When I started asking readers of the blog to post pastry questions, the most common one, far and away, was about piecrusts. It seems that everybody is somehow puzzled by why their recipes don’t produce the perfect piecrusts of memory. So this post is meant to go into great detail about the recipe and technique I use to produce piecrusts.

I like my piecrust browned and flaky with a slight crunch on the exterior. Once I slice into a pie or tart, I take great pleasure in seeing thin layers of dough alternating with pockets of air creating a lightness of texture and a delightful crackle when a forkful enters the mouth.

Ingredients
6 tablespoons ice water
2 1/3 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
14 tablespoons chilled butter (7 oz. butter)

Choosing a Pie Crust Shortening
I favor high fat butter over shortening, lard or oil. I think most bakers will agree that butter provides the most flavorful crust. But there is quite a bit of disagreement about what fat creates the most desirable texture. The texture results from a combination of the method used to incorporate the fat and the type of fat or combinations of fat used. So many bakers will use lard, oil, or vegetable shortening (though this fallen out of favor because of the high percentage of trans fats) instead of butter because butter melts at much lower temperatures which means that, badly made, a piecrust using butter may well have a greasy, non-flaky texture, which is definitely undesirable. Last November, Melissa Clark published a wonderfully comprehensive article in the New York Times that covered many of the various options in terms of which fat to choose for a pie crust; you can find the article on her website.

In order to create a pie dough that is flavorful and tender but flaky, I work cold butter into the dough very carefully. Once the butter is incorporated, it is stacked thinly in pockets between layers of gently worked flour and water. The finished crust should be chilled before it goes into the oven. As this type of crust bakes, the flour and water layers set or gel, trapping the fat in sealed pockets. Steam develops in these sealed cells and they expand, creating an aerated pocket and a flaky texture in the finished crust.

In this recipe I use water as my liquid instead of egg yolks, cream, sour cream, or cream cheese. Water allows for the most gluten formation (the strengthening of flour protein once a liquid is added and incorporated), which does not mean the dough will be tough or chewy, but it does enhance the flaky air pockets and the slight crunch in the mouth. Egg yolks, and cream add more fat to the flour, preventing gluten formation and tenderizing and softening the final product. Sour cream and cream cheese are similar to egg yolks and cream but they also contain acid which prevents gluten formation even more, creating a very tender dough.

What lard and shortening lack in flavor, they make up for by creating a fine flaky, delicate texture. The more you coat the flour with fat the more tender it will be. Lard and shortening do not melt at room temperature and therefore can be worked into dough for longer periods and into finer particles without melting, creating a much softer and more delicate crust (since there are much smaller air pockets and very little gluten formation in the dough). On the other hand, if you use butter, the more you work butter into smaller pieces the warmer it becomes, and it is likely to melt into the flour, losing its ability to steam in the oven, and resulting in an overall toughening of the crust.

Method

In a chilled stainless-steel mixing bowl, toss together the flour, sugar, and salt. Cut the cold butter into 1/4 inch cubes and add it to the flour mixture. Using two knives, a pastry blender or a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, chop and toss the butter until all the chunks are coated in flour and smashed up a bit. Do not keep cutting and tossing the butter so that the butter chunks all become pea sized. The butter chunks should mostly remain a bit larger than peas and vary in size, ranging from lima bean size to pea size, as in this photo:

Add 6 tablespoons of ice water and toss the mixture in the bowl with a fork, or allow the paddle to rotate a few turns. The dough should not come together at this point. It should seem almost too dry to do so:

Scrape out the contents of the bowl onto a marble slab, a stone countertop or a large wooden board:

Using the heel of your hand, smear the butter with the dry ingredients to marble the butter into the flour-water mixture:

Begin with one section of the dough and work your way through all of it. Repeat this process a second time, coaxing the flour clumps into the butter chunks. The mixture should now come together like dough, but the butter streaks should be clearly visible. You might need to repeat the smearing process one more time:

Gather the dough into a mound and transfer it onto a piece of plastic wrap or wax paper:

Wrap the clump of dough tightly with the paper and fold it over the top of the dough:

Press down on the plastic or paper, forming a disc of dough:

Chill the dough for one hour. Have your pie filling fully prepared before you roll your dough.

