It’s odd, because yesterday’s post, entitled “An Epiphany”, was more about a date in the calendar than... you know – having one – and today’s is about just that. Only – and here’s my slight difficulty – the venue for the revelatory moment was the kitchen, rather than the garden, and there’s not a lot I can do about that. Thankfully, I know that most of us gardeners are just as fascinated by food, so I’m sure you’ll forgive the detour, and maybe between us we can come up with an appropriate horticultural takeaway. Something along the lines of: try being more open to those things you’ve soundly rejected; they might be just what you’ve been looking for.
The thing is, I’m not a bad cook, but I’m a rotten baker. I’ll regularly stagger through my version of a vegan German apple cake, which is as delicious as it is stodgy, and often exhibits a suspiciously soggy layer which I blame on the apples, but is probably more like slightly undercooked cake mix. The top always cracks, which apparently is a problem, though I just think it looks appetisingly rustic. Tastes wonderful anyway, and is just the thing you want to have about your person when gardening on a cold winter’s day. Other than this culinary delight, once a year I’ll embark upon several weeks of mince pie making – and that’s about it when it comes to my baking activity, which is probably why I’m not much cop at it. I love to eat pastry, but I lack the touch, and I’ve been working on the shortcrust for my mince pies for years (but only for those few weeks in every twelvemonth), taking notes as I go along in the hope of reaching pastry Shangri-La.
And here’s the thing. I’ll eat a shop bought mince pie, but find them far too sweet and so, I long ago resolved not to put any sugar in my shortcrust. There’s plenty of sweetness in the mincemeat, I reasoned, and I like a little salt in the pastry for contrast. (At this point, I can almost see the experienced bakers among you shaking your heads) I’ve stubbornly persisted in this way for years, tweaking a little here, and a little there; adding more fat to make it shorter, a little baking powder for a tiny rise and, while all these things helped a little bit, and the mince pies were still preferable to the ones we’d buy, the tweaking just gave me pastry that tasted like a slightly different kind of cardboard from the last batch. No matter how light I tried to be with the rubbing in, how delicately I’d float around the kitchen, how cold I’d try to make my hands and how far away from the mixing bowl I’d stand... just that. Cardboardy.
And then I read something. Actually, a friend (hello
!) posted her recipe online, and I was about to reply to her by flaunting my sugar free cardboard pastry chef credentials when something – I don’t really know what – told me to look into the thing. The whole business of sugar in pastry. And this is where I discovered (yes I know you know what’s coming, let me have my moment) that sugar in shortcrust is not just there for the sweetness. It does things to the structure – unexpected things, like holding on to water. I was pretty sure that the water content of O’Brien’s cardcrust pastry was distinctly low, and so, against all my inclinations and years of previous misguided reasoning, in I went with the icing sugar. About 100g of it, to be exact, to 350g flour and 200g fat (this is vegan baking, bear in mind, the fat behaves slightly differently to butter or lard so your proportions may vary).Of course, it worked. Pastry transformed, cardcrust a distant memory. Short, a little flakey, slightly cakey actually inside, the filling merging with the inner layer of the pastry in a delicious and hithertoo undreamt of combination. Mince pie perfection – well, would have been, only I was a touch heavy handed with the water and the fan oven was a little fierce for the first batch. But the sugar, it turns out – the thing I definitely knew I didn’t want – was the thing that made everything else work. And, oddly, it wasn’t too sweet – they must use bucket loads of the stuff in the shops.
All of which has left me feeling at the same time almightily smug at having, at the tender age of 52, worked out how to bake a decent mince pie, at the same time as feeling more than a little stupid that the answer was probably to stick to a bloody recipe. Actually, let’s briefly unpick that. I’m really glad I didn’t stick to the recipe. If you only follow the satnav, you miss out on so much incidental detail along the way, and the getting lost is where the discoveries happen. I’m glad to have had the privilege of learning what a pillock I’d been – I don’t think that if I’d accepted what I thought I didn’t want right at the start, I’d have discovered quite so much about what a difference it can truly make.
It’s only January, and I can’t even begin to work out quite how this is going to apply in my own gardening – but I’m convinced it will. I know as we get older, and more experienced, we tend to become less malleable, and less open to suggestion. I guess the place to start is where my convictions feel most secure, and my results stubbornly cardboardy.
Does any of this resonate? Do let me know. Back to the garden properly with the next post (maybe with a mince pie in hand).
I can relate and I've been muttering, 'try icing sugar', in my head, I was quite annoyed when someone beat me to it ! 😄 I think we should question everything, except Mary Berry, she is always right. I just accept she has a ridiculously sweet tooth, so I always half the sugar in her recipes. I'm convinced we are gardening wrong. It's dictated by fashion, inflated egos and snobbishness. I look back at summer bedding and sterile gardens and think, idiots. I'm sure that in twenty or thirty years people think the same about us. Nature is Mary Berry. She always gets it right. I start there and work backwards and try to unpick everything I ever thought I knew. I'm hoping I'll manage to break free of the gardening mind cardboardness and co-create something half decent before I