Homemade Pie Workshop: Strawberry Rhubarb

go all right welcome everybody to our zoom cooking class for those of you that don't know me my name is jill simmons i'm going to be your instructor today and we are celebrating spring ingredients today by making a homemade pie we're making a strawberry rhubarb pie with a oat crumble topping and this is one of my very favorite pies to make and just to share a little bit uh with you um since we have some new students or news people that are new to me just a little bit about my background i've been teaching now for well over 20 years and baking and french cooking are my specialties the cream cheese pastry pie dough that we're making the recipe that i'm sharing with you is actually a prize winning recipe i used it when i entered an apple pie in the california state fair and my pie one best of division and two oftentimes when i'm teaching cooking classes i team up with my husband chris is clapping thank you chris um so walt is here today and he has selected a sparkling wine to pair with our strawberry rhubarb pie and i'm also going to show you later he's going to introduce the wine and we'll just initially be drinking it on its own but later in the class i'm going to show you how to make a strawberry sparkling wine cocktail so that'll be a lot of fun too so as far as the format of our class today for those of you that are cooking along with me this is my plant so we're going to start in on the pastry dough so we need to make our pastry dough and get it into the refrigerator so it has a chance to chill and rest and we need it to be in the refrigerator for at least a half an hour so we'll get that into the refrigerator and then we can move on to our filling um so we're going to then go ahead and slice our strawberries that'll be a good time for walt to come in as we're slicing our berries for him to talk about the sparkling wine that we're serving and then we'll go ahead and add our rhubarb and we're going to add a little sugar and we're actually going to let the strawberries macerate for a little while so they're going to hang out and then we're going to go ahead and work on our oat crumble topping so once we make that that goes in the refrigerator then we'll be ready to start rolling out our pastry dough and that's when we're going to go ahead and preheat our ovens if you're going to bake your pies off right at the end of class we'll roll out our pastry i'll give you some techniques on crimping i'm going to give you a technique as far as how what to do with your your leftover pastry scraps so that you can use them for something else you can either chill them or freeze your dough scraps and then at that point we'll have um our pie pan lined with our pastry we'll have our oat crumble topping we'll come back to our strawberries we need to drain them finish up the filling and we'll be ready to assemble our pie and then our pies will be ready to go into the oven and i'll go over the baking instructions uh with you stay and then we'll be ready to wrap up class and answer any questions that you have and please feel free um lori's gonna is kind of the moderator the phyllis facilitator ask questions um as we go i know the steps are a little bit different um when you're making this recipe by hand i'm gonna be mainly concentrating on the steps for using a food processor but we're i'm here to work with you um to make sure that you're successful um with either method that you're using okay does that sound good so let's go ahead and start so i want you to go ahead and pull out your ingredients uh we asked you to um knees employs which is a french term means to put in in place assemble ahead of time and with this recipe you need to have all of your ingredients chilled and that just helps to keep the butter cold so that you have a nice flaky pie crust and i wanted to show you the spoon and sweep method of measuring flour so i asked you just to go ahead and chill the flour in a bowl and we need one and a third cups of flour for this recipe and when i measure flour you know you think about it it kind of settles in the canister or settles in the bag whenever i'm baking and measuring flour so that i have consistent results i go ahead and pour some of the some flour into a bowl just so i have a chance to kind of let it aerate and then this is the spoon and sweet method of measuring flour you're going to take a pretty good size um spoon and spoon it into your measuring cup you want to go ahead and over fill give it a little tap on the side and you can take just a flat edge knife and just level off the excess flour usually just a regular table knife works best so that's one cup of flour and then we're going to do our third and i'm just putting my flour into the bowl of my food processor we had a question earlier you could measure out your flour into a ziploc baggie you're going to be using this a little bit later and then mix in your salt and your baking powder but i wanted to show you um the spoon and sweet method so the people who are doing this by hand they would just have a nice big bowl that they're dumping their flour in correct yes that is right okay so there's one third cups of flour and then i have an eighth of a teaspoon of salt and an eighth of a teaspoon of baking powder and the baking powder just helps the dough to puff a little bit as it bakes and let me explain to why i'm using a food processor and there are some advantages if you uh do have one versus making your pie dough by hand it actually is more efficient in cutting the fat into the flour and it's faster so you're able to work a little bit faster and then you're able to keep all those ingredients nice and cold two because it's more efficient in cutting the the fat into the flour in this recipe it calls for two tablespoons plus one teaspoon of water i find that that's pretty consistent in the amount of water that i have to use you'll find making this recipe by hand you're likely going to need to use a little more water to bring your dough together and that's okay but if you add too much water you do run the risk of your pie dough being a little bit tough i have a yes i have a question yeah so the people that are doing it by hand it looks like they do things in a different order than what you're doing in the food processor is that true you're placing the flour mixture in a chilled bowl then you're adding the cream cheese to the flour so that's you're on step two so that's exactly we're all together here okay okay i i don't know if you have that i have an updated flaky cream cheese dough by hand i brought my own recipe too okay yeah i'm looking at the one like the copy i gave you i just want to make sure that they're able we're all together so have your flour mixture in your chilled bowl and i have my flour mixture in the food processor so now we're ready to add the cream cheese and a quick question on the cream cheese i guess i was overzealous mine's been freezing overnight so it's hard as a rock oh yeah you don't freeze the cream cheese you put it into the refrigerator oh okay so if i have some in the fridge i should use that and not this now you need three ounces okay okay so now we're adding our cream cheese so you would be working this in with a pastry blender and i'm going to use the food processor to cut the cream cheese into the flour mixture so i just cut my cream cheese into pieces and we're working this all the way in so you have kind of like a cornmeal consistency so we'll