Week Five, Dish 4 - The Pie with Cake
Originally published at Modern Domestic Geek. You can comment here or there.
Another week down! I’m almost 10% of the way there. Slow and steady is the way to go? Anyway - today’s dish is a dessert dish called No-Pan Pear Pie. And pound cake is one of the ingredients. Now this seems like sacrilege - how can there be cake in pie? Isn’t there an ancient feud between pie and cake? Then how can they exist together in the same dish? It’s a little shocking. Now AB calls this not a true pie, but a fruit gallette. So maybe it’s okay for cake to be in a gallette. But - this is not the whole way that this dish is deceptive. There are not only pears in the pie. There are blueberries! So - the question I ask the great Alton Brown - why not call it No-Pan Pear/Blueberry Pie? Maybe it was the whole alliteration thing.
20 Recipes down, 188 to go.
The Recipe: No-Pan Pear Pie, Good Eats the Early Years, page 100
Dessert Dish
Cooking Notes: The crust for this ‘pie’ was unlike anything I’ve ever made. First, it has corn meal in it. And sugar. And is brought together with apple juice. So it makes for a very tasty dough, that rolls out pretty well, and bakes up very rustically. The filling was actually cooked before putting it the pie, and this actually isn’t surprising. Pears can be very hard, and hitting them with some heat will soften them up before they go in the oven. The other thing that I normally do not put in fruit pies was balsamic vingear - which gave it a unique flavor. All in all, the cooking was easy - and really no more work than a regular pie, with the exception of the stove top cooking.
Family Reaction: The problem with making dessert during the week, is that I run the run the risk of them being too full at the end of the meal to eat it. Yes, that does happen. Especially when I make spicy turkey burgers and cheesy mashed potatoes. I was full too - so I waited till half an hour after dinner to eat. And it was a treat. Cutting into it was satisfying, it was easy to cut, and the first piece was so much easier to remove than with a traditional pan in a pie. Then there were so many things to delight the tongue. The questionable cake? It soaked up all balsamic vinegar juices and were little bites of delight. The fruit was good - though I need to slice things thinner, since some of the pears were crunchy. And the crust - the crust was sweet on it’s own, buttery, rich, but with a hint of texture from the cornmeal. And it complemented the fruit filling. And it’s pie - even with the yummy cake bites in the middle - which I suspect were there for the same reason some people put a ceramic crow in the middle of a traditional pie. But I want to make this again - only with apples. I want to see what the balsamic will do to the flavor.
So - this dish saves the week! And so we move on toward next week, and I need to start planning soon - since we may be snowed in for the weekend, and the next weekend is Farpoint. There will have to be some creative cooking and planning going on.