Sofia Helen Eleftheriou

Corn meal påte brisée 

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
  
• 1/2 cup cornmeal (finely ground if possible)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 sticks cold butter
• 1/2 c cold water

Filling for 2 Galettes:

• 6 thinly sliced apples
• 3 cups raspberries
• 3/4 cup sugar
• juice of one lemon
• 3 tablespoons corn starch (despite my harsh feelings for the stuff)
• 1/2 cup chopped almonds
• 4-6 tablespoons white nectarine sauce 

A little beaten egg (or milk) and sugar for the top. 

Put flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar and butter in a food processor, pulse until the butter is pea sized. Add the water until it starts to come together. Put this on a counter, divide it in two. Roll each ball of dough out into a large 12-14 inch round and refrigerate for an hour. 

Preheat over to 375 °F 
Mix apples, sugar, lemon juice, corn starch and almonds in a bowl, once this is mixed add the raspberries and lightly mix. I of course used raspberries from Heidi's Raspberry Farm you pick. That's my mom, the u-picks at her field are one of my favorite parts of summer! 

Spread two or three tablespoons of jam in the center of each dough round. I used Urban Orchards White Apricot Sauce. On a cookie sheet with parchment paper put the fruit sugar mixture in the center of each round, leaving a couple inches of dough around the edge. Fold the edge of dough up around the fruit so it holds it in a bit. Brush the edge with egg or milk and sprinkle with sugar. 

Pop this in the over for about an hour, until it is golden and the juices are bubbling!

These are made by adding a hand-full of fresh or dried lavender flowers to your favorite white cake batter just before you pour it into cupcake pans. I used lavender from our front yard. 
I frost these with buttercream and add a pinch of flowers on top. Before I made this recipe I thought it sounded weird, that it would be too perfumey, but these are refreshing and delightful!

If there is one thing in the kitchen I could call myself an expert on, it would be pies. I spent a few summers picking apples from my parents orchard and selling apple pies at farmers markets. It was a crash course in pie making as well as working with friends. (Some friends are great to hang out with when you're taking a break from baking, some friends are great to bake with). 

Now that spring has officially arrived in Albuquerque (wind and all), my Rhubarb is big and beautiful! This is the Rhubarb that I planted several years ago which is now getting big enough stocks to use. I typically let it go to seed and let the big bushy leaves fill my strawberry Rhubarb patch with foliage. 

I recently read that if you pick the stocks, they will grow back bigger and better, so what better excuse would there be to bake a pie? Aside from the fact that Rhubarb pie (not too sweet) is my girlfriends favorite. And I (the pie maker) have never made one. 
So in my quest to find a good, not too sweet recipe (Jessie's mom was not answering the phone) I decided to start from scratch and make my own. I know this will take a few shots, but hopefully we'll have those bigger and better stocks coming in soon for round two.

 As I expected all of the recipes I found had a ton of sugar, spices that didn't sound quite right and copious amounts of corn starch. Corn starch is something I keep in my cupboard, but use reluctantly. In the age old Thanksgiving day argument of flour vs. cornstarch in the gravy I stand stonchly on the flour side of things. When I think corn starch I think, bad gravy and bad Chinese food. Like food that probably photographs really well, but isn't really meant to be eaten. But, as I admittedly know nothing about Rhubarb and it's liquid producing abilities, I decided to put some cornstarch in. I also left out all of the spices, save some orange zest. (wrong, wrong and wrong, but I'll get to that later). 

The crust is more or less my old stand-by, I use a variation on this one for all things sweet and savory. My crusts were my first big lesson in my pie making adventures. My grandmother very delicately told me that my crust tasted like cardboard. People were buying the pies, but then again, I was the only one selling pies. In all of my pie making excitement I was making something closer to the glue we used to hang posters with than pie crust. In short, I was over working the gluten. So here is the recipe, with my perfected pie crust and all!

Here it is, the recipe, crust, filling and all.
Preheat the oven to 425F. 

Crust: (I may turn this into a separate post at some point because it's lengthy, but easy!)