pulse this in and you're going to work it all the way in so i really like this recipe because the cream cheese adds a nice flavor it also gives your crust a really nice color i find that i don't really need to use an egg wash with um this pie dough recipe and two it helps to make your crust nice and tender i find if you use all butter it gives your pie crust a really nice flavor but it can also be a little bit tough so this just seems to be like the winning combination the cream cheese and um the butter is that your secret ingredient is that why you won i think so i think it's kind of unusual lori yeah and i've tried so i've worked this pretty much all the way in the cream cheese and show you what i'm going for and i'm gonna be ahead of you um the people that are doing this by hand because this is faster can you um go get the butter for me walt please so the people doing it by hand did you were you able to see that um consistency so yeah okay good make sure okay thank you so here's my butter that's been chilling and i cut this into about three quarter inch size pieces and i'm going to be working this into the flour mixture you're going to be if you're making this by hand grating it into the flour mixture you're going to have a whole cube of butter that's frozen and grated into the flour mixture so i'm just sprinkling the butter over the top and then i'll start pulsing this in so we're going to do something a little bit different here we're actually going to leave the butter in bigger pieces than what we did with [Music] the cream cheese and if you're grating your butter on the box grater you're using you're using that that can show you the big holes the big holes right okay so we're going to pulse this in by leaving the butter in bigger pieces what happens is that they act as little spacers in the dough if you will so when it goes into the oven it doesn't melt as fast and steam has a chance to form and it actually then puffs the layers of dough apart so it's kind of a similar concept to puff pastry and this is a technique that helps you to achieve a really nice flaky dough and i'm just giving this a little stir to kind of check to see how i'm coming along and i still have some pretty big pieces of butter so i'm going to go ahead and pulse a little more and i'll come up and show you the consistency that i'm going for so you want the pieces of butter to be about the size of um an oatmeal flake or peas or the fingernail on your little pinky and i still have some pretty big pieces so i'm just going to go a couple more times so can you see here where i have some nice nice pieces of butter okay yeah that looks good and how are you doing grating the butter into the mixture is everybody doing okay there we go all right okay all right so once we've got ours grated should we um mix it in so kind of in your recipe it says to mix it in with your fingertips so your grate the frozen butter stick using the large holes of the grater into the flour mixture toss the butter with the flour using your hands until all the pieces are coated okay so you just kind of gently toss to cut the grated pieces of butter okay so i have chilled water and i have one and a half teaspoons of distilled white vinegar and the vinegar helps to make a nice tender crust so i'm going to start adding uh my liquid and we're going to start out with two tablespoons and one teaspoon of water and make sure when you're measuring your water it's two two full tablespoons of cold water and you're sprinkling it over the top of the flour mixture so there's two tablespoons and then a teaspoon and then i'm going to go ahead and pour in my vinegar and i'm going to pulse until my dough starts to come together i'm not looking to mix this to where i have a ball of dough i don't want to overwork my dough and i'll show you too how i can tell my dough is going to come together so i'm going to pulse until it just starts coming together and then i'm going to test it by feel and if i take it and i squeeze it together and i can tell it's holding together i know i have enough water okay if you need to add a little more water you can add a teaspoon at a time to bring it together what if i feel my dough is too sticky too sticky so you think you have too much water i think so okay usually it's the opposite so does it seem like it's going to come together in a nice ball or does it seem like it's really too sticky it's way too sticky okay then sprinkle in a little more flour okay to bring it together thank you when you were pulsing on your uh food processor were you using a low pulse or a high pulse i don't have a high pulse so i was just i was okay you were okay okay so my dough is holding together nicely by feel i'm gonna go ahead and pour the contents into my baggie and i'll explain in just a minute why i'm doing it this way what's she doing putting it in a baggie yeah and putting the contents into a bag because then we're going to form the dough we're going to form the dough and the reason why i'm using a baggie is i want to keep everything nice and cold so i'm not warming it up with my hands and i'll show you how to shape it all right so i'm going to take the baggie and i'm going to use the baggie and press with my hands and i'm going to form this into a disc and you can use your hands around the outside of the baggie you know press firmly around the sides and the top so you have a nice compact disc and you can use your hands to move the disc more into the middle of the bag but then just keep pressing from the outside of the bag to get your compact disc so firmly around the edges you can turn it over and firmly on the top so if you have a nice disc to work with it's going to chill up a little faster and then two it makes it easier to start rolling out so that you have a circular shape how are the folks doing that are doing it by hand are you guys okay oh good good chris lynn okay okay guys karen did that work out with your dough adding more flour i didn't add enough so i'm to finish it by hand put some more flour in and do the pastry blender with it okay okay thanks and you'll notice too when you form this into a disk you'll be able to you should be able to see little pieces of butter right and that's a good thing okay so i think i'm pretty good i'd say let me give you a measurement here oh where are you here so my disc is about about five and a half inches across about five and a half inches in diameter okay so you want to let this rest at least for a half an hour but the nice thing is i know somebody um who is it somebody's gonna make their pie next weekend who was that okay so you can do this ahead if you want and your pie dough can keep in the refrigerator for up to three days you can this also freezes beautifully it can be in the freezer for six months okay my trusty assistant will put this in the refrigerator for me thank you so much no okay and if uh we can wait a couple minutes to let people catch up robin how did yours turn out uh it turned out good we could see the flakes of butter our disk was a little bit bigger um but looks good oh that's awesome okay exciting great yay good job cheryl you're doing good oh look at you she's got it okay all right i'm just cleaning up my station mine came out very rustic looking sometimes that's a good thing right my husband jokes because i tend to try new recipes on people coming over to eat and that's no different today i'm taking this pie to a birthday party i love it i'm sure it'll be a success