This makes enough dough for a covered 9” pie. Divide the dough in half. Using a rolling pin, with two grip pins at either end, roll the dough back and forth until it doubles in size. Pick the dough up and sprinkle flour underneath to prevent sticking and rotate the dough ninety degrees. Roll it again until it again doubles in size. If you find that the dough sticks to the rolling surface or your rolling pin, you can try rolling the dough between two pieces of parchment paper or wax paper.

When the dough is rolled out to the size needed, dust off any excess flour with a dry brush. To transfer the dough to the pie plate, you can fold it into four quadrants like a napkin or drape it over your rolling pin and roll the dough around the pin:

Unroll the dough over the pie plate or unfold the napkin of dough, placing the folded corner in the center of the pie plate. With a kitchen scissors, trim the dough around the dish leaving a one inch overhang.

Set the lined pie dish aside and roll your second piece. Follow the same guidelines as above. Once the dough is rolled out to the correct size, you can add your filling to the pie dish lined with dough. Follow the directions above to transfer the second piece of dough to the pie dish. Trim the top piece of dough so that it is just a bit smaller than the first dough that lines the dish. Wrap or fold the bottom piece over the top one resting on the rim of the pie plate, and pinch the dough together on the rim of the dish. You will create a decorative pattern by simply pressing down with your two index fingers 1/4” apart. Keep moving your fingers clockwise around the rim of the pie plate, sealing the dough and creating a visual pattern of indentations and peaks. Chill the pie in the refrigerator for 15 minutes before baking. Before placing the pie in a hot oven, using a sharp paring knife, make some steam holes in the shape of an “x” with slits one inch in length in the center of the top crust. Using a pastry brush, paint the top crust with an egg white wash and sprinkle it with two tablespoons of granulated sugar (with 1/4 tsp. of cinnamon mixed in if you like cinnamon). Bake according to the pie recipes instructions.

For any sort of raw filling, bake the pie at 400º F on the bottom shelf of a fan-less oven for 30 minutes. Turn the oven down to 350 º F and bake for another 30-60 minutes. The filling should be bubbling. The crust should be brown. And some juices might be drizzling out of the steam slits.

I have some more great photos of readers’ versions of my recipes. I take endless pleasure in seeing how my desserts get made and remade out there in the world. It’s really a treat.

Bea at La Tartine Gourmande strikes again, with a wonderful post about making the custard filled vanilla cakes that are pictured in the book (and which I describe how to make here). There are several beautiful photos of the final results. Here is one:

Over at Cookies and et cetera, Paul made perfect looking versions of my Almond Honey Caramel Chews. And he says they were perfect tasting as well, so I’m thrilled:

And Paul, Vivien, Eva, Michael, Claire and my dad spent an evening together making my Maple Walnut Souffles. And they even rose!

I first met Mike when he featured me on his PBS television show, and we hit it off from the start. He’s fun, funny, and a perfect host, and now that he’s got a regular daily gig on WOR Radio here in NY, Food Talk with Mike Colameco, I’ve been dropping in every few weeks to answer pastry and baking questions. Here are two links to the shows I’ve done with him:

January 31, 2007

January 10, 2007

I made an appearance today on the local Fox morning show. It was fun — relaxed, great hosts, and chocolate pot de cremes! Here’s a link to the segment. Thanks to the folks at Savory New York for hosting me on their segment with Fox.

One of the most extraordinary things about having written and published The Sweet Life continues to be the experience of reading about and seeing the results of my readers making my desserts. It’s just amazing to actually view the photos on food blogs and emails, not just hope that my recipes are working.

So, I’m going to link to and post some of the beautiful photos I’ve found, either on blogs or in emails sent to me, of my desserts. I hope they make you hungry!

First up, two versions of my Honey-Roasted Pears, featured on the front cover of the book.

