Quote of the day: Dan Davies on “microfoundations of macroeconomics”

Posted on 2015-01-30 by

In the “Bull Market” collection on Medium, Dan Davies writes:

The actual investment decision is carried out by a corporate manager. He wants to maximise his own income, so he is going to do what he thinks will generate a bonus for him. This depends on his boss, who reports to the corporate board, and who therefore wants to do what he thinks will get a bonus from them. The board are responsible to the shareholders, and it might be thought that the shareholders, at least, want to maximise profits. But actually, the shareholders are several levels of abstraction away from the actual investment decisions of the company. Most shares are held by fund managers, who want to beat the market, and who therefore want companies which do things which the rest of the market will value higher at a later date.

So, the investment decision, rather than being simply based on “what will maximise profits?”, is actually based on the manager’s perception of the CEO’s perception of the board’s perception of one group of fund managers’ perception of a larger group of fund managers’ perception of what the underlying owners of the shares are willing to pay for. There are six or seven levels of principal / agent problems between an already quite intractable profit-maximisation problem, and the individual decision-making agents who are meant to carry it out.

Seems like a pretty good summary of one of the big problems in contemporary economics right there.

Source: Dan Davies, “Microfoundations Ain’t So Microfounded“, 2015-01-28

Quote | Posted on 2015-01-30 by | Tagged , ,

Quote of the day: Tal Yarkoni on peer review

Posted on 2015-01-29 by

In a footnote to a recent blog post, Tal Yarkoni writes:

On a tangential note, this is why traditional pre-publication peer review isn’t very effective, and is in dire need of replacement. Meta-analytic estimates put the inter-reviewer reliability across fields at around .2 to .3, and it’s rare to have more than two or three reviewers on a paper. No psychometrician would recommend evaluating people’s performance in high-stakes situations with just two items that have a ~.3 correlation, yet that’s how we evaluate nearly all of the scientific literature!

The rest of the article is probably only interesting to people doing human-subjects psych research, but I thought this one bit was particularly revealing: I knew about the crisis in peer review, but not how bad the inter-reviewer agreement was!

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Schedule for the next few weeks

Here’s what I’m currently expecting to cook/bake and write up for you:

This weekend:
One of the lemon pies from The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book — the black-bottom one by choice, lemon chess if Meyer lemons are not available in the supermarket — and Chef Corey’s New England-Style Baked Beans with Thick-Cut Bacon from Joanne Chang’s Flour, too
Feb. 7/8:
Ming Tsai’s Flourless Chocolate Five-Spice Cake and Christopher Myers’ Tortilla from Flour, too
Presidents Day:
Torta Caprese from Rosetta Constantino’s Southern Italian Desserts and Country Ham & Vermont Cheddar Quiche from Flour

As always, plans subject to change. I still have two more weeks open this winter before I go on vacation in March. Suggestions are welcome (see my recipe pointers pages).

Aside | Posted on 2015-01-28 by

Other people’s recipes: Sarah Mullins’s almond cake for Cook’s Illustrated

Posted on 2015-01-28 by

And now the second post in this series of things I did last weekend. I have a few more photos this time around, and I can actually present nutrition data. If the chicken stew was an example of the Test Kitchen’s cooks pulling out the stops to amp up the flavor, this is an example of the other side of the Test Kitchen’s repertoire: take a classic European pastry, decide that Americans won’t like it, and change it into something else. It’s not bad — but it’s not really the “elegant European dessert” the display type advertises, either. To Mullins’s credit, the body text actually admits this, but I’ll be wanting to try actual European (or at least European-style) recipes before drawing any conclusions as to which is better. (I have a suspicion I’ll prefer the denser European ones, just because “denser” is usually a good guess when it comes to my own cake preferences — more like tortes than anything else.)

Down to the details. The recipe, “Best Almond Cake” ($) appeared in the January, 2014, issue of Cook’s Illustrated, and was featured on America’s Test Kitchen episode 1502, “Almond Cake and British Scones” — although in this case regular TV cook Bridget Lancaster (the only regular on the TV show who doesn’t also appear on the magazine’s masthead) presents the recipe rather than the magazine article’s author, Assistant Test Cook Sarah Mullins.

The recipe starts out by toasting blanched sliced almonds, which are used in two ways: first, they are ground and mixed with the other dry ingredients of the cake batter, and then later, more toasted almonds are used to top the cake.

