Sweet Potato Pie

I made sweet potato pie.  I followed the recipe from the first google hit for "sweet potato pie," with some alterations.

Is this worth writing about?

I made some very broad statements in the last post, as I'm wont to do.  While I was making the crust for the pie, I kept having to look back at the recipe I adapted from Helen Rennie to remember quantities.  Despite making pastry dough many times, I needed that recipe.  Or at least I needed its list of quantities.  The recipe is not disposable.  It's a kind of helper--somewhere to defer my memory.  It's an instance of a cliche of how the internet has changed the nature of knowledge: it's not so important if one remembers everything, so long as one knows where to look.  In the case of recipes however, the internet is not necessary at all--encyclopedic cookbooks have been serving as cyborg extensions of memory for a long time.

So I don't need to know how to make pastry dough.  I wrote it here in this blog.  The blog remembers how.  To return to my question, is this worth writing, let's compare this to my diaries.  I have boxes and boxes of diaries.  Most of them I have read at least twice.  Reading them is at once familiar and surprising--on the one hand, reading them triggers memories and I might also recall writing what I wrote, on the other, I had, up until reading it, forgotten much if not all of what I wrote.  One is almost always remembering in one way or another, but there is obviously nothing cumulative about it.  Reading a diary doesn't add to a collection of things I remember, but puts me in a different stream of remembering.  Through reading the diary some memories come to life again--I think about them again briefly, they might crop up over and over for a long time.  In other words, the diary must be read, and reading happens in time.  Having "saved" (the anxiety of losing memories drove much of my diary writing) these memories in a diary, only in the unread text of the diary might they be saved.  Only without a reader might the text be said to exist as a totality.  But not really, of course--it isn't anything without being read, is it?

But this blog is not a diary.  I'm not trying to record the ephemera of experience here.  A recipe is simply supposed to record a procedure in a way that's followable.  Actually this isn't so simple, as I've discussed before.  And thankfully.  Wouldn't it be awfully dull if even just a recipe could be written in the universal register?  This suggests another purpose for a recipe: to not be quite followable.  Not that a recipe writer has to try to do this, but a recipe's potential to confuse, mystify, or unintentionally inspire might be valued.  Because apparently I need to subject recipes to the literary theories of decades ago.

The pie was good.  The crust I thought was a bit too hard, although someone else liked it, called it "crunchy."  I prebaked the crust for fifteen minutes or so before filling it, using the sweet potato pieces in tinfoil as a weight to keep the crust from puffing up.  Improvising a weight was the most enjoyable part.  Next time however I'll just fill the unbaked crust, so that the crust turns out softer.

Ate My Soul and Gave Me The Recipe

As we discussed earlier, dear nonexistant readers, the ostensible purpose of a recipe is to facilitate recreations of the same result.  But of course this is not the whole story.  When you’re most in need of a recipe is when you’ve never made what the recipe tells you how to make.  At such a delicate time you take care to follow the recipe exactly.  Having never followed the recipe before, it is easy to misunderstand the recipe.  Sometimes, by sheer luck, the first time comes out flawlessly.  More often there are some kinks, which over the next few attempts, are worked out, and finally a satisfactory result is produced.  After this point, if you need the recipe at all any more, it is more as a memory map than an instruction set.


What is it you have created?  Your creation conforms to the limited contours that the recipe provides.  If you were after a replica of what the author sought to instruct you to make, however, there is no way of confirming this.  Sometimes there are photos, which often provide a more forceful impulse than the recipe itself--you see the photo and think “I want to make that.”  It’s sometimes easy to make it look right, sometimes it isn’t.

All these masturbatory, death-of-the-chef preoccupations aside, whether or not the recipe changes, you change.  At least, this is one way of accounting for culinary disappointments.  Tonight I made pasta with tomato-cream sauce and shrimp for dinner, and I ate it, but only because I was hungry.  The flavors were weak, and the textures even a little nauseating.  I’ve made pasta with tomato-cream sauce in countless different ways, some less satisfying than others.  And I keep making some form of it because I remember a few delicious instances of this dish.  But this time it’s been long enough I wonder if I have any idea what I’m after.  If I made what to me was a wonderful pasta dish a year ago, and ate it today, would I like it much?  There really isn’t any way of finding out empirically.  If I wrote down the precise recipe for those times when I made a particularly spectacular rendition, I doubt I would be able to reliably cook it again.  And I doubt I would want to.