Here’s a version from Veronica’s Test Kitchen:

My dear friends Deborah, Suzanne and the two Erichs made the pears for their Christmas dinner, and sent along two great photographs, one of the pears, and one of Suzanne making them:

At Dessert First, Anita the PastryGirl tried a couple of my ice creams and cookies, and also provided an interesting report on her test run of her new ice cream machine. Here’s the Mandarin Orange Sorbet with Hazelnut Shortbread:

And here’s the Apple Cider and Caramel Ice Cream:

Erin over at Ahi to Ziti posted about the Chocolate Almond Cracks, which I made on the CBS Morning Show:

Cenk at Cafe Fernando made the Chocolate Caramel Pot de Creme, and he also emailed to say hello all the way from Turkey:

One of the things that’s most exciting about getting to see the results of people making your recipes is seeing their variations. Over at Cook & Eat, Lara transformed my Cardamom and Honey Pistachio Nougat Glacé into a Honey Elderflower Glacé:

An even more creative spin on one of my recipes is this Vanilla, Brown Butter & Hazelnut Cake with Warm White Chocolate & Truffle Honey Filling; Truffle Honey Ice Cream; Apricots in Vanilla & Earl Grey Tea Caramel, produced by Joycelyn at Kuidaore. I love using truffle honey — the bread pudding in the book uses a truffle honey drizzling to make it special — and I love filling my Vanilla, Brown Butter and Almond Tea Cake with warm, oozy things, so I was really tickled by this one:

What’s most rewarding these variations on my recipes is that it reminds me of exactly how I do my job: I find techniques that appeal to my senses, then I add flavors and textures that I adore, and then I play around, make adjustments, and suddenly I have a whole new recipe.

With Meyer lemons currently in season, my Aunt Judi’s friend Joan made a Meyer Lemon Curd Tart, with beautiful lemon zest decorating the edges of the tart:

And I think my Uncle John might have been the very first person to send me a photo of one of my recipes. He made the Goat Cheesecake Enrobed in Hazelnut Brittle, all the way back in October:

I apologize to everyone out there for disappearing for the last month. December through the New Year is the busiest time of year in the restaurant business, particularly at restaurants like Chanterelle, and I simply haven’t had any time to think about blogging or even responding to emails. But I’m looking forward to posting on a number of topics in the next couple of days — starting now!

About.com has posted a terrific review of the book. I think the reviewer really got what I was aiming for, which was to create very explicit and clear recipes that don’t make you read between the lines or guess what to do at every turn.

And here’s an interview I did for GlobalChefs. Jeremy Emmerson, who conducted the interview, wrote that “Could this be the best cookbook I have seen in 2006?
Every year there’s one, a ‘home run’ of a cookbook and this year I think Kate Zuckerman is the one that’s hit it!” Thanks, Jeremy!

My publisher, Bulfinch Press, asked me to write a short essay about what I learned while putting my book together. It’s available on their website , but here it is:

About two years ago, during the time when I was first contemplating writing The Sweet Life, I was in the process of rolling pate sucree, sweet tart dough, on a stainless steel worktable while simultaneously trying to explain to a pastry intern at Chanterelle how to whip egg whites for a batch of Goat Cheese and Basil Souffles. Standing right next to her, but admittedly with my attention somewhat divided, I was walking her through the process of whipping egg whites, as she looked into the mixer’s bowl, cream of tartar in one hand, sugar in the other. What I wanted her to produce was a shiny, voluminous, smooth meringue with stiff peaks. To get them to that stage you need to add acid and sugar at specific moments. I thought I’d be able to explain to her, without peeking into the bowl, what to look for: how to know when to add the cream of tartar, when to add the numerous teaspoons of sugar, at what speed to whip the eggs, and, most importantly, when to stop.

It didn’t work. What I got instead was a bowl full of chunky, mealy egg whites that were leaking liquid: classic overbeaten egg whites, which, if I tried to use for the soufflés, would produce a dessert with big white hunks in a barely risen soufflé that would be runny and unpleasant. So we did it again, and I stood next to her, looking into the bowl.

This experience stayed with me when I set out to write The Sweet Life. If I wasn’t able to verbally explain the steps needed to whip up egg whites, how would I manage to instruct a reader whose bowl I certainly wouldn’t be able to look into?