yeah so can that pie dough recipe be used on all kinds of pies or all kinds of pies and ice creams getting so much mileage out of this recipe um well period but since we started the zoom classes we did a pumpkin pie in november we've done empanadas we made chicken pot pie we're now doing our strawberry rhubarb pie it's delicious for quiches um tarts i have a summer tart i'd like to do with goat cheese and zucchini free time so good so good so it's very versatile so thank you for your question okay i'm just we can still take a minute if people are catching up but for those of you that are ready um you can uh i want you to go ahead i asked you to rinse gently the strawberries and dry them and hold them so we can bring our strawberries out and we're going to go ahead we need to slice our strawberries so we'll get that started and then i'll kind of work in the corner and walt can introduce the wine so that'll just be in a couple minutes my dear okay so are we ready to start in on our strawberries okay so i know not everybody um shopped at the co-op but we have the jf sam strawberries um that recently came in the peak for strawberries is about april to september and these strawberries are so good they're so sweet and they because they're so fresh they hold up really well in your refrigerator if you're not going to use them uh right away so they're just absolutely lovely um so i did ask you to hold your strawberries ahead of time and what i do and there are different methods but this this works well for me is just take the tip of the paring knife and go around the green stem so that you're popping out the stem and you're reserving most of uh the berry and strawberries um in general i don't the um the json do vary a little bit in size i find no matter this size they're all really sweet but in general when you're shopping for strawberries you want to go for the smaller and more medium strawberries they do tend to be a little bit sweeter sometimes the great big ones they can be kind of watery in texture and they don't have a sweet of flavor you want to rinse right before you use them because the water tends to break down the the berries uh they're actually a member of the rose family which kind of makes sense because they're so beautiful and delicate and fragrant and you want to choose berries that are plump and brightly colored let me this is a very pretty very pretty strawberry i know so to slice if your sizes vary i'm going to turn my strawberry upside down so the stem end is on the bottom so you have like a stable the stem end that i've removed so you have the tip pointed up you have a flat piece to work with and you're just going to slice this into quarters if you have smaller berries just go ahead and cut them in half okay so we're going to go ahead and do that while walt comes up and talks about our sparkling wine so here's walt my husband good morning how is everybody okay so what we have here today this is a this is a french sparkling wine called cremonte because it comes from an area of france that's outside the via the champagne district um or champagne there's a an area that's very famous and the big cities there are rams and uh effort so on the other hand this comes down from this this comes to us from the south of france era between two major cities those cities are toulouse and montpelier there also is a city nearby that's a basically fortified castle called carcassonne and this is the city is le mou l-i-m-o-u-x but phonetically it's as if you spelled it as l-i-m-o-o so that area of france actually doesn't it its thunder obviously gets stolen by parts of france such as bordeaux burgundy and the champagne and then the uh like chef notification pop in some of the areas in the south of france but this area is an area that is responsible for some of the highest volume of wine that's made and it's we haven't been one no we haven't we've been near there but not we haven't actually been to the area where where now this is jade lawrence and it is a cremont and it's a brute rose non-vintage so it's just uh it's it comes to you with a very good price tag of 17.99 now if you have a fruit rose that comes from the champagne district you're probably looking at at least twice that much as the ground floor because they go up from there so high 30s all the way up toward 100 plus so anyway it's it's a very good it is the difference that dramatic some might say well there are some little refinements and some somebody has to do varietal as well now this in common with the champagne area has a 60 chardonnay and chardonnay is not as commonly grown in this part of france but you have cabba from spain and there's there's some if you go into the loire valley where shin and blanc is a common varietal as you get closer to the center of that area towards the coast then you um you'll notice it has a little more sweetness now this has about 30 shin and block in it and then ten percent pinot noir where if it were up in the champagne district you probably would see a much higher presence of pinot noir unless it's a chardonnay based champagne so um one one thing i notice people do is you know especially guys they get all macho and they try to open the champagne bottle like gripping down here and you know really cranking on it with the with a cork hand and you can save a lot of effort simply by just cranking down on the cork and the turning the bottle you have much better leverage and boom and also you know unless you're in the world series and you just won you don't need you you don't need to see how far you can get the court projectile to ricochet off the ceiling and spray champagne all over or sparkling wine all over the case as the case may be and so you let it out very slowly and like a little whisper kind of like that and by doing so you're preserving a lot of that nice carbonation and that effervescence so one thing about the cremont flavor profile i'll go ahead and pour some of this and i'll use the back of jill's timeline sheet here to make a backdrop you see it's kind of a nice salmon color it's the nose and it goes pretty with the strawberries it sure does so you take pick a little there so what's coming out of there is raspberries and strawberries yeah and we take a taste more strawberries than raspberries but it's all in the ballpark and so obviously this is an ideal pair with with jill's strawberry rhubarb pie it is not overly sweet we don't really want it to be in this case it does have a little bit of body to it it has kind of a i mean it's a little bit of anxious and it's not not real obvious there's a little trailing profile of yeast which you find that more in in the french some of the french champagnes and also in some of the cremates and more so than in california sparkling wine so we for example we we we celebrated one time with a you know pretty fancy bottle of crude champagne it's a food banded champagne you know that's it's not something unless you you know silicon valley that people might pop people in the tech industry might pop bottles like that every other night but most of us i think would probably find that would be a kind of a superfluous way to spend money but that having been said it was wonderful has a nice kind of toast and toasty apple a nice yeasty kind of a profile so anyway this is the area this comes from is in the foothills it's not really high in the mountains i think it's probably about 2000 feet and it's an area that does get a little bit of maritime