Most of the mise (one step done)
In this photo, I’ve already toasted and ground the almonds that form part of the flour mixture (seen in the foreground). The second step is to whip four eggs together with sugar and additional flavorings — still in the food processor. (Both the magazine article and the TV show explain how whipping the eggs in the food processor changes their structure in a way that leads to a flatter, denser cake.)

After preparing the batter in the food processor
The fats — a mixture of vegetable oil and melted butter — are added to the egg-sugar mixture, with the processor running, to create an emulsion, and then the almond-flour mixture is pulsed in until just combined. The resulting batter comes just up to the capacity line in my food processor, as shown in the photo above. This is then poured into a greased and lined cake pan — I used a springform pan for ease of extraction — and topped with more toasted almonds and a mixture of sugar and lemon zest. This is then baked about an hour at a fairly low temperature (only 300°F).

Top of fully baked cake
After cooling in the pan for a quarter of an hour, the cake is extracted (again, using a springform pan made this easy) and allowed to cool for another couple of hours on a wire rack.

Side of baked cake
The cake formed a lovely browned crust on the side…

Half of cake
…while the crumb was moist and golden. (I cut the cake in half to take these photos, but neglected to get a picture of a single slice!)

Close-up of topping
I did not care for the sugary topping, which (as shown in this photo) remained fairly loose and granular even after baking.

Close-up of cake showing crumb texture
In this close-up you can see that the cake was slightly underdone — I think that’s actually the puncture from where I put my tester in — and could perhaps have used five more minutes of baking time. No complaints, though — as mentioned above, I prefer cakes on the fudgy side anyway!

Blood-orange supremes
The recipe comes with a suggested sauce, really just flavored and sweetened crème fraîche. It starts with supremes of two oranges; the first oranges I grabbed when I looked in my fridge happened to be blood oranges, which give a lovely color to the sauce. Supreming oranges is a pain, though. The recipe also uses some grated orange zest, sugar, salt, and of course the crème fraîche (a cup of it). The result:

Finished sauce
It was very, very tasty indeed, and a great simple sauce; the only thing to keep it from being an everyday sweet sauce is the crème fraîche itself — which although it’s readily available in the supermarket these days is not commonly found in people’s refrigerators. (Of course, you can also make your own, as I discussed last spring, but that requires as much advance planning as it does to just buy it with your regular groceries.) I’ll probably be doing more with crème fraîche later this year as I work through some of Joanne Chang’s recipes where it’s an important ingredient.

I brought the cake into work and it was very well received, although a few of my coworkers were a bit dubious about the sauce. That said, I still had a quarter cake left over, which I put out on our tasters mailing-list (a slightly more limited circulation than vultures), and by the time I got out of my after-lunch meeting, it was nearly gone — pretty good for the last week of winter break.

Nutrition

I cut the cake into eight slices for service, but once people insisted on further cutting up the slices, I cut the remaining slices in half. I’ve based this calculation on eight slices.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/8 cake
Servings per recipe: 8
Amount per serving
Calories 486 Calories from fat 261
% Daily Value
Total Fat 29g 45%
 Saturated Fat 7g 34%
 Monounsaturated Fat 5g ​
 Polyunsaturated Fat 5g ​
 Trans Fat 0g ​
Cholesterol 108mg 36%
Sodium 292mg 12%
Potassium 37mg 1%
Total Carbohydrate 49g 16%
 Dietary fiber 3g 10%
 Sugars 36g ​
Proteins 9g 18%
Vitamin A 8%
Vitamin C 3%
Calcium 6%
Iron 8%

For the orange crème fraîche, I based the calculation on navel oranges (rather than the smaller blood oranges I used) and figured on two tablespoons of sauce per serving (thus 16 servings per recipe). When I brought this into work, I had a significant amount of the sauce left over (which unfortunately I had to toss).

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 2 tbsp (exclusive of orange segments)
Servings per recipe: about 16
Amount per serving
Calories 70 Calories from fat 54
% Daily Value
Total Fat 6g 9%
 Saturated Fat 4g 18%
 Trans Fat 0g ​
Cholesterol 13mg 4%
Sodium 21mg 1%
Potassium 29mg 1%
Total Carbohydrate 4g 1%
 Dietary fiber <1g 2%
 Sugars 3g ​
Proteins 0g 0%
Vitamin A 6%
Vitamin C 17%
Calcium 2%
Iron 0%
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Other people’s recipes: Dan Souza’s chicken stew for Cook’s Illustrated

Posted on 2015-01-28 by

This is the first of two posts on food I made this weekend, both of them rather short and lacking in illustration. This one will also be lacking in nutrition details, for reasons I’ll explain.