I recognized that, when I whip a bowl of egg whites, I’m looking for subtle visual and sensual clues that key me into coaxing a meringue to take shape with maximum volume, a lustrous shine, a homogenous texture, and a stiff mountain of peaks. But these clues are not explicit; they’re experiential and ephemeral, and almost impossible to write down without a broader context. That context, I realized, was what is actually happening to the egg white proteins on a chemical level. If I could better understand why egg whites whip - and why acid and sugar and the right agitating tool used at the right speed are needed - maybe I could really teach a far away reader how to do it without needing to check on her results.

So, I began studying some of the chemistry of the pastry kitchen. I had a lot of help, from classic books like Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking and Shirley Corriher’s CookWise, as well as from Kirsten Hubbard, a culinary student of mine who turned out to be a physicist with a burgeoning interest in food science. It was in the process of writing this all down, making it explicit and clear in decent English, that I really came to understand what has always been happening in my stainless steel bowls when I’m whipping egg whites.

Writing this book has made me an immeasurably better pastry chef: it’s aroused so much curiosity and desire to explicate the experiences I have in the pastry kitchen. Really, it’s the people who’ll cook from my book that I have to thank for this, and I hope that by reading The Sweet Life they’ll sense me standing next to them, looking into their bowls, watching for the clues that hopefully are no longer so mysterious.

Copyright © 2006 by Kate Zuckerman

I haven’t had much time to post to the blog in the last week, since there have been a lot of live promotional events for the book, including a 45 minute demo at the wildly well-attended Chocolate Show here in New York this past Sunday.

But catching up on what’s happening on-line, I found this lovely post about my book and my Apple and Quince Tart recipe, filled with absolutely beautiful photos, by Bea, proprietress of La Tartine Gourmande.

Your greatest hope when you write a book like The Sweet Life is that your readers will actually make and enjoy your recipes. Seeing my tarts brought to life by one of my readers is a truly wonderful feeling, and I’m so grateful to Bea and to all my other readers for welcoming me into their kitchens.

Here’s one of Bea’s gorgeous photos of the Apple and Quince Tarts:

Thanks, Bea!

Tuesday’s Women’s Wear Daily ran a very nice profile of me. Here it is:

Just Desserts
By Emily Holt
NEW YORK — When she’s not picking figs and quinces from the trees in her Brooklyn yard, pastry chef Kate Zuckerman is whipping up sophisticated desserts like raspberry lemon verbena napolean for the refined palettes at Chanterelle in TriBeCa.

And she traces a similar path in her first cookbook, “The Sweet Life,” out now from Bulfinch Press. Alongside recipes for passion fruit glacés and hazelnut cake, Zuckerman, a former anthropology student, offers helpful scientific and horticultural tips on ingredients and how they react with other foods in the baking process. “I enjoy researching topics that are very familiar to people,” she says. “It’s what I like to do with food — talk about things you use every day and sort of dig them up a little.”

Zuckerman started cooking for her two older brothers. “They’re both very tall and have endless appetites, so when they were in high school, I made my way through Maida Heatter’s ‘Great Book of Desserts,’ recipe by recipe.”

The petite mother of two has now moved on to baking for her own children — and sweets are on the menu, despite the current vogue to put children on strict sugar-free diets. “My son loves these malted meringues with gooey milk chocolate, sort of glorified Whoppers,” she says. “He’s really picky and only likes chocolate. But my four-year-old daughter surprises me” in terms of what she’ll try.

The kids aren’t just willing taste testers, they’re also hands-on. “We just made an apple tart this weekend, with brown butter and vanilla bean and fig and apples,” she says. “I usually lay out the apples in beautiful rows, but they wanted to do something, so I just let them. It looked terrible.”

And, of course, Zuckerman is still learning herself. “If I went back to college now, I’d study chemistry,” she says. “I know I have to beat egg whites on the first day that I crack them open to get panna cotta to set….Cooking to me is about doing things over and over again and seeing subtleties. A home cook doesn’t have that opportunity, so you really need to give them an idea of what you’re experiencing as a chef.”

One tip she can offer for the layman or -woman: In case of a disaster, like the all-too-common fallen soufflé, there’s nothing to be done but to eat it. “It still tastes good,” she swears. “A lot of people serve fallen soufflé. It’s just like a warm pudding.”