methionine, valine) and fails to constitute what dietitians refer to as "complete protein" ... the sort you find in meat. So, if you're looking to this as a substitute for meat, it doesn't cut it. And speaking of meat, these burgers, as do many of their ilk, contain milk and egg derivatives, two food groupings often eliminated in vegetable-based diets.

You get the picture. I would guess that all of the vegetables in these patties start out in a dehydrated state so as not to introduce undesirable microorganisms (bacteria or molds). You can imagine this would eliminate most water-soluble vitamins, the B's, C, and lots of antioxidants and other phytochemicals. Residual oils from brown rice or other grains, and added oils, are surely undergoing a process of rancidity but are effectively covered up with a profuse array of spices, extracts, flavorings, salt, etc.

It is my opinion that the cells of a human trying to subsist on these types of foods will fail to thrive, and may deteriorate prematurely.

The alternative to Morningstar Farms Garden Veggie Patties is, as the significant man in my life says, "A Big Salad". We discussed your question and he talked about how he ate when he lived alone, how difficult it was eating healthfully, how much time and planning it required, and how the roasting of a Big Chicken, the tossing of a Big Salad, and the uncorking of a Big Red constituted eating well for him. I would say he didn't do too poorly.

(He just added: "The most important thing about the Big Salad is the dressing!" He said you need to develop a good combination of good (olive) oil, good vinegar ("Not that white crap."), and good other stuff like good mustard and good garlic, etc. so that the resulting dressing is good, good enough so that eating lots of it just makes you feel even more good.)

(He also just added that when he was living alone he had such a buddy relationship with Pizza Palace that the guy behind the counter greeted him by his first name.)

Enjoy!

To E or Not To E

A study making headlines about the possible downside of taking vitamin E sounds inconclusive to me. I'm eager to have a look at their research methods.

Here's what I hear from the news:
Elderly people who took at least 200 IUs of vitamin E a day died earlier than those taking less.

Here's what people may take away from this:
Taking vitamin E will make me die earlier.

Here's why I caution drawing this conclusion:
1. People who take supplements are a unique group and do not represent a cross section of the population. One reason people take supplements is as therapy for a preexisting ailment, or as insurance against a chronically poor diet. People who take vitamin E are also apt to be taking other supplements. Did the researchers account for these confounding factors?

2. One cannot draw a risk statement (or a statement of cause and effect) from this type of study. That is, you cannot say that vitamin E caused people to die early, you can only say that people who died early also happened to be taking vitamin E. In fact, the lead author of the study admits he does not know the reason for the association he reported.

3. Was the supplement intake primarily self-reported? Self-reporting of intake is fraught with errors ... desire to please the questioner, memory lapses, lack of knowledge about quality, quantity, and frequency of intake. And self-reporting is especially problematic in an elderly population.

4. The study in question is a meta-analysis of 19 studies that were published between 1993 and 2004. The data for the 19 studies was collected in years prior to publication. And some data (we don't know unless we read each of the 19 studies) may be based on data even older than 1990. Why is this important? Because we now know that intake of vitamin E in only the alpha-tocopherol form has been implicated in heart disease. (Possibly because it blocks absorption of the other vitamin E compounds.) Most vitamin E on the market prior to 2000 contained only alpha-tocopherol. Synthetic vitamin E (labeled, sometimes incorrectly, as all-rac alpha-tocopherol, all-rac alpha tocopheryl acetate, or dl-alpha-tocopherol), another popular form of vitamin E in supplements in past years is known to lack the benefits of natural vitamin E and may also be problematic.

I think I will continue to take vitamin E, at least until a mechanism can be explained for possible risk.

Note: Vitamin E is actually a complex, much like Vitamin B Complex. We know of 8 compounds, 4 tocopherols and 4 tocotrienols (described by alpha-, beta-, gamma, and delta- for each class), that comprise it. Of the 8, alpha-tocopherol is the most abundant in our bodies, but studies have revealed unique and important activities for the lesser compounds.

It's best to take a vitamin E supplement that consists of mixed tocopherols and tocotrienols. The DRI for vitamin E (based only on alpha-tocopherol) is about 15 mg/day. Antioxidant effect was seen at intakes of around 80 mg. The upper limit is 1000 mg (1500 IU).

1 mg. alpha-tocopherol = 1.49 IU alpha-tocopherol, e.g. 268 mg. = 400 IU.

The Slash

A post-script to my Raisin Pecan Bread...

A lame (pronounced lam) is a double sided blade mounted to a holder. It's used for slashing dough before baking. Slashing is more than decorative. It gives steam a place to escape as the loaf bakes. Try baking a loaf without slashing and you'll produce a nicely rounded loaf with a giant air bubble inside.

Another trick: If your loaf tears or pulls as you drag the blade through, try wetting it with cool water first.