The recipe in question is “Best Chicken Stew” ($), by Dan Souza, which appeared in Cook’s Illustrated for November, 2013, and also in the season-opening episode (1501) of this year’s America’s Test Kitchen on PBS, “Comfort Food Revisited“, which Souza also presented on camera. (Is anyone else disoriented by the new title sequence, or is it just me? I had all that narration memorized, and now in the new titles there’s no narration at all.) Hopefully this is the start of a new trend and we’ll get to see more of the Test Kitchen staff actually talking about the recipes they developed.

In developing this recipe, Souza pulls out most of the tricks in the Test Kitchen’s playbook — the only obvious ones missing are tomato paste and mushrooms, which puts it within the realm of possibility for me. I did have to go out and buy a couple of those tiny little bottles of white wine. (Why, oh why, can’t they make them in a reasonable size? Like, seriously, 187 milliliters? What kind of unit is that supposed to be? OK, so it’s a quarter of a bottle, but what would you ever measure that way?) The main chicken component is thighs, which makes sense since they have more fat, connective tissue, and flavor than breasts, but this recipe also uses chicken wings — which are discarded before service, after rendering their fat and doing a solvent extraction of their collagen. My nutrition calculator can’t cope with ingredients that don’t make it in to the final product — particularly in a case like this where it’s not even known how much of the fat and protein have been left behind in the stew — so I’m not going to provide nutrition information for this recipe; I would need to send it out to a lab, and I plan on eating it (using a conservative but known-wrong estimate) instead.

Mise for the chicken stew
This photo shows most of the mise en place for the chicken stew. Not visible here: the chicken broth — I used Pacific Organic low-sodium, which I believe the Test Kitchen has panned in recent tests — the wine, and the soy sauce. (Soy sauce in chicken stew? I told you Souza pulled out almost all the stops!)

The initial preparation of the stew starts out on fairly normal lines: the bacon (of course there’s bacon — the Test Kitchen doesn’t do kosher or halal; they don’t even suggest alternatives) is rendered, then the chicken wings are rendered in the bacon grease, and then the aromatics are cooked in the animal fat. Unusually, the pot is deglazed at this stage, but the deglazing liquid is then allowed to evaporate, and once the super-cooked aromatics are dry, butter and flour are added to make a roux. Then the pot is deglazed again with the rest of the broth, and the wings and the lean part of the bacon are added back, along with the rest of the vegetables, and the whole thing is cooked, uncovered, in a moderate oven for half an hour.

Stew after first round in oven
At this point, we’re supposed to deglaze the sides of the pot. The photo in the magazine shows a deep, dark ring of fond around the pot where the liquid has evaporated, but as you can see, mine never got there. I followed the procedure anyway (using a wooden spoon to scrape down what crust did accumulate), but there was so little it’s hard to believe it made any difference. The chicken thighs are added at this point, and after heating back to a simmer on the stovetop, the Dutch oven goes back in the oven — again uncovered — to cook for another 45 minutes. (One sour note: the recipe calls for thighs “halved crosswise and trimmed”, but the photo in the magazine shows much smaller chunks than that, more like the normal ½” cubes of breast meat seen in many chicken soups. I followed the recipe, but in retrospect this results in pieces of chicken that are unsatisfactorily large compared to the vegetables — see the photo below.)

Finished stew in a bowl
I forgot to take a picture when it was fresh out of the oven; this photo shows my second serving. All told, I got 5 pounds and 2 ounces of stew, which works out to just under seven 12-ounce servings. On tasting, I noted that — as with my pot pie the previous weekend — the vegetables were a bit crunchy and really could have used another five or ten minutes of cooking time. It was still pretty tasty, but I think the process was rather more involved than I would really care to repeat — all told it took about four hours from starting prep to sitting down to dinner.

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Other people’s recipes: Joanne Chang’s French Lemon-Poppy Pound Cake

Posted on 2015-01-22 by

Now for something completely different! It’s been a while since I made any sort of cake, and I’ve wanted to try this one (from Joanne Chang’s Flour, pp. 70–72) for a while. The proportions are very similar to a pound cake (if you doubled it, anyway), but rather than the creaming method typical of butter cakes, Chang takes a page from the génoise playbook, folding the flour into an egg foam, then folding the reinforced foam into melted, rather than solid, butter. The result was a moist and not-too-dense crumb, although I wouldn’t have minded a little boost in the flavor department. Here’s how it went:

Mise en place
This is, I think, the complete mise for this recipe. Note the separate bowls of sugar and other dry ingredients. I was a little short on the lemon zest so I made it up with some Meyer lemon (which isn’t technically a lemon) zest instead. Everything else is as described in Chang’s recipe.

