SWEET! Potato Pie

As I mentioned in my last post, I woke up on Sunday morning with pie prominently on the brain. No rhyme or reason for it--I just wanted pie. Specifically, I wanted to make pie, something I'm ashamed to admit I'd never actually done before. Pie's got charm and pretty consistently gets people excited (my friend Kris keeps talking about putting on a muumuu and coming over to eat pie all night long). And, there's something really satisfying about how contained and orderly a fresh-baked pie is. It's a well-dressed, compact, and delicious unit of dessert. It's practical.

After embracing the desire to make pie, my thoughts turned to Meyer lemons--how much I don't like them and how much I want to like them. I think the first time I had a Meyer lemon was the day I picked one off the unkempt lemon tree in our yard. It was a few months after I had moved to California and I was thrilled to have such an accessible fruit tree in my back yard. (Growing up, we had a crabapple tree behind the house. My brothers would use its bitter, unpalatable fruit as sibling ammunition. When fruit is used to create marble-sized bruises on the arms and legs of a sister sandwiched between an older and a younger brother, I, personally, don't think it should count.) I envisioned myself bathed in California sun, leisurely picking bursting bright yellow lemons off of a fruit-laden tree and freshening up my drinking water, meals, and cleaning agents with crisp homegrown citrus. I'd have a fruit bowl on the counter overflowing with them all year round. I'd be known in the neighborhood for my exquisite and thoughtful use of lemons.

I'm such a dreamer.

When I picked the fruit off the tree, I naturally expected a strong, solid, sour lemon. I was sorely disappointed. Instead, I discovered I'd just flavored my ice water with a flat half-lemon, half-orange hybrid that couldn't decide which side of the citrus spectrum it belonged on. I tried making it into a custard (another dessert I'd never attempted before) and the result was completely inedible and sat in little covered custard dishes in the back of the fridge for a full two weeks, dripping condensation. After a couple of days, they settled into layers of colloidal yellow liquid and water.

I swore Meyer lemons off.

I was thinking my pie ambitions of this past weekend could lead me back to the Meyer lemon, though, and prove true every single wonderful thing I'd ever heard about them since the failed custard experiment. (To be fair, custard needs a double-boiler, which I didn't have at the time but tried to replicate using a pot of boiling water and an ovenproof mixing bowl. Just like a hammer doesn't make a great substitute for a food processor, an ovenproof mixing bowl doesn't make a great double-boiler, either.) When I reached for a bag of coffee beans in the (lemonless) fruit bowl on the counter on Sunday morning and one of our CSA-delivered sweet potatoes gave out from under the bag and collapsed into a slippery mush, I knew there were other plans for my pie. There were four sweet potatoes left, not counting the one that had just smeared all over my bag of coffee, and they were surely close to meeting the same sad, uneaten fate as their moldy brother. A quick solution?

Pie.

I'd never tasted sweet potato pie before, but it had, from what I could tell, a great reputation. I found an intriguing recipe on epicurious.com that suggested roasting the potatoes starting in a cold oven and on lower heat for a longer period of time to generate more maltose. I love the intersection of chemistry and food, even though I have no idea what maltose is or why it's a good thing. The recipe also included rum, so, maltose and gradual chemical reactions aside, I knew it had to be a win.

I also found a basic pie crust recipe on Epicurious and improvised the hell out of it, adding sour cream and lemon zest just to see what would happen (and also because, in my opinion, it's not a recipe if it doesn't include sour cream). I used coconut milk in place of most of the cow's milk the filling recipe called for (although I wish I'd substituted it one-for-one)--a little trick I learned during my short stint as a vegan.

The results are really amazing. This is a delicious pie. It's smooth and, thanks to the coconut milk, deliciously rich, sweet, and full-bodied. The spices give it a punch while the rum helps the flavor linger a bit in your mouth. Not being a fan of flaky pie crusts, the sour cream version made for a more solid and present dough.

In short: Maltose-ify your sweet potatoes. Make this pie. Don't skimp on the rum. Thank me later.

SWEET! Potato Pie
Makes one 9-inch pie



Crust
Recipe adapted from epicurious.com

1 1/2 c all-purpose flour
2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 c (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
3 tbsp sour cream
2 tbsp grated lemon zest
1+ tbsp ice water

Whisk flour, sugar, and salt in medium bowl until blended. Add butter and, using your fingers, knead and rub in until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Using a fork, mix in sour cream and lemon zest. Add ice water and stir until mixture is evenly moistened (add more ice water if needed). Roll dough into a ball; flatten into disk. Wrap in plastic and chill at least 1 hour. Bring dough to room temperature before rolling out and placing in a floured, 9-inch pie pan.

Filling
Adapted from another recipe at epicurious.com

4-5 small sweet potatoes (about 1 1/4 pounds)
1/4 c (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
3/4 c sugar
1/2 c coconut milk
1/4 c whole milk (forget it--just use 3/4 c coconut milk and skip the cow's milk altogether!)
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp dark rum (I kind of wish I had used more.)
1 tbsp all-purpose flour

Prick the sweet potatoes with a fork and place on a shallow baking pan in the middle of a cold oven. Turn the oven on to 325 degrees F and roast until very tender, about 1 1/4 hours. (The potatoes will appear to be oozing. I'm pretty sure the ooze is maltose.)


Gettin' its maltose on

Cool potatoes to room temperature.

Raise the oven temperature to 400 degrees F, and place a shallow baking pan on the bottom rack.