influence from the the sea there is mediterranean sea so as compared to the loire where a lot of other vermonts come from there you're getting the atlantic ocean so anyway it's a wonderful wonderful treat and for 17.99 you can enjoy this a whole lot if you want to and and you should as jules says so so one thing about this is you're going to get a kind of a double um there's a there's a there's a bonus package with this which jill will show later in the discussion so how many people have enjoyed mimosas so we love mimosas and uh but we you know for example we found a really nice tequila called uh i don't know this there's a point to why i'm changing from from this to that because i'll be bringing it back in but we found this this tequila and it's called fortaleza and we're just sipping it by itself this is this is not for for a fraternity sitting around and seeing how many shots you can do and how bad a hangover you can have the next day it's more just taking a sip and savoring it and then you know kind of occurred to me that mixing that end with a margarita would be a waste well this is just good enough for cremont that if you use this in a mimosa you don't feel like you i mean if you use crude champagne in a mimosa you're missing out on why food is so spectacular now so i've described the properties of this and the flavor profile is having a good strawberry present so imagine what happens when you macerate strawberries and you have a nice juice coming from that and you there'd be a little bit in the bottom of the glass that mixes into this and you just make a little sparkling wine cocktail so anyway you would be hard pressed to find a better sparkling wine for the price of 17.99 even california some of the nice sparkling wines are anywhere from around 20 dollars up to 30 and then again in champaign area you're in france you're looking probably 38 is the ground floor so and it goes up quickly from there anyway highly recommend this and uh i will turn it back over to jill all right cheers all right do you mind putting a little champagne stopper on that for me and putting it back on the tray for me in fact are you gonna drink that i don't have to um because i could use it for my cocktail so you could just put everything over there and then put the stopper on thank you thank you honey very nice okay all right so has everybody um sliced their strawberries okay so i know has everybody's rhubarb defrosted and if it has it just let it continue to do so um but mine has and do you see all the liquid that has come from my rhubarb so the reason why i had you put the rhubarb in the freezer is because i wanted to pull out some of that excess liquid um so i i think i was telling chris and our students and chris was in that class in our last class you know i've always had my really good um pastry recipe but sometimes my problem was controlling the juiciness of my fruit filling so we went ahead and put the rhubarb in the freezer let it defrost and then i'm draining it but see all the excess liquid i have here that's been released so that's going to help us to make sure that we have a nice consistency for our pie filling and i'm going to go ahead if your rhubarb hasn't defrosted completely you can wait to add your rhubarb but mine's completely thawed out i'm going to go ahead and add it to my strawberries and let's talk a little bit about rhubarb because it seems like a lot of us don't use rhubarb that much it's just come into the store um i think typically it is paired with um strawberries um i was reading though in britain they like to pair it with uh ginger and usually it's served as a fruit but botanically it's actually a vegetable it has it's actually a member of the buckwheat family which is really interesting it has a celery-like texture and when you're looking for rhubarb you want to look for rhubarb that has like this this beautiful cherry red color nice crisp stocks um at the co-op i think they're selling it where the stocks are upright in water to help keep it fresh it's highly perishable so you want to use it within a few days keep it refrigerated and the leaves actually tend are have a tox toxin in them so the leaves are poisonous you don't want to eat the leaves um so just trim off the top and the bottom and then we cut this into i i went ahead and i can show you i took off the top and the bottom and then cut this in more manageable pieces cut the stock in half lengthwise and then went back through to kind of cut it into about three quarters of an inch to one inch chunks is how i prepared the rhubarb um the stocks that i had from lori were pretty pretty substantial in size um which is fine so i found for two cups i only needed three stocks i went ahead and measured it out and i used three instead of uh four all right so i have my rhubarb and my strawberries in your recipe when you're measuring out the granulated sugar it asks you to measure out three tablespoons three three tablespoons and then a quarter of a cup so we're right now gonna use the three tablespoons to sprinkle over our strawberries and let's give this a little toss and then this is going to hang out to macerate and what that means is that the sugar is just going to help to cause the strawberries to release some of their moisture and we're going to go ahead and drain this mixture again to help control the juiciness of our pie filling and then we'll use we'll reserve that strawberry syrup to then make our sparkling wine cocktail but uh the strawberry syrup is actually delicious um with just sparkling water or if you had like some rose wine just to make it kind of fun um you could add a little bit to a nice rose okay are we all all together here we have our strawberries now macerating um so we're ready then to uh move on to our oat crumble topping so i asked you to measure out your ingredients ahead of time for this recipe and what we're going to be doing is whisking in the dry ingredients and then cutting the butter into pieces your butter should be at room temperature and then we're actually going to mix this with our hands until we have a crumbling unbelief coffee so in this recipe you have a i'm going to go ahead and flip you have a quarter of a cup of granulated sugar you have then a half a cup of light brown sugar that i measured and packed into the measuring cup brown sugar is granulated sugar and molasses so it has a softer texture so that's why you're packing it in to measure there we go you have one and a half cups of rolled oats and then two-thirds of a cup of all-purpose flour forgot to mention i like to use king arthur flower it's a really reputable flower company and it's actually the oldest flower company in the united states it's been around since 1790. we have then our salt i have half a teaspoon of sea salt and then we have our spices so we have cinnamon an eighth of a teaspoon of cinnamon but we also have cardamom so cardamom is a member of the ginger family and it has a nice pungent aroma it has kind of a sweet spicy uh flavor so native to india member of the ginger family it's pretty pungent so a little bit goes a long ways but this will it's going to pair nicely with our rhubarb too because they're talking about ginger and rhubarb or a nice pairing and then you don't have to do this but i did grab some whole allspice and i have a little spice grinder so i'm going to go ahead and grind freshly grind my um allspice and then add this to the mixture so if you buy whole spices and grind them fresh