Butter, cream, and flavor mixture
The first step is to mix the melted butter, cream, and flavoring ingredients (lemon zest, lemon juice, and poppy seeds) together. As the recipe suggested might happen, my butter resolidified a bit, and I had to put it in the microwave for a few seconds to make sure the butter would stay melted.

Egg and sugar mixture
In the second step, whole eggs and sugar are whipped together in the stand mixer until foamy and lightened in color.

Dry ingredients folded into egg-and-sugar mixture
Then the previously sifted dry ingredients (cake flour, baking powder, salt) are folded into the egg foam.

Egg mixture folded into butter mixture
Then the egg mixture is folded into the melted butter. It would have been rather convenient if this had gone the other way — my stand mixer’s bowl has a nice pouring spout — but it can’t be helped, since it’s the egg that has the air in it that we’re carefully folding in so as not to deflate. This gets poured into a lubricated 9″×5″ (230 mm × 130 mm) loaf pan and baked for a fairly long time — more than an hour.

Finished cake
Unsurprisingly, it has to cool in the pan until starch structure that reinforces the foam cools and sets — half an hour according to the recipe.

Lemon glaze
While waiting for the cake to cool, there’s more than enough time to make a simple lemon glaze — what in my dialect we would call “icing” as distinct from “frosting” — from powdered sugar and lemon juice.

Cake after depanning, before glazing
Now the cake is ready to depan. You can see a little bit of roughness on the bottom edge where there apparently wasn’t quite enough baking spray; I had to run a knife around the perimeter to get the cake to slide out without breaking.

Cake after glazing
I put some waxed paper underneath the cooling rack to catch the dripping glaze, then poured the glaze over the top, using a knife to spread it around where it had pooled up a bit too much.

Sliced cake
After the glaze dried, I took a slice for myself. I wrapped the rest of the cake in plastic and brought it in to work the next day (where I had another slice, of course!). Opinions were pretty favorable overall, although I still thought it needed a bit more flavor than it had. (Subtle flavors are often lost on me, unless they’re nasty ones like coffee or mushrooms!) It was popular enough (and went fast enough) that I’d probably double this recipe in the future and make two cakes rather than just one. But my next time through, I’ll probably make the vanilla version Chang gives as an alternative — which substitutes vanilla seeds for the lemon and poppy in the main recipe.

Nutrition

Since it’s baked in a standard 9×5 loaf pan, this cake is 9 inches in length. For service I sliced the cake in half lengthwise, but I had whole slices for myself — figure ¾″ (19 mm) per slice to make 12 slices per loaf.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: ¾-inch slice
Servings per container: about 12
Amount per serving
Calories 316 Calories from fat 134
% Daily Value
Total Fat 15g 23%
 Saturated Fat 9g 43%
 Monounsaturated Fat 3g ​
 Polyunsaturated Fat 1g ​
 Trans Fat 0g ​
Cholesterol 96mg 32%
Sodium 106mg 4%
Potassium 49mg 1%
Total Carbohydrate 41g 14%
 Dietary fiber <1g 2%
 Sugars 27g ​
Proteins 4g 8%
Vitamin A 10%
Vitamin C 6%
Calcium 9%
Iron 3%
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A recommendation and a related random thought on sex and gender

Content warning: potentially NSFW for some values of W.

Today on my commute I listened to a great podcast episode from CBC Radio 1’s Ideas called “Not with the Eyes” (MP3 audio). In this episode, Ideas producer Philip Coulter moderates a discussion at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, between a psychoanalyst and a Shakespeare scholar about gender, and how conceptions of gender differ (or don’t) between our place and time and the Elizabethan England of Shakespeare’s day. All of the participants seem to get confused a bit between gender identity and sexual orientation, but the discussion is very interesting and draws some surprising parallels between our (supposedly “liberal”) time and Shakespeare’s (“repressed”, at least in the popular view). I highly recommend this podcast despite the confusion; Ideas episodes remain online for only a few months at most, so grab it while you can. (And Canadians, please ask your MPs to support the CBC.)

