Apple Pie!

I have been in the mood for desserts lately - and one of my favorites is pies. But pies come in different styles depending on the filling and whether that filling is more custard with a semi solid consistency or solid or mixed.  One of the more solid ones is apple pie and it is a standard and quite easy to make. 

"There, your sample...Mrs. Lovett's meat pies..."
but it's not! It's Apple Pie!

Pies are pies because of one thing which is very important: pie crust. Called "pate brisee" in French, pastry has to be three things: flaky, therefore delicate and lastly, flavorful to complement with the filling. In desserts, this is more sweet, in savory, this is more salty. But whatever the flavor is, the basic way of making pate brisee is still based on the balance of oils and gluten released flour paste. 

I explained before in a post on cakes that there are basic proportions in making cake batter. It is the same in pate brisee. The most important as mentioned, is the creation of a delicate flaky crust and this is achieved through the use of butter. 

Butter, being solid, has the capacity of making spaces of air within thinly rolled flour paste. Because flour paste by itself when baked is a tough structure, the rolling of this mass with butter or solid fats such as lard located in between will achieve the flakiness we desire in pie crust. 

Thus, with that in mind, butter needs to be "cut" into small pieces incorporating its solid structure in the flour then, adding the water to release the gluten of the flour, the mass transforms to a dough that is easily handled and when baked under oven heat, the butter is melts, frying the thinly rolled flour paste, achieving a crusty crunch that is pleasing to the palate. With the filling, the rest is just...well, history. 

The filling is another matter. And fillings usually work perfectly with pate brisee depending on texture contrasts.  In apple pie, the moist solid yet buttery sweet filling works well with the sweet salty crunch of the pie crust. Hungry yet? Well, let's proceed to making! 

Apple Pie 

Pie crust: 

(A tip! Remember the proportions for perfect pate brisee: 1 cup flour: 1/2 cup (therefore 1 stick) butter! For a 9-in. single crust recipe, use 1-1/2 sticks butter and 1-1/2 cups flour; for a double crust recipe, use 2 sticks butter and 2 cups flour.) 

• 2 cups all-purpose flour 
• 2 sticks (1/2 cup butter = 1 stick) butter 
• 3 tablespoons sugar 
• 1 teaspoon salt 
• 1/8 cup (more or less) of ICE cold water 

1. Mix the first four ingredients by using two blunt knives cutting crosswise several times about two minutes until the butter is cut into smaller pieces and evenly distributed within the flour mixture and each butter piece is just well dusted in flour. Water may be added once the butter has been cut to pea sized pieces.  
2. Adding the water slowly, incorporate by gently kneading the resulting dough with the fingers releasing the gluten of the flour thus making it easier to handle. The purpose of this is not to make the dough appear like bread dough rather to release the gluten making the mass semi-resilient and therefore flaky later on for the pie. The dough should be semi rubbery rather than the very doughy appearance that bread dough has. 
3. Divide the dough into 2/3 and 1/3. Chill the dough a bit about three to five minutes just cold enough to handle. In between two pieces of wax paper, roll the larger piece evenly to 1/4 inch thin. Line the pie pan with this dough. 
4. Fill with the filling, the recipe of which follows, then top with the rolled smaller piece, the technique of which is just the same as the larger one. Folding the overhang of the bottom piece upwards meeting the top piece, seal the dough and make some airvents on the top. 
5. Bake for an hour and let cool until ready to serve. If desired, apply some eggwash (beaten egg with about three tablespoonfuls of water) on the top with a brush, sprinkle with sugar then increase the heat to broil for a minute or two until golden brown. 

Filling: 

• 6 medium to large Granny Smith Apples 
• 3/4 cups brown sugar or white if a sweeter feel is desired 
• 1/2 cup all purpose flour 
• 1 stick of butter, cut to 1 inch pieces 
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon to taste 

1. Peel and core the apples. Slice them all 1/4 inch thickness. 
2. Combine the apples, flour, sugar, butter and cinnamon and mix well until the apples are well coated with the dry ingredients. 
3. Fill the crust lined pan with the mixture as stated above. 

How to Make a Chicken Dish Without Really Trying (Honey Hoisin Chicken - An Original!)

I was just busy lately with work that I manage to update this site once a month usually on the final day. But in the spirit of leading busy lives and the bitchiness of maintaining a career, I am presenting a dish that caters to just that - making home cooked tasty meals while doing something else: whether be it work, catching up on reading, tending to your brats or even watching your often forgotten TV series! 

The trick here is  maintaining the juices while subjecting the meat to high temperatures that give its caramelization. This results in a dish that is tasty, fork tender yet moist. Yet, the tool should be able to do all that. Usually high heat results in a dry burnt dish. Long low heat usually results in fork tender stews that are quite honestly, tasteless! So how to manage to keep the best of both worlds? The secret? Oven timer cooking using a Dutch oven. 

Hence to quote Ron Popeil, "Set it and forget it!!" 