they they tend to see pressure and flavor and it's also a way to have your spices last a little longer and if you've come to the co-op before we have a really nice spice aisle so you can buy your spices in bulk you can buy them whole so then they stay really nice nice and fresh and you can buy just a little bit at a time so that you don't run the risk of your spices passing the expiration date i like that spices now come with the expiration date versus you just having the second guess um so i have an eighth of a teaspoon of then my freshly ground allspice so allspice is native to west the west indies and it gets its name because the flavor combination is reminiscent cloves and nutmeg and cinnamon and i'm just whisking this together yeah jill um i have to say with our bulk herbs and spices yeah they are so fresh and what really um opened up my eyes i've always bought the i've been i've been working here for 27 years and probably shopping over 30 and i only buy the bulk herbs and spices but when coveted hit we weren't able to um to sell the bulk spices and so i was forced to buy packaged and it was day and night i actually actually threw it away because there was there was no hardly any smell or flavor it was so different than what i was used to and i have to say i'm i'm so happy that we have this back you can now buy them and it makes a huge difference makes a huge difference absolutely thank you for that lori and i have a question yeah yeah did you just say 1 4 of a teaspoon i mean one eighth of a teaspoon of the oh sorry it's one-fourth sorry thank you thank you yes one-fourth on all the spices so i'm gonna add i have an eighth of a teaspoon out i'm gonna add thank you another eighth of a teaspoon and i appreciate that i just thought i over spiced myself you you were correct if you use uh already ground allspice is it the same amount or less no it's the same it'll come out yeah okay good question hey walt i think if you want to go you can do you want to wave goodbye okay walt's going to wave goodbye he's going to go but thank you for your wine introduction and being my assistant well thanks everybody it's been a pleasure and i'll leave you in the most capable hands thank you okay bye-bye bye-bye okay so i've whisked together all my dry ingredients and i have my butter that's been sitting here at room temperature and i find it just works a little easier if i cut this into chunks to work it into the dry mixture and i'm just going to use my fingertips to work it in we want to leave it kind of chunky and then we're going to put it back in the refrigerator so the butter has a chance to firm up before we top our pie so this recipe is very easy to double it freezes really well and in the summertime i like to take the advantage don't let me forget my rings i love it thank you um in the summertime you know just to kind of save on calories you know we have such beautiful fruit in season i'm not always making pies but i'll make a really nice fruit crisp and this oat crumble topping is so good for a fruit crisp and i'll keep it in the freezer so then i'll have you know fresh fruit just cut that up toss it you know with a little cornstarch and sugar top the fruit with the crumble topping and we'll have that for dessert and then it's just the two of us in our household um so i'll have enough you know walt can have some for for breakfast as well so i i love this topping so i'm just kind of working this in with my hands so i'll tell you um we're talking about spices i have a story and bless my dad's heart um he was moving uh he was a college professor in uh chico and had retired and then decided he wanted to buy a home that was closer to a river he ended up moving up to rebluff of all places but his house was beautiful and had a nice view of the river and we were moving him so that he would be closer to us here in sacramento and he had some cinnamon in a little container and he had set it aside because he want you know he knows i i cook and bake he wanted to know if it was something that i wanted because he hadn't used it up and he he doesn't cook at all um and so i looked at it the date laurie you won't believe it the date on it was 1970 so i then i connected the dots i lived with him in chica when i was in high school and i graduated in 1977 oh and i liked i've always liked to cook and i would cook for the two of us so it must have been cinnamon i got and he had had it all that time that is hysterical hysterical and then her in-law who's younger she said she would keep it because it was a vintage container did it even have smell i don't even remember i think i was just so shocked when i saw the date i don't even think i i smelled it i don't know that's that's funny okay so i'm gonna come up to the camera let me just wash my hands so i can show you kind of the crumbly texture i'm going for here okay okay so can you see how that's pretty crumbly so that's what i'm looking for so i'm going to go ahead and cover this and put it in the refrigerator okay and i'll be right back did i remember turn the refrigerator off you know walt did oh okay thank you we just have to remember to turn it back on yeah i can do that okay i'll be right back robin did you have a question lori is this our time to turn our ovens on yeah turn your oven on thank you thank you robin mine takes 30 minutes to heat up yeah go for it okay everybody turn your ovens on and you're going to turn that on to 425 in this moment is is the recipe available in a recipe form without all the explanations i mean it's good to have them but it's good to have i find that this is um i don't know i think because it goes back and forth if what what's going on a little bit back and forth yeah do you get a pdf or a word format i think i got a word format so you could take out um probably make it a little easier to take out like the equipment yes prep ahead okay more precise so here's um rolling out the pie dough is part of the flaky cream cheese dough recipe right and i offer tips for you as far as rolling the pastry and then the baking instructions are separate right jill i have a question um do you ever use the convection setting on your oven do you think it does anything you know i really don't and i don't know if lori has an opinion but i've kind of heard that it's not that great for baking i don't know anything about convection um it's very confusing for me yeah so i don't i have found that it's good for yeast baking okay but not quick kinds of breads okay so for like pie dough and banana bread and those things it's not good but for baking bread it's very good for doing that okay thank you for that that's good to know good question okay i gave my strawberries and rhubarb just a little stir um so we're now i heard somebody i'm talking about preheating the oven so this is a good time to preheat your oven um the equipment that you're gonna need to roll out your pastry is you need what's referred to as a little bench flower for rolling um a rolling pin and then a pie pan and i like using just the old-fashioned pyrex glass pie plate and i'll talk about two in a minute uh why this is such a good pie plate to use so we have our disk of dough and one little step i'm going to have you do you can go ahead and take it out of the baggie is if you kind of roll the edges along a flat surface that kind of helps to seal the edges and then you're not as likely to have the edges crack on you a little bit as you're rolling out the dough so this step is