So here’s the “related random thought”: One of the ideas that the panelists bring up is this notion of “performativity” — and in particular, that when an act is understood by the viewer as part of a performance, it is in a sense “defanged”, losing some of its transgressive power. And one of the things that made me think of (because my mind works in strange ways) is the existence of porn stars who present as, even profess to be, totally straight, but are perfectly willing and able to perform in gay porn for money. Some even will admit to enjoying it, all the while insisting that they are “really” straight (“yes, I’ve told my girlfriend, she’s OK with it”). There’s an awful lot of comment that assumes that these are inherently contradictory — and that the actors (we’re talking about male actors here; female porn actors are just assumed to be bisexual) must be somehow “really” gay or bi, and just “in denial” about it. (“As if there were something wrong with that”, one might say, but there’s still more than enough stigma to go around, especially in the places many of the non-American/Western-European porn actors come from.)

But maybe we should take them at their word. Maybe, to put it more generally, the problem is that our society — which is still coming to terms with the concept that not everyone is straight — conflates two different kinds of orientation: physical orientation (who one might desire/be aroused by/be able to perform with sexually) and emotional or relationship orientation (who one might form lasting emotional bonds with, desire a long-term relationship with, or marry). These need not be identical: one can desire to have sex with (some) men and still feel a strong emotional attachment to or preference for (certain) women. While these are usually positively correlated, the correlation isn’t perfect. And we know it isn’t perfect, because there were and are cultures in which sex — particularly gay sex — was/is understood as a different kind of thing entirely from the sex which binds partners in a relationship. Clearly, at least some people, at some historical moments, are able to distinguish sex-as-play or sex-as-ritual from sex-as-procreative-act, and don’t necessarily have the same preferences in every context. (And that’s just talking about humans; let’s not get into the bonobos, OK?)

This is particularly relevant to my own personal experience: I identify as bi, I’m beyond doubt attracted to (and aroused by thoughts of) both men and women, but in terms of the sort of long-term relationship I desire, it’s just as definitely opposite-sex and with at least the potential (perhaps not to be realized) of procreation. (Which is not to suggest that I would be totally averse to more complex relationships — but finding one unicorn is hard enough, finding two or three is ridiculously unlikely, so I leave that to the realm of fantasy where it belongs.)

Aside | Posted on 2015-01-21 by | Tagged , , , , , ,

Other people’s recipes: Corey’s Homemade Chicken Potpie by Joanne Chang

Posted on 2015-01-20 by

This is another one of those confusingly titled recipes from Joanne Chang’s cookbook Flour, too (pp. 194–197). As a pastry chef by training, Chang depends on other chefs to handle the savory side of her Flour Bakery-Cafes; the “Corey’s” in the title refers to Chef Corey, who developed it as a winter dinner special. In the past two posts (“Tutorial: Making Joanne Chang’s Pâte Brisée” and “Tutorial: From pie dough to pie crust“) I covered the making of the pastry case for this pie in great detail — since making pie crust is a pretty fundamental baking skill it seemed like it was worth it. (Let me know if you’d like to see other basic baking procedures covered in comparable detail — actually, I’d love to get any feedback at all!) I’m going to go through the rest of the recipe pretty quickly, since it’s fairly standard.

Blind-baked bottom crust, with failed patch
I ended the last installment with a fully blind-baked bottom crust for the pie, plus an uncooked top crust resting in the refrigerator. Now it’s time to make the filling — a mixture of aromatic vegetables, peas, a diced potato, and a pound of cubed chicken breast in a chicken-flavored velouté sauce.

Preparing chicken breast for freezing
First, I’m going to go back in time a little bit. Chicken of whatever variety is much easier to cut evenly if it is first frozen stiff — not quite solid, but firm enough that it doesn’t squish under the pressure of a knife. Since the package of boneless chicken breast I bought had three half-pound breast halves in it, and I only needed a pound of meat, I took the third portion and stuck it in a plastic zip-top bag. The other two pieces I simply laid flat on my nylon cutting board (used only for meat) and stuck them, uncovered, directly in the freezer. I left them in the freezer while the crust was cooling, so they got reasonably firm (the more so as I found that my celery was bad and I had to make an emergency trip to the store) but not rock-hard.

