Gone Awry Pie

 

FYI, as I am settling into my new job, I find that my weekends are being broken down into Sat = totally useless couch potato recuperation day and Sun = headless chicken impersonation as I run around doing all the things I was too couch potato'd to do the day before.  SO moving forward the plan is to expericook on Sundays, post on Wednesday (I promise, I'll get this figured out yet).

As you may take hint from the post title, Sunday's pie plan didn't turn out the way I'd hoped it would so I thought I'd take this opportunity to turn it into a culinary lesson.

GONE AWRY PIE

A little background, when I was going through culinary school, I had the best baking instructor, Mr. Kimber.  Great guy, good sense of humor, and knew his baking sh*t like nobody's business.  Because he was so good it was a little nerve wrecking when we had a bake day for grades where you had to present your final product to the panel of instructors for critique and discussion.  Very nerve wrecking...at first.  Then Mr. Kimber explained to us that even if you brought up a biscuit that resembled a charcoal briquette, as long as you understood what went wrong and could explain it, you could still get an A for that day.*  It wasn't about making the perfect product, that's not what they really wanted, it was about the learning experience and what you took away from it.  For me, cooking is fun because it's both a science and an art, and with either you only get better through experimentation and practice.

*Side Note: this was also the day I started honing my "lawyering" skills in the kitchen and was able to product justify my way to a 4.0.

Alright, onto my failed experiment.  Dad told me about an orange pie that he and Mom had on one of their recent travels.  I love key lime pie, I love lemon ice box pie, another citrus pie sounded great to me.  So I decided to use Mandarin oranges.

I modified a key lime pie recipe -- 1 (14 oz.) can sweetened condensed milk + 3 egg yolks + 1/2 cup Mandarin orange puree blended together and poured into a pie shell, baked for 15 minutes at 350 degrees -- voila! Orange pie!

Was it edible...yes.  Was it good...not so much.  What I did not take into account is that Mandarin oranges lack the zing of the other citrus fruits.  Instead of standing out in a glorious taste display, it kind of got overwhelmed and pushed to the background by the condensed milk.  Poor Mandarin oranges. :(

I tried to cover up the pie gone awry by mixing Mandarin puree with whipping cream and then slathering it over the top.  Yeah, not much help.

So I started thinking about what I could have done different to make it better and here's what I came up with:

(1) orange zest -- I should have zested the pie filling.  The citrus fruit zest is just that, a tangier zippier version of the fruit itself

(2) sugar -- I should have added a touch of sugar to help sweeten up the puree.  Orange puree is not that sweet in and of itself

(3) salt -- I should have added a pinch of salt.  Salt actually tends to bring out the hidden sweetness in fruits that don't seem that sweet

(4) not used a key lime pie recipe in the first place -- something more along the lines of a light custard or mousse may have made a better vehicle for this delicate tasting fruit

Of course it goes without saying that Dad decided he could live with the results and offered to "take care of the problem" for me, but I think next time it will require a little more thought about the qualities of the ingredients and how best to highlight them.

So I know it's not a recipe per se, but more a recipe for life (yes, I just went pompous on you).  While I like it that people think I'm a really good cook, it's never been for lack of trying and I hope that by sharing some of my "whoops" moments, it will encourage you to keep on keeping on in the kitchen even when things go awry (we've got a pie for that now).

Until next week, bon appetite!