just called sealing the edges it's not in your recipe but it's a little tip i wanted to share with you you're going to use a little bit of bench flour underneath and a little on top and let me just give you a couple instructions before you start rolling and two you know as far as surfaces to roll on um granite and marble are nice because they're cool to the touch and they also help to keep the dough cold i'm just i'm going to just go ahead um because of the way we're set up i'm just going to go ahead and use my wooden cutting board and then as far as a rolling pin you want a rolling pin that's going to get the job done right so this is referred to as that heavy or um a ball bearing rolling pin it's pretty heavy in its size this is just what i'm used to working with a lot of pastry chefs like the tapered rolling pins the french rolling pins um because they feel like you have a little more control so when you start rolling out your pie dough you're going to be rolling from the center out and the reason why you're going to be rolling from the center out is the center tends to be the thickest part we want to roll this out to about an eighth of an inch thick and you're going to roll so i'm going to start rolling you're going to roll the center out and then two to help your dough as you get started because it's kind of cold you're kind of getting it where it's more malleable malleable as you're rolling you can use your hands too to press in to kind of keep a round shape but once it you get going you're not going to have to do that anymore i sprinkled a little flour on the top as well i'm going to roll a little more and then you're going to turn your dough periodically so you're going to pick it up i can smooth out my flour i still have quite a bit of flour i'm going to use my hands to press in a little bit but by making that quarter of a turn you're preventing the dough from sticking but also it helps you to maintain a shape more of a circle versus you know ending up with like a map of the united states if you will um you have plenty of dough to work with so you really don't have to worry um as far as not having a big enough um piece to pit fit your uh pipe hand so rolling from the center out i'm turning i'm going to use my hands a little bit i'm going to sprinkle on just a little more flour using my hands to round it out and then using my rolling pin going from the center out and then turning there we go and you're going to end up with a pretty big piece of dough here so remember you want it to be an eighth of an inch thick and if it's not a perfect circle that's okay so i'm turning again i'm going to add just a tiny bit of flour on top you turn again so you never turn it over you just turn it around and if your dough ends up warming up a little bit you know you feel like it's getting hard to work with just put it on a baking sheet and put it in the refrigerator to let it firm up it'll only take like five or ten minutes and then just start all over again so it's pretty forgiving i'm going to turn one more time i'm going to sprinkle a little flower underneath uh oh i think there was like a little i didn't clean my board rory i think there's a little pepper on here oh no it'll be okay okay you referred to bench bench flour that's just regular flour that you're using on your bench right exactly egg you got it so i would say let me just measure for you [Music] i've got a piece of dough that's um about uh 14 inches uh in diameter here okay so now i'm going to take my dough and wrap it around my rolling pin and this helps me to transfer the dough to the pan to lift it and transfer to my pan and at this point i'm going to center it a little bit and i want to just gently ease my pastry dough into my pie pan i don't want to stretch it so i'm just like gently patting it in to the pan so it's filling my pan you can use a template if you want a perfect circle but i just like to go ahead and trim the edges with you can use a paring knife or some scissors and you want about an inch of overhang so as you trim reserve your scraps don't wad them up into a dough ball i'll show you a technique so that you can use your scraps if you want to and they'll still be really nice and uh flaky the dough will still be nice and flaky okay so i'm just going around and trimming so i have about an inch overhang using my scissors just kind of eyeballing it okay that looks pretty good so like that and then i'm going to take my dough and tuck it under and i'm tucking it kind of folding it under tucking it under having it sit up on the rim of the pie pan so you're making like a little dough wall if you will and this is what we're going to use to crimp the edges so you're just working your way around that the pan so let's as we're doing this i'll tell you why i use pyrex so you probably are familiar with like cooks uh illustrated um on pbs they and they have a website and magazine um and they do a lot of equipment testing and this was actually some time ago but they compared the pyrex glass baking dishes to all kinds of other brands emilon ri which is a french ceramic that's really expensive so you know they didn't have any expectations but they did a blind baking and then they did um i think a filling with cherry pie filling to see what the results would be in doing their comparison and the pyrex was the one that beat everybody out and they liked it because you have a nice rim to support a crust when you bake your pie you can check the bottom to see if the crust is brown on the bottom and it just did a really nice job of uh browning for a pie a pastry that's where you're baking it blind for a cream filling and then it also did really well as far as the browning for a fruit pie and that's something that we typically either is and plus they like that the cost it was it was very inexpensive so typically that's something we have or it's very accessible um to buy so i'm going to show you i'm going to do this style of crimping see the picture here and i'll explain what they're doing too but you can use a fork too or even the back of like a teaspoon and go around the edges looks really pretty so i'm taking my index finger and my thumb and then i'm going to press my thumb in between the index finger and the thumb so i'm pressing with my thumb and my index finger kind of making a c and then pushing in with my thumb so you're going to go around the perimeter to make your crimp and then the edge of your pie pan is going to help to support your crust and we're going to put this in the refrigerator and that gives us a chance to kind of set the edges so that your pie shell is nice and cold when it goes into the oven and your crimp that you've done is going to hold its shape in the oven when you're done can you bring that up yeah okay that's beautiful let's see can you see how the sides are all right so i ended up doing a lot of i like twice as many crimps as you is that okay yeah you know it's it's um creative okay so yes you can make it however you want oh before i bring this to the refrigerator um let me show you the scraps so you'll need a couple pieces of uh plastic wrap here so i'm going to take one piece and put it on my cutting board and you're going to take the pieces and kind of align them so they're about the i'm kind of folding them over so they're about the same length and you have quite a bit of dough here you could what my mom used to do is she would you'll let this firm up in the refrigerator you can roll it out