This is what I make when I have the best strawberries in the world, and those are whichever strawberries I’ve most recently picked with my family. "Here's a red ripe strawberry!" "Yeah, you wanna put it in?" "There you go!" So I start by hulling about a quart of strawberries, that’s a couple pounds. Hulling just means cutting off their leafy green tops and digging out at least some of the fibrous white flesh underneath. I just do it with my thumbnail. Though, for this recipe, it really doesn’t matter if you get out the white part. It’s just gonna break down in the sugar, so cut off the leaves however you want. Give them a rinse. These had a lot of pollen on them from the Georgia pines. And you don’t need to dry them. If anything, a little extra water on them helps. Cut these into thin slices whichever way you want. I like doing them this way because I think it makes them look like little flowers. If I come across ones that are just too perfect to cut up, I set them aside and eat them whole later, which is the best way to eat fresh strawberries. I think this recipe is the second-best way. Throw the slices in a bowl and then spill some sugar on them. Get it? Spill? Honestly, we went out right when the farm opened for the season, and so these are not the ripest, sweetest strawberries yet. I gave them a quarter cup of sugar. But for the real ripe ones we’ll pick there later in the season, I’ll just use a spoonful. The primary function of the sugar here is to draw water out of the cells via osmosis. Stir in even a tiny bit and, within minutes, you’ll have strawberries in strawberry sauce. You can see it happening already. It’s just the sugar drawing moisture out. Now, time to bake a pound cake. Traditionally that’s just equal parts sugar, eggs, butter and flour by weight, but I think the best recipes use some buttermilk too. I never have buttermilk, but you can approximate it well enough by pouring a little splash of vinegar into regular milk. That’s like a teaspoon of plain white vinegar into a half cup of milk. At the buttermilk factory, they’d curdle milk with lactic acid produced by bacteria. We’re doing the exact same thing but with vinegar. While that sits and curdles, we’ll get a stick and a half of softened butter. Here is my trick for speed-softening butter. Set your microwave to half-power, at most. Nuke them for 10 seconds, then role them over 90 degrees. Nuke another 10 seconds, turn 90 degrees in the same direction. Just repeat until they’re soft. The short one was done sooner than the long one. Be very careful. It’ll melt in a flash, and we can’t allow that. I’ll tell you why in a sec. Grab a loaf pan. This one’s 9x5 inches but you could use a smaller one. Steal a little slice of your softened butter and grease up the sides of the pan. Pound cake sticks, really bad, so I do the butter coating and then a pinch of flour. Plastic wrap over the top, and then you can just shake it to get the flour everywhere. You could use non-stick spray, but this makes the crust yummy. Rest of the butter goes in a mixing bowl, and then a cup of sugar. And we start blending. A defining feature of pound cake is that it has no leavening. No baking powder, no yeast, nothing that will create gas and inflate bubbles to open up the structure. All of the bubbles are being created right now, as the abrasive sugar granules tear into that butter. If the butter was cold, it would be too stiff, and you just wouldn’t be able to blend in the sugar. If it was melted, it would just become a buttery syrup. With soft butter, you can start to see it getting light and fluffy, filled with tiny air bubbles. It took me about four minutes to get it like this. Now we crack in two eggs, and beat those in. Here is our ersatz buttermilk. Kinda gross, but this stuff is magic in cakes. It makes them lighter, it gives them a slight tang. Without it, I think pound cake is too dense and kinda boring. Get that mixed in, and at this point I’d normally add some vanilla extract, but we’re gonna eat this with a vanilla cream, and I like it when the different layers of a dessert don’t overlap each other in flavor. Just let them complement each other. A big pinch of salt goes in, and then we’ll start with a cup of flour. You can see that’s still really wet. We’re looking for a texture that seems like it’s about to stop being batter and start being a dough. I’ll put in another half cup of flour. K, that’s looking better. See how it’s not dropping off the beaters? I’ll give it like another quarter cup. Alright, see how it’s starting to look like cookie dough? That’s what I like for pound cake, but honestly anything in this ballpark will be fine. This is not a fussy cake. Spoon it into your loaf pan and smooth out the top a little. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit. It’ll probably take an hour. You’ll know it’s getting there when the top puffs up a bit, and a crack opens up down the middle. It’s been in there for 50 minutes, and now I’m gonna test it with the old skewer trick. Stab it, and then see what sticks. Look at that, there’s wet cake sludge clinging to the skewer. It needs more time. 10 minutes later, that’s looking good. Skewer comes out clean. It is baked. Another sign with pound cake is those little freckles on the surface. Those only form right when the cake is about done. Cool this thoroughly before you try to take it out of the pan. Here is a very expensive piece of food. This is pretty much the only time of year I splurge on a whole vanilla bean, and I’m even too cheap for that. I’ll just use half of it. Now, very carefully, you split it right down the middle. Man that smells of leather-bound books and rich mahogany. Then you just scrape out the seed pulp. Be very careful not to get any bits of the outer pod in there. It’s very woody, it’ll get stuck in your teeth. Here is a metal bowl and some beaters that I have been chilling in the freezer. That’s really not necessary, but it will make the cream whip up faster. One pint of cold heavy cream goes in, and start whipping. Here it is after three minutes, and you see that it’s just dropping right off the beaters. We're not there yet, but we are close, and you need to be very cautious. Cream will go from perfect and velvety to grainy and nasty really quick. There, see that little peak standing up? That is perfect, and that was four minutes, total. Scrape in that vanilla pulp against the edge of the beater. You could just use vanilla extract, it’d be fine. Then just a little sugar goes in. I started with one tablespoon, tasted it, and gave it one more. The cake is gonna be very sweet, and again, I think food just work better when each of the components has a distinct job to do, so I don’t want this cream very sweet. You can see those little specks of vanilla. Those cost like a penny each. Alright, our cake is cool, which means it is firm enough to survive extraction. I just run around the edge with a knife, then turn it around and tap it. Out it comes, nice and clean. Slice it up, and if you’ve only ever had store-bought pound cake, this will blow your mind, because the day you bake it, it’ll be crunchy on the outside. Really crunchy. By tomorrow, it will have softened into that moist, dense texture that you associate with pound cake. But right now, it’s crunchy, and that’ll be a great contrast with the soft strawberries and cream. I grew up eating strawberries with shortcake. That’s kinda like a dry, bland scone. This is, uh, way better. When you lay on your strawberries, be sure to get some spoons of their syrup. Then the cream. The trick is to get a little cake, a little cream and a slice of strawberry on each bite. The strawberries are too tart on their own. The cake is too sweet, the cream isn’t sweet enough, but together, they sing in harmony. If each element was perfect on its own, together they’d be a jumble, or they'd be overkill. That right there is insane. That is like eating springtime. You’ve gotta try it.