And I won't say more - I will let the video speak for itself. 

Dutch Oven Honey Hoisin Chicken. 

• 8 chicken thighs, thawed 
• salt 
• pepper 
• 1 head garlic, peeled and chopped 
• 1 onion, medium chopped 
• 4 -5 springs thyme 
• 1 thumbsized ginger, crushed 

1. Set the oven 375 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. 
2. In a bowl, combine salt, pepper, garlic and chicken and mix well. Line the Dutch oven pan with the chicken pieces. Top with onions and sprigs of thyme. Cover and bake in the preheated oven, timer cooking mode for two hours. Timer cooking means that the oven would turn itself of once the cooking time is over. 
3. You may just leave the whole setup and sleep until it is dinner time! But if you want to baste it further with flavors, then once the two hours are done just spread on top of the chicken pieces: 

• 1/2 cup honey 
• 1/2 cup Hoisin sauce 

Cover once again. Leave it and serve until dinner time! 

I served this to my nurses - and it was gone in about an hour... 

How to Fry a Chicken - Southern Style.

 

Fried Chicken, somewhat the staple of every meal is not as common as one thinks.  Now, it is easy to get them from the supermarket and of course, the restaurants and any outlet that deals with them.  In my day, fried chicken was not a daily occurrence for meat, chicken included, was reserved for special occasions and that goes for fried chicken as well. Chickens then took quite sometime to grow to full edible maturity unlike the hormone pumped chickens of today with supersized breasts and meaty thighs. So, when I was a child, it was only during birthdays we could be able to indulge on these and that would involve a deep fried half chicken for each person. Otherwise, we didn’t have the luxury of eating fried chicken on a whim. 

Fried Chicken...mmmm.

 KFC was not in Manila in my day even though there was an attempt to bring "Kentucky Fried Chicken" then.  Remember this was the old name of what KFC stood for and it stopped because current branding laws in the United States forbade any company using names that did not accurately describe the product, e.g. Boston Chicken is not really from Boston or Kentucky Friend Chicken is not really Fried Chicken typical of Kentucky style. But "Kentucky Fried Chicken" in the Philippines was a flop in the 1960's and that did not catch on until the 1990's when it was reintroduced to the newly accustomed fast food Filipino market as the rebranded KFC. 

KFC before as it was known by the full name.

  

Going back again to this piece of history, the main reason why chicken was very much a home cooked meal those days is that most housewives then used to do it. However, with the advent of fast food, it seemed that such skills are slowly becoming history especially with everyone working in their respective jobs, women included that no one has the time to cook even simple meals, fried chicken included. 

There are many versions of fried chicken and in fact, my mother used to make it "Chinese Style" by adding five spices as part of the flavor and instead of dusting the pieces with flour, she used corn starch instead which gave the product a lighter feel.  I read somewhere in a Chinese inspired cookbook, that some would even sauté the chicken pieces in a sugar-light soy sauce mixture after frying them to give it a "Hong Kong" flavor. 

Light soy sauce, sugar, some chili even and sesame seeds
now its time for some Chinese Chicken!

But here in the US and if I believe it's what "traditional" fried chicken is all about, "Southern" style is the way to go. The reason why Fried Chicken is very much a product of the South is the fact that most farms during the time of "home cooked" meals were very much a Southern phenomenon. In this regard, the farm economy of the nineteenth century involved manual labor which meant slave labor prevalent in those days. Chicken was and still is cheap here in the US compared to other forms of meat, fish and seafood and hence it was considered a "poor person" staple (Note: Fish on the other hand, is "poor person food" in the Philippines because of its abundance given that the Philippines is an archipelago surrounded by ocean waters.), that as a historical racial slur, fried chicken is associated with black slavery (again, this is just mentioned as a point of historical significance). I remember how a local supermarket in one of the Southern American cities, got flak for their billboard that said, "In celebration of Black History month, free Fried Chicken for everybody!" I didn't understand the upsetting connotation of that promotion until I got acquainted with the cultural history of the United States. 

Ads like these are considered politically incorrect.

But setting that aside - everyone loves a good fried chicken. Now, if there is anything that an African-American nurse friend of mine said once on the topic of this dish that is quite significant, it is this one piece of great advise, "Freyd, mah gradmuddher alwhays sayd - eef dher iz one things dhat youse need in chickhen, eets phap-er-reekha!" Note - its not paprika, its "phap-er-reekha"! The South is traditionally influenced by the cooking of France and Spain and if one looks at the traditional cooking of Spain, it may involve the savory spices including paprika, which is known as "pimenton" or a powder consisting of wood roasted red peppers that give Spanish chorizos its distinctive flavor. 

Paprika!

The second thing one needs to know in making Southern Style Fried Chicken is the use of buttermilk which serve two purposes - the acidity serves as a meat tenderizer and the thickness makes the meat moist enough for the flour to cling well.  These two qualities of buttermilk make the chicken tender and crusty which gives the chicken that juicy with a crunch to the bite. 