and then she would sprinkle it with sugar and cinnamon and bake it in the oven for about 10 minutes so it's like a little pastry cookie you could make this savory you could brush it with a little egg wash and some parmesan cheese would be really nice or you can just have pieces in the freezer like if you're making empanadas this would you be able to use these pieces to make the empanadas that are about three inches round so i'm going to go ahead and take another piece of plastic wrap put it over the top and just roll this so it has a chance to adhere and then what you're going to do this is going to create some layers for you i'm going to take the top piece of plastic off and you're going to do what's called like a business letter fold you're using the plastic wrap to move to fold the bottom towards the middle and then the top towards the middle and then i'm going to roll this again so that's going to create some flaky layers for you i'll roll this so that it's a little thinner and then you can just wrap it up and you can put it in the refrigerator or go ahead i would probably wrap this up and put it in like a little baggie and uh into the plastic wrap inside a little baggie and then you can put it in the freezer to save or this would be perfect like if you had a bunch of pastry scraps you can make little turnovers little fruit turnovers too okay i'm to put this in the refrigerator and i will be right back so okay so how's everybody doing good okay glad to hear it all right we're gonna i'm just gonna um wipe this up um we're gonna come back uh to our filling so now we need to finish our filling uh [Music] is there a minute where i can um talk chill yeah that's a good time hey i wanted to let you guys all know that um next friday um we're doing a malaysian chicken it's called chicken rendang um and chancery is going to be teaching that class it's next friday from 4 to 5 30 and it's a really exciting recipe and so i just want to encourage if you guys think you might be interested to register for it i'd love to have you guys join us so um you can just go to our sac.coop to our website and register online if you think you are interested in uh chicken rendang okay and that's john curry yeah yeah she's a really good instructor too all righty okay so the next step now for our strawberry filling is we need to go ahead and drain our strawberries and our rhubarb so i have a big bowl and a strainer and i'm just gonna pour all of this in the strainer and i'm gonna let that drain for a minute while i work on my apple so you might be thinking why we're making strawberry rhubarb pie why why are we using an apple so here i'm showing you three different techniques of helping us to make sure that um our filling is a nice consistency so i'm peeling my apple i think what what i mentioned granny smith golden delicious and i think we ended up with a honey crisp apple which are all good baking apples meaning that they tend to hold their shape when they're baking we're going to grate this so you're not even going to know that it's there but the reason why we're using an apple is that the apple has natural pectins in it so that too is going to help us with our pie to make sure that the filling is a nice consistency and i'm going to just use the box grater then to grate my apples and we'll add this to the uh strawberry rhubarb mixture so you could actually do this little technique with um you know any any fruit pie just to help the consistency obviously you don't need to do it if you're making an apple pie all right so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to use the mixing bowl i was using before for my strawberries and my rhubarb and just make sure i've got most of the juice strained off here and you can let this sit for a good hour if you want before filling your pie and then i'm going to just go ahead and take my syrup here and add it to my measuring cup so that i can use it to show you the cocktail all right so i'd say that was about a quarter of a cup um of liquid that came off of the the strawberries so we'll go ahead wonder and add our apple mix in our apple with the strawberries and the rhubarb and then we'll add in we have a little bit of lemon zest lemon juice and a little bit of vanilla that we're adding to this i thought the vanilla would be a nice touch okay so i washed my lemon if you don't have lemon zest would you add more lemon juice um you could no i would okay so um your recipe calls for a teaspoon of lemon juice so we'll just go for the teaspoon of lemon juice the lemon zest is nice because you have the essential oils and the zest that actually have more flavor than the lemon juice and in this recipe you're you have a half of a teaspoon that we're using and i just use the microplane to take off the zaps and i do it this way um just so i can see that i'm getting the zest and not the the white piss that tends to be a little bitter and then chris i'm gonna tap that out yeah i was just gonna say that um you gave us that tip uh last time yeah the zester and it's the best tip okay yeah i never thought to use it you know right side up right and i always see people doing it the other way and i don't know if i learned that or picked it up from somewhere else but thanks yeah it works well i think and then i'm gonna juice my lemon i'm just gonna eyeball it so i want about a teaspoon [Music] of lemon zest or i'm sorry teaspoon of lemon zest let's see just try it again one more time teaspoon of lemon juice and then i just zested half of the lemon for my half a teaspoon of lemon zest and then we have our vanilla so we want a teaspoon of vanilla and you may have noticed vanilla is a little more expensive these days it's it's been expensive regardless just because it's so labor intensive to harvest but i was reading most of the world's vanilla supply comes from madagascar so over the last few years they've been hit by a lot of storms and it's devastated some of the vanilla bean crops that comes from an orchid so that it's been harder to get um vanilla beans especially and then it seems like the price of vanilla has vanilla extract has gone up as well so we have our strawberries our rhubarb our apple our vanilla our zest and our lemon juice and then the next step is to whisk together our dry ingredients and add that then to our fruit so we have that quarter cup of granulated sugar that we reserved we then have three quarters of a cup of our brown sugar we have cinnamon and salt now i gave you um an option to use either tapioca ground tapioca beads or cornstarch as your thickener so i'll talk just a little bit about thickeners probably what's most common to use is flour and corn starch and with the flour a lot of times it's a good thickener but uh your filling can be kind of um what's the word i want to use uh i can't think of it i have it in my notes kind of dull it kind of gives your filling a dull finish now the cornstarch has good thickening abilities as well we have three tablespoons of cornstarch but if you use too much your pie filling can be a little kind of gummy gummy tacky um the uh tapioca it actually comes from a root of yucca plants um so if you had the beads you would just grind it in like the spice grinder that i used uh for the allspice and then you would use three tablespoons as a thickening agent and i think it does give your pie filling just kind of nicer finish than if you were using flour or the cornstarch but all three are good good thickening agents so