Scoop the flesh from potatoes into a large bowl and discard the skins. Mash the sweet potatoes with a fork until smooth. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat and stir in the sugar (the mixture will be grainy). Add the butter mixture to the sweet potatoes and mix. Using a whisk, beat in the milk(s) and the eggs until smooth. Whisk in the remaining ingredients. The filling will be liquidy.

Pour the filling into the pie shell.

Carefully transfer the pie to the heated shallow baking pan in the oven and bake until the filling is just set (about 40 minutes). Transfer the pie to a rack to cool.



---
What? You want to know more about sweet potatoes and maltose? Turns out it's a documented chemistry thing. Check out this blurb from an article titled "Formation of Maltose in Sweet Potatoes on Cooking," published in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry in 1923:

It is evident that the formation of maltose is of paramount importance in the production of delicious cooked sweet potatoes as we know them...

Since upon cooking sweet potatoes at least half, and frequently nearly all, of the starch present becomes converted into sugar, our concept of the sweet potato as a starchy food should be revised, since when consumed by man it really is saccharine rather than starchy.

H. C. Gore, in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 1923, 15 (9), pp 938–940 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ie50165a031 (for a snippet of the article)

My Favorite Meal: Home Cookin'

It always amazes me how quickly the body embraces new habits. I've started a morning gym routine recently and almost instantaneously found myself getting crabby and misaligned on the days when I've chosen to sleep in over pulling my body out of bed and into the pre-dawn city darkness in spandex yoga pants and pigtails. (It's one of San Francisco's seediest hours, as it turns out--I've so far seen one arrest and numerous stumbling, confused vagrants in my one-block walk to the gym.)

Another new habit of mine: Sunday cookery. On a day like today, when there are no plans as far as my eye can see and the sun's bright and the breeze is pushing through the window in a poetic shhh-ushhh-uhh, I want nothing else than to spend the last remaining hours of my weekend in the kitchen. It may not seem like an intuitive thing (wouldn't I rather be sunning myself in the park enjoying a cold 22-ounce beer in a brown paper bag?), but I assure you that some of the nicest weather in San Francisco makes for the best cooking experiences. There's nothing better than opening the windows a crack (and only a crack, since my cats also have a new habit, one of falling out of third-storey apartment windows) and letting the smells circulate through the apartment and into the street.

This morning I woke up with pie on the brain and a rotten sweet potato in my fruit bowl. The mushy-fuzzy potato was nestled amongst several cousins and siblings that were doing a slightly better job of clinging onto life. While the fruit-laden Meyer lemon tree in our backyard was initially calling my name, I couldn't ignore the remaining tenacious tubers in the bowl. So, I'm in the process of making my first-ever sweet potato pie, taking my time roasting the potatoes in an attempt to produce maltose-rich results. (I don't really know what maltose is, but it seems like something I may have learned at some point during that one particularly terrible semester I had of organic chemistry in college. Regardless, fancy words win me over all the time, so when I read about it in the recipe, I knew I had to try it.)


They're beeeeauteee-ful.

But I digress. This post is actually about my favorite meal. The best eats I had during the past seven days. I promised I'd make the effort to reflect on it every week, and my slow-roasting potato maltose experiment gives me some time to do it during Sunday Cookery.

And--wouldn't you know it--I actually don't have a favorite meal to report on this week. Even with all this time (90+ minutes!) I have to talk about it. It's because I can't narrow it down to one.

When I somewhat haphazardly put the "my favorite meal" idea together a few or so weeks ago, I didn't expect that it would drive me deep into a world of home cooking. I thought for sure it would have inspired me to, yes, cook great meals at home, but I also thought I'd be more inspired to venture out and try tasty eats at some of San Francisco's best cheap-and-cheerful places. It turns out that I don't want to do that. I want my weekly favorite meals to be, well, mine.

There's something so fantastic about home cooking. Of course there is; most people agree that home cooking (mom's home cooking, usually) is much better than anything that can be ordered from a restaurant. I guess I just never thought about why it's so darn good.

Now that I've had a solid week (okay, more like five out of seven days) of home-cooked meals, I understand it better. For me, home cooking is so superior because it allows me to know and love every ingredient used in a dish. Yes. I am a control freak, both in and out of the kitchen.

Example: Tuesday's meal. Braised escarole and white beans with whole wheat gnocchi. What the hell is escarole? All I knew is that it came in my CSA box and I mistook it for lettuce until I re-read the CSA newsletter (it never made it onto a sandwich, but I wonder...). I consulted our copy of the Field Guide to Produce and learned a bit more (popular in Italian cooking; mild flavor; melty texture). Even after that, I wasn't totally convinced that the leafy stuff in the bag in the fridge wasn't just red lettuce, but okay. So I threw together a basic braising liquid (chicken stock, green garlic, garlic, green onion, splash of tamari) and paired it with another Italian staple, white beans, wondering aloud at several points along the way what soggy salty lettuce would taste like. Oh, and did you know you could get whole wheat gnocchi, and it's not as pasty as the potato version and it pairs really nicely with a bean-based braise?

Yup. Home cooking can be some of the most educational food you can eat. And most rewarding.

So I ate really well this week, between the braise, the pork chop with fresh steamed green beans, the first pan of meatballs I ever made, the veggie sushi (fresh mango and avocado, by far a perfect pairing), and the homemade burritos, just like I hoped I would. Unfortunately, though, I can't just pick one favorite meal; they all stood out.

Perhaps it's a rookie's mistake--trying too hard at the start, resulting in consistent(ly tasty) results. Perhaps more risks need to be taken.

Speaking of, I'm smelling something sweet burning in the kitchen.