• 15 oz of flour (3 cups)
  
• 1/2 cup cold butter (1 stick)
  
• 1/2 cup cold margarine or shortening (1 stick)
  
• 1 1/4 teaspoon salt
  
• 6-8 Tablespoons ice cold water

I like to make my crust in a food processor. It is quick and easy, but most importantly it's easy to keep the ingredients cool, away from the heat of my hands. 
Put the flour and salt in the food processor. Add the butter first, cut up into slabs. Mix by pulsing until the butter chunks are pea sized. Repeat with the margarine. The reason for using the butter first is that butter is for flavor (so it's okay that it gets mixed in a bit more) and margarine is for flakiness (so you don't want to over mix it, leaving those nice pea sized chunks to be worked into the dough). 

Now for the water. I've had excellent pie crust made with no water at all (water promotes the development of gluten which you don't want) but no water also makes the crust very crumbly and difficult to work with, so I add as little as possible to make the dough workable. Add the water a little at a time so as not to over do it, mixing again on pulse so it doesn't get over worked. Scrape the sides down so all of the water doesn't clump up into one little area of the mixture. You'll know you've added enough when the mixture starts to clump up a bit and looks like a crumble, but it not a solid piece. Empty the mixture on a floured surface. Press the mixture together to make it into a solid, while you are doing this it's important to use your hands minimally so your body heat doesn't melt all those lovely cold butter and margarine chunks! It doesn't have to be perfectly together before you roll it out. Divide it in two and roll one half out for the pie pan. 

I don't bother buttering the pie pan, there is so much butter in this crust there is no chance it will stick. lay the rolled out crust into the pie pan, and gently press in the edges. Try to leave a nice overhang if possible. Put this in the fridge or freezer to keep cool (you can even freeze it for several days like this if you want to return to it later). 
Roll out the second half of the crust. Cut 9-10 1 inch strips for the lattice top. Also keep these cool with the pie pan. 

For the Filling:

• 1 1/2 lbs of Rhubarb (about 5-6 cups cut up into 1"-1/2" cubes and strips)
  
• 10 oz of white sugar (1 1/4 cup) this turned out to be a bit too much, next time I'll put 7 oz.
  
• Zest of 1/2 an orange (next time I'll go with a little lemon juice instead)
  
• 1 Tablespoon cornstarch (I'll just leave this out, as I suspected...)
  
• 2 Tablespoons flour (maybe double this to make up for the cornstarch)
  
• A couple slabs of butter

This should be done right before assembling the pie, as the sugar will cause the Rhubarb to release liquid once it's mixed. Mix the dry ingredients, add the rhubarb and toss till it's coated with the sugar mixture. That's it! Pour it into the pie crust and put the slabs of butter on top. Now for the lattice top, which is much easier than it seems. 

Lattice top:
Lay 5 of the strips in one direction over the top of the filling, making sure they hang over or at least reach the edge. Fold every-other strip (3 strips) back half way. Lay a strip perpendicular over the remaining two strips. Unfold the three strips so now they lay over the top of the new strip. Now peal back the two strips that are under the new strip and lay another across. Repeat this till you've added all of the strips. (I'll take pics and add them so it makes a bit more sense).
Fold up the edge to cover the end of the strips and press it into your desired pattern. Brush the top with milk or an egg and sprinkle with sugar. 

Bake at 425F for 30 minutes. Rotate the pie and reduce the heat to 375F for another 30-40 minutes or until the liquid is bubbling up and the crust is nice and browned. Let cool completely, if you cut into it before it's set the filling will spill out. 

We had the pie for breakfast this morning. It was great! Of course being ever critical, and now on the quest to perfect this recipe, here is what I noticed and will change. 

The cornstarch was as expected. Even the small amount that I used left the filling slightly more gelatinous than I like. I'll leave it out next time and just add more flour. 

I typically like orange zest as a flavor, but it didn't quite work with this. It seemed to linger as the dominant taste in my mouth when all I wanted to think about was rhubarb. I will either leave it out or use it very sparingly. Next time, I'd like to add some lemon juice instead.

It didn't seem too sweet, but I want to be on the edge of being to sour rather than sweet with this pie, so I'll probably reduce the sugar a bit as well. 

As I said, I left out the spices. We got a text from Jessie's mom this morning, it turns out she uses both cinnamon and nutmeg, so maybe I'll give those a try too. One recipe highly recommended cloves, which is a flavor I like so I'll give that a shot too. 

And that's all folks! Here's to bigger and better rhubarb coming in soon so I can test out the changes!