i've whisked this together and i'm going to go ahead and add this to my berry mixture and just give this a toss so you just want to kind of gently mix this in because you don't want to break up the strawberries so chris i think i know you're working you were talking about rhubarb did you grow up having rhubarb pie or you were saying that it brought back memories for you yeah uh one of my grandmothers made it okay and i mentioned to my family this morning we send each other an email every morning just to check on each other and my that i said i was making it my mom's memory is that one of her grandmothers made it once and that she tried it once for us and that it didn't go over very well and that's so funny to me because i have a very fond happy memory of strawberry rhubarb pie so you never know yeah yeah well you'll have to let them know how it turns out yeah maybe make up for them at some point okay while we're mixing i'm just going to show you the cocktail really fast and again [Music] i mentioned this is really nice and sparkling wine too so i'm just going to go ahead and add it to what what walt or actually i'll do this i'm going to add then two tablespoons of the and you can do this to taste of this strawberry and i'll add some of the sparkling wine that walk poured and then top this off with a little bit more so it looks really nice it foams up a little bit because of the strawberry syrup and i'll take a little taste that's nice very refreshing and again what's nice about it too is you can appreciate the strawberry flavor but it's not overly sweet and you can just keep this this syrup will probably last um you know for about a week in your refrigerator it's kind of nice to have something like that on hand to um spruce up sparkling water just so you kind of feel like you're pampering yourself especially in the spring and summertime all righty so i think we're ready you guys um to go ahead and get the topping and our um pastry to assemble our pie i'll tell you what before we do that let's just talking about baking the pie so we did preheat our oven to 425 degrees um in your instructions under the baking instructions it um asks you to place the oven rack in the lower middle portion of your oven there's a good chance that this pie is even though we took all these steps to control the juiciness of the filling it'll bubble over so either preheat a baking sheet or if you have a baking stone you can use that so make sure that that's preheating in the oven before you put in your pie and i would put either piece of foil or parchment down as well so that it's easy to clean either the stone or the the pan um you're gonna bake this pie at 425 for about 25 minutes and that's just going to help to set your crust set the edges then you're going to rotate the pie turn the oven down to 375 and then bake for about 40 to 50 minutes longer so what i can tell you what you want to look for to make sure that your pie is done is that it's bubbling and it you you'll see that it's starting to bubble around the sides first but you also want it to start to bubble in the middle you'll then you'll know when you see that that the thickening agent the cornstarch it's hot enough where it's activated the thickening agent in your pie so time is an estimate like likely it's not going to be under 40 minutes but 40 to 50 it could be just a little longer and then you unfortunately you need to let that pie cool so it needs to cool for about four hours before you slice into it a lot of people think that a pie actually is better the next day because it has a chance to settle if you will or you want to make it like earlier in the morning let it sit all day and then serve at night just that the filling has a chance to settle and it's gonna it's gonna be easy to cut into and to serve if you notice the edges are starting to brown a little bit you can use some foil to protect the edges or i have um one of these little gosh now i can't think of what it's called um this fits over your pie so it protects yeah chris has one protects the edges so the edges don't get too brown so you know after that at apple hill it says pie crust shield field thank you very much show a pie crush shield mine says that too thanks chris oh my gosh um so pie crust shield it protects the edges and you may have to put that on after about a half an hour 40 minutes if the edges are starting to get brown so i'm going to go grab my pie pan and my topping and we'll assemble our box i want a clarification on the oven rack [Music] um so she said set an oven rack in the lower middle portion of the oven and place a baking sheet or baking stone on the rack before preheating so is your pie gonna sit on that on that or is there one is there something i when i first read it i thought you had a a baking sheet underneath with foil or something on it to catch drips but it looks like put it right on the rack so your pie is sitting on that baking sheet or baking stone right and and so the crust you make sure that that crust you know gets gets nice and brown you don't have a soggy bottom that's why you're preheating the the baking pan or the the baking stone but two it's also going to help to protect your oven okay but it doesn't drip over right okay so i'm going to go ahead and pour my filling into my pie pan and we'll see if i have more filling than what my pan can accommodate so you're just gonna kind of spread this out so that it fits into the pan and i have a bit of juice in my filling should i try to not pour the juice in i think i think you're okay because that's going to have some of the sugar and corn starch if you have a lot i would hold back but i would i would use a good part of it okay okay and i'm just kind of pressing this down so that it fits into the pan okay there we go so i think that looks pretty good and then i'm going to take my topping and i'm just going to use my hands and start crumbling this over starting from the middle and kind of spreading it over the berries and you may not need all of this but you can put it in the freezer and kind of patting it down on top of the berries wow that's amazing how much you can get in there i know huh hopefully i didn't go overboard but it'll the berries will cook down but if for sure this is gonna um bubble over but i think it looks pretty when it does that too [Music] okay i'm going to try to fill in the edges a little bit but i think i'm probably just about there so this pie can hold i'd say you know for um probably about three hours and i've never tried to freeze it but i did give you some instructions for freezing okay i think that's good i probably have i don't know about a half a cup of the oat crumble mixture so ta-da beautiful there you go so i'm going to take mine home to bake but if you're so inclined feel free to send lori um a picture too of your your pies after their their base okay so there we go so any questions about anything that we've covered today it looks like everyone was successful i guess the proof is in the pudding after you taste your pies tonight but i think you'll really enjoy them and uh i know lori was talking about some upcoming classes uh towards the end of the month but you've got a nice variety of classes too lori that you're offering in may

Channel: Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op

Views: 1,230

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: KrWngILcrpE

Length: 98min 36sec (5916 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021