Chicken breast cut into pieces, with cleaver
A good cleaver makes short work of cubing the semifrozen chicken breast. I put the cubed chicken aside while I worked on the rest of the filling — of which <sound effect="sad trombone"/> I took no pictures. But it’s a fairly standard preparation: the vegetables are cooked in butter, the meat is added, then everything is mixed with flour to form a roux, and finally herbs (only thyme in this recipe), seasoning, and chicken broth are added to turn the roux into a velouté. The sauce is enriched with a small amount of cream (which I probably wouldn’t notice if it wasn’t there), and the whole mess gets dumped out of the sauté pan into the pre-baked pastry case.

Fully assembled pot pie
It appears that I chose my dish wisely, as the filling came just up to the top of the pie shell. I took the top crust out of the refrigerator and cut a hole in the center to allow steam to escape — if I had a pie bird I might have used it here — before pressing it firmly onto the top of the filling. A bit of egg wash on top and the pie goes into the oven for a relatively short time, only half an hour (the filling having been partially cooked already).

Cooked pot pie
Looks lovely, doesn’t it? (Well, unless you’re a vegetarian, I suppose!) The pie has to sit on the cooling rack for another quarter of an hour — there’s a lot of carryover and it’s still cooking — but eventually it’s ready to cut into.

Slice of pot pie
Oops. What happened here? It seems like my pie failed in a couple of different ways: the crust got a bit soggy, and the filling didn’t hold together as I was removing the first slice. In fact, the velouté looks a bit runny:

Pot pie with slice removed, showing excess liquid in filling
Ideally, you’d like the sauce to be rather thicker, so that the filling stays in place rather than immediately flowing out into the vacant slice. I wonder if I didn’t cook it enough on the stove before putting the filling in the case? A bite confirms it: the potato is still crunchy, which it definitely should not have been. Oh well, better luck next time. I’ll have to see how it does on the reheat.

On the positive side: this is an incredibly easy recipe to make; it requires no unusual ingredients or procedures, and Chang provides an alternative version with a biscuit topping in place of the pastry crust, so I can easily see myself trying this again (and hopefully nailing the cooking time). For about an hour of active cooking time (about three hours total) I ended up with a creamy, nutritious meat pie that will easily make four or perhaps even more meals.

UPDATE: After chilling the rest of the pie completely, the velouté did solidify, allowing me to get a rather nice quarter-pie slice for the reheat. (It’s over 800 kcal but that’s no worse than a decent hamburger, and I did plan for it by having a light lunch.) Even on the reheat it wasn’t as runny, but the pastry did stick a little to the bottom of the pie dish, so perhaps I didn’t do a very good job of lubricating it before I built the crust. The fluted edges of this dish make it difficult to slide the pie taker underneath a slice. Despite that, it looked fabulous, and reheated quite nicely, although I still think the filling needed to cook a bit more.

Nutrition

The recipe says that it serves 6 to 8. I’m probably going to end up eating the pie in quarters (still not a bad use of meat, if you consider that most meals have more than a quarter-pound of meat in them!), although if I were sharing then I’d go to the effort of cutting it in sixths, and that’s what I’ve presented here.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/6 pie
Servings per recipe: 6
Amount per serving Whole recipe
Calories 544 from fat 234 3265 from fat 1422
% DV % DV
Total Fat 26g 41% 158g 243%
 Saturated Fat 14g 71% 82g 408%
 Trans Fat 0g ​ 0g ​
Cholesterol 174mg 58% 1041mg 347%
Sodium 567mg 24% 3405mg 142%
Potassium 269mg 8% 1615mg 46%
Total Carbohydrate 49g 16% 292g 97%
 Dietary fiber 3g 12% 18g 73%
 Sugars 5g ​ 27g ​
Proteins 26g 52% 155g 310%
Vitamin A 89% 531%
Vitamin C 12% 74%
Calcium 8% 46%
Iron 9% 57%
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Tutorial: From pie dough to pie crust

Posted on 2015-01-19 by
Pie dish and rested pastry

This gallery contains 18 photos.

In the previous installment (“Tutorial: Making Joanne Chang’s Pâte Brisée“), I covered making an egg-enriched pie dough using a recipe from Joanne Chang’s cookbook Flour, too (“Corey’s Homemade Chicken Potpie”, pp. 194–197). When last we left the scene of the … Continue reading →

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Tutorial: Making Joanne Chang’s Pâte Brisée

Posted on 2015-01-17 by
Two sticks of butter

This gallery contains 19 photos.

A lot of the people I’ve spoken to over the past few months of pie-baking have expressed to me that they think making pastry is “too hard”, “too fussy”, or “too much work”. I aim to demonstrate that none of … Continue reading →

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