Thirdly, even frying temperature is what's important. Because some cooking utensils are so thin that they can absorb heat and become hot instantly, once the relatively cold chicken pieces get into the oil, the temperature drops instantly that the crust falls as the flour buttermilk batter on the meat's surfaces fall unto the frying pan, leaving the chicken naked with no crust. Hence, the pan needs to retain heat despite the chicken pieces. This is where the traditional thick Southern skillet comes in. 

The blacker the better!

My advise to you cooks and bargain hunters out there. So not go for the shiny new skillet that's good to be part of Martha Stewart's show. If you are looking for the best skillet available, go to the antique shop and get the blackest, most disgusting looking skillet you can find for that has withstood the test of time. The blackest of the skillets mean that it has been used over the years that the oils it came into contact with have been incorporated into the surface and in fact, this means that it has been seasoned so well, the oils have transformed into a microfilm of lubrication that surely food will not stick once it comes into contact with it. This quality goes for anyone looking for a well-seasoned wok too.  On a side note, my wok is the blackest of the black which I bought from a Kiwanis sale for only five dollars and my skillet came from Mike's great grandmother who passed it for generations and it actually was present during the bombs and cannons of Gettysburg. 

Next, what makes good fried chicken is the fat its fried in. For this, there is only one thing we need - lard and lots of it. For those who are weight watching, you know you shouldn’t be reading this article in the first place. But since we are in the topic of fried stuff, one knows that there is not an ounce of health in this discussion. Seriously speaking, the reason for the lard is it has a higher smoking temperature that it will not change the taste character during the frying process. This keeps the flavor to the dish. 

And you are surprised by the lard?!

Now that we are in the topic of temperature during the frying process, one needs to know the importance of uniform chicken pieces - none to big and none to small.  In this way, there is an even surface area of all chicken pieces exposed to the oil and heat and since the same relative sizes are placed in the skillet each time, one can assure the constant amount of time the frying process is given to yield consistent results. And for an average sized frying chicken of about 2 1/2 pounds total weight, the magic number is 13 and 7 - meaning 13 minutes on one side and 7 on the other. 

That said, one needs to remember this one golden rule. You are given only BUT one chance and ONE chance only to turn your chicken. There are reasons for this: first, prolonged exposure of the first side of the chicken pieces to heat ensures the solidification of the batter and second, while that is happening, the juices of the chicken along with the seepage of blood from the raw meat appears on the other side which is then cooked upon turning the chicken giving now the batter of the second side to solidify and achieve the crunchiness like that of the first side. If one keeps turning the chicken pieces during the frying, the action in itself is enough to inconsistently keep the temperature that it would take longer for them to cook. Secondly, the constant manipulation would not give the chance for the batter to solidify which then falls on the pan leaving you with nothing more than a mess. The only way to avoid this is let the pieces fry on the one side, then turn once to fry the next side. 

I've tried this recipe and it is a success everytime. 

 

Southern Fried Chicken 

• 1 whole frying chicken 
• 1 tablespoon salt 
• 1/2 tablespoon pepper 
• 1 cup buttermilk 
• 1 tablespoon paprika 
• 2 cups all purpose flour (some use self-rising flour) 
• 2 - 3 cups vegetable or animal lard (enough to half cover the chicken pieces during frying 

1. Cut the chicken according to the general way of cutting them into pieces. First, cut lengthwise on the breastbone flaying the whole chicken open exposing the neck and spine. Cut the chicken lengthwise as well dividing it into two halves. For each half, remove the wing cutting it through the joint. Likewise, cutting through the spine, separate the breast from the thigh and leg portion. Then cutting through the joint, separate the thigh from the leg. I sometimes cut the breast into two equal pieces although this is not necessary but it may be a good idea especially if the chicken is large. 
2. Combine salt, pepper and paprika in buttermilk and marinade the chicken pieces preferably for half a day. 
3. With a cup of flour in a plastic food saver with a tight seal, drop two or three chicken pieces and shake well until they are well covered in flour. If any of the surfaces are not covered in flour, it is best to dip those surfaces manually ensuring all are evenly coated. Leave the chicken pieces on a tray for the liquids of the chicken soak the flour creating a crust in the process. 
4. Meanwhile, heat the skillet with lard. Once the lard has melted and it begins to somewhat ripple in the heat, fry half of the chicken, i.e. a breast, a wing, a thigh and a leg in the lard leaving adequate space in between pieces and for a total of thirteen minutes. One would notice that the temperature drops with the addition of the chicken but keep the heat at a medium and surely as the frying proceeds, the temperature would creep to its acceptable level. 
5. After the thirteenth minute, turn each piece and fry for an additional seven minutes. 
6. Remove each piece and leave to drain on a rack or on paper towels. 
7. Do the same for the other half of the chicken. 
8. Let the pieces rest for about five minutes and serve hot.