A recipe is a much more intriguing beast than it may have appeared.


The general shape inconsistently described above also applies to me writing this entry.  Through writing, what I wanted to write changed.  What I thought I was writing changed.  These changes can hardly be tracked by the writing itself to create something coherent.  To me it appears that throughout the entry I forgot what I meant to write, and began on a new, somewhat related tangent.  By the end forgot the import of everything I had just written, summing it up as "intriguing."

Bizcochuelo de Papa

I had forgotten about Olga de Trejos' La Cocina Practica. This ardently mundane title resurfaced in a--no, the: I haven't done it in five years or more--thorough cleaning of my room. I think the fact that it's in Spanish, a language I more or less understand but am not very comfortable speaking has a great deal to do with my conviction that there is something to be found in this book. In it's range of recipes it is The Joy of Cooking, but unlike Joy it is more concerned with nutrition facts than technique, and rather than outlining recipes in painstaking specificity, de Trejos, with her exceedingly short recipes, seems to assume you know what she's talking about. Not knowing, in my case, is compounded by the fact that Spanish is not my native tongue. However most of the recipes are nonetheless very recognizable. The book seems to be for the most part (and here's the resemblance to Joy) a convenient anthology of European-derived classics.

So I'm fascinated by a dessert I've never ever heard of: Bizcochuelo de Papa, or, in rough English translation, Potato Cake.

1 libra de papas
6 huevos
9 cucharadas de azúcar refinado
jugo de 1 limón y cáscara rallada

Se hace un puré con las papas bien calientes para que quede espumoso. Se le agrega el jugo de limón, la cáscara rallada y las 6 yemas bien batidas, con el azúcar. Se baten las claras a punto de nieve y se incorporan suavemente a la mescla anterior. Se coloca en un molde engrasado, se espolvorea con azúcar refinado y se hornea a calor moderado.

Nasty lightining isn't it?

At first, having no idea what bizcochuelo meant, I thought it was a kind of potato pudding, because of the large quantity of eggs. The eggs are separated and the whites are beaten into frothy peaks. I like the spanish metaphor for this: one beats them "a punto de nieve"--"to the point of snow" or "into snow." The beaten egg whites, in my mind, make it a kind of angel food cake, but with potatoes. Why use potatoes in a dessert? The exotic imagination boggles.

My bad English translation of the recipe:

1 pound of potatoes
6 eggs
9 tablespoons sugar
juice of 1 lemon and its zest

Make a pure with the hot potatoes so that they stay fresh (sparkling? in spanish espumoso) Mix in the lemon juice, zest and the six egg yolks, beaten well with the sugar. Beat the egg whites to high peaks and fold in the yolk-potato mixture. Put in a greased mold and sprinkle with sugar and bake to a golden brown.

Yes, you have to see three photos of potatoes.

You might notice there is no oven temperature, or, for that matter, baking time. Nor is any shape or size of baking mold specified. But what I really love is the way the recipe begins in the middle of the action. Never mind how the potatoes are cooked, or even if they're cooked--just puree them when they're hot, so that they remain... what? Perhaps someone could help me out with what espumoso means here?

Not nearly yellow enough.

I decided to try it anyway, making the following assumptions: the potatoes would be boiled and mashed without any of the water, the baking temperature would be 350 F, and the baking pan would be whatever I had that seems about the right size to accommodate the batter.

My friend who agreed to join me in this endeavor (as in to make another version and tell me about it) commented that it seems like a lot of eggs for not very much potato. I agree, but when I began mixing it together it began to make sense: the potato paste is very dry, and the six yolks are just enough. Well, five might do.

 

This, as well, was more yellow.  And on the right side.

The result was something very nothing--pleasant and delicate. The metaphysical implications of describing it as “very nothing” are familiarly appalling, but. Why not give (or allow) it a bit of fruit and/or a glaze? Doesn't this little cake look sad and alone?

PS I just realized that's calor moderado not color moderado. So the recipe does specify oven temperature, albeit vaguely, but not how to tell when it's done.

Tarte Tatin IV: Reproducibility

 

~10'' saucepan

4 Golden Delicious apples

1/2 cup honey

2/3 stick butter

1 tsp lemon juice

pastry dough enough to cover the ~10'' pan rolled

Preheat oven to 375 F.  On low heat, melt butter in saucepan.  Fill a large bowl about half way with water, and pour in lemon juice.  Peel, core, and quarter apples, placing them in lemon water.  When butter is melted, remove pan from heat and stir in honey, mixing thoroughly (a rubber spatula works to both stir and scrape honey out of a measuring cup).  Shaking off excess water, arrange apple quarters radially, exteriors up, in pan.  (Arranging the outside edge first is easier.)  Roll out pastry into a roughly round shape large enough to completely cover pan.  On high heat bring honey-butter to a boil.  Boil for 3 minutes.  Flip apple quarters. Boil for another 4 minutes, stirring apple quarters around but not messing up their arrangement (pushing the outside edge to spin it and moving the pan in a horizontal, circular motion are two ways to do this).  Remove from heat.  Move the rolled out pastry dough using rolling pin, and place evenly on top of pan.  Trim excess if there is a lot of it.  Using a utensil to avoid burning hands, gently tuck the edges down between apples and the edge of the pan.  Gently press the top into a relatively even shape.  Bake for ~30 minutes at 375 F.  Cool for ten minutes.  Run a knife along the inside edge of the pan.  Using potholders, turn out onto a plate.  Cool for another twenty minutes.

(No I'm not posting another pastry dough recipe.)

Tarte Tatin III: Golden, Delicious, Boring

This time I used Golden Delicious apples.

Look, no applesauce!

4 apples, 6 minutes caramelizing, all-purpose flour.

Having put together a satisfactory result (I've replicated the more blonde photos that appear if you search for "Tarte Tatin" on Google Images), what would be the purpose of writing another recipe?  The trail-and-error experimentation I went through to arrive at this tasty yet now boring tart was not because of a dearth of good recipes, but rather because I had to get to know the recipe.  Apparently getting to know a recipe, for me, involves significant variations that are clearly not called for in the recipe: different fruit, sugar, flour, and proportions. (If stupidity is doing the same thing and expecting different result, what is doing something different and expecting the same result?)  It was through this daft variation that the necessities of the recipe revealed themselves.  Pears instead of apples and honey instead of sugar are fine.  But whole wheat pastry flour makes more finicky dough than all-purpose flour, the type of apples is dramatically important where consistency is concerned, and caramelization is a highly sensitive process that if you're niggly about burnt spots requires stirring, flipping, and paranoia about how long to leave the pan on high heat.  And so several seemingly unimportant details, glossed over by most recipes, become solidified into details that must happen.  If knowledge is as I have just described it, a collection of immobile things, perhaps this is why I am not at all motivated to write another recipe now that I think I know what I'm doing where this tart is concerned.  The previous recipe was in pursuit, and we've all heard those sayings about how it's all in the chase.  It was a recipe of what I imagined should be done, an imaginative fiction of sorts.  This recipe that I feel I should but don't want to write would be a history.  Although I would make some minor changes: I would caramelize it for just a little longer.  I would make sure there isn't a gap in the arrangement of apple slices.  I would use a little less water in the dough (the crust was a bit tough).  I suppose the point of writing the recipe down would be as an elaborate mimetic.  Months or years from now I will have forgotten about all this, and the recipe should allow me to make the same tart again, even though without the recipe I won't remember how.

Well, I still have one more round of dough in the fridge.  I'll write the recipe after I make one more tart.

Tarte Tatin II: Applesauce

The bits that were too burnt are on that little plate in the background.

 I followed the recipe I wrote last time, but with apples instead of pears.  But they were Granny Smith apples, and so the result is very thick, sweetened, somewhat caramelized applesauce on top of pastry.  It doesn't taste bad, in fact it tastes very good, but the texture is not at all what I was hoping for.  Apparently I should be using a different kind of apple, one that doesn't disintegrate when baked.

Other problems included a hunk of pie dough very irritable from being left in the fridge for a few days.  Like a bad case of athlete's foot, it cracked over and over when rolled out, and it fell apart being gently tucked into the pan.  Its fragility was probably in part due to the whole wheat pastry flour.

Some parts of the top (the bottom) were virtually charcoal, which I remedied by just scraping them off.  But maybe I should move the apples around in the pan while they're cooking in the boiling caramel.

Finally, I think I liked the less fruit, more pastry of last time.

Pear-Honey Tarte Tatin

Having just watched, I don't remember why, someone who is apparently not Jamie Oliver make Tarte Tatin, I stared at three pears waiting to rot in the fridge, and had a mad idea.  I think, in retrospect, I was more enamored with the madness than the idea itself (not that there is such a thing): make Tarte Tatin with these pears, but use honey for the caramel (there's no sugar in the house).  If this is "madness" my life must be terribly mundane.  It became apparent when I started peeling the pears that every recipe I had read used enough fruit to fill the pan completely, sometimes layering more on top.  Julia Child's pan, the extreme case, is brimming over.  So it would be a scant tart.

For a recipe I followed the "filling" part from smitten kitchen's, and (roughly) Helen Rennie's extremely explicit pastry technique.  Except I halved smitten kitchen's recipe, because I was only using half the amount of fruit, I used ~1/3 cup honey instead of 1/2 cup sugar, and for the crust whole wheat pastry flour, which is not as heavy as whole wheat flour, but does taste like something and has some texture. 

The problem, I think, with using honey is that it caramelizes more quickly than sugar.  So while smitten kitchen's recipe called for cooking the caramel with fruit for ten minutes on high heat, after five minutes I was afraid I had ruined the whole mess, and then I only cooked it for another minute or two after flipping the pear halves over.  And even then, I think it came out just a little too burnt.

Oops, I didn't cut the edges free from the pan before turning it out.

But despite being maybe a little too caramelized, and not terribly pretty, it was still delicious.  I made enough dough for another, maybe next time I'll try apples--more than three, even.

What follows is the untested recipe I would follow if I were to make this again.

Pastry (for two tarts)
13.5 oz (~3 cups) whole wheat pastry flour
2 1/2 sticks butter
1 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
1 cup ice water

With a postage scale, weigh a medium bowl, and then subtract this weight to weigh 13.5 oz flour in it.  Set this aside, and put the sugar and salt on top of it.  Cut the (cold) butter into lengthwise quarters and then many chunks (~1cm square).  Scatter these on a plate and put in the freezer for ten minutes.  Move the flour with salt and sugar to a food processor.  Put in the butter chunks.  Pulse repeatedly until the butter is cut into pea-size or smaller pieces.  While pulsing every second or two, slowly pour 1/2 cup ice-cold water.  Pick up some dough with your hand and squeeze it.  If it holds together easily, not falling apart after you stop squeezing, it's enough water.  If it falls apart, add more water in small increments until it does hold together.  Dump half of the not-yet-formed dough mixture out onto a flat, clean surface, scrape it together into one mass (despite the paranoia of heat that accompanies pastry dough, I think your hands are fine as a scraping instrument), and squeeze into a ball.  Do the same with the other half of the unformed dough mixture.  Seal with plastic (a bag, or plastic wrap) and refrigerate.


Fruit
6 pears
3/4 cup honey
1 stick butter

Preheat oven to 375 F.  Peel, halve, and core pears.  Splash a little lemon juice on top of them.  Melt butter on low heat in a large saucepan that can be put into the oven (no plastic parts).  Remove from heat, and stir in honey with a whisk.  Arrange pears facing down (they will be flipped).  Cut pear halves into pear quarters to fill in gaps.  While it's cooking, roll out pastry dough into something that will more than cover the top of the pan.  Cook on high heat for 3 or 4 minutes.  Flip pears.  Cook for another 2 minutes.  Roll the flat dough onto a rolling pin or other cylindrical object, to make transferring it onto the pan easier.  Lay it on top of the pan.  Push the edges into the sides of the pan, where possible between the pears and the sides of the pan.  Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes.  When the crust is just barely browned, take it out.  Let it cool for 30 minutes.  Unstick the edges of the crust from the sides of the pan with a knife.  Place a plate (significantly larger than the pan if possible) on top of the pan.  Using pot holders on both hands holding the pan and the plate together, quickly flip them over so that the tart falls onto the plate.