Wednesday, April 06, 2005

pieblogging

I've been on a quest.

A quest to make an apple pie without an oven.

I tried this once before. The filling was fine. The crust, however... oh, the crust. It was a disaster.

This time, though, I noticed something as I was scanning deep-fryable pie crust recipes.

A pie crust isn't all that different from pasta. But you have to make a few changes.

So here's what I did.

The original pasta recipe is one cup flour, one egg, a half-teaspoon of salt, and water only as needed. Knead, roll out on well-floured surface, cut into noodles, boil, and serve.

To the above recipe, I added

another cup of flour
another egg (refrigerated)
two tablespoons of cold butter (could've used more, actually)
a mass of sugar, probably about a quarter to a third of a cup
a splash of milk

(The above measurements are all approximate. I eyeballed.)

This produces a sweeter, eggier, "butterier" dough. Roll that puppy out and deep-fry.

Here's what a deep-fried hunk of that dough looks like:

hunk o' burnin' crust


Sorry it's out of focus. I rolled out some dough into tortilla shapes, deep-fried them in a skillet, and ended up with something like an actual pie crust. Behold my dessert:

hidden fortress


The above was quite tasty. But I still wasn't satisfied with the shape. It lacked dignity. It was like building a fortress out of square sofa cushions: gratifying if you're a kid, but useless if you're a five-star general. So the next night I decided I'd go the McDonald's route and try to make an apple pie with a wraparound crust.

So, as you see below, I rolled out some more dough and stuck the filling in.

not a mandoo


Then I wrapped everything up like a burrito. Well, not exactly like a burrito: I folded the dough up the wrong way. Did you notice? Look below:

not a burrito


Then I deep-fried the "pie" in hot oil:

burn, baby, BURN


The result looked good, like an actual "camp style" pie:

mmmmmmm


And when ice cream was added, the effect was complete:

no animals were humped in the making of this pie


It could've been better, but it could've been much worse. I'm going to try this again at some point and see what other crust designs I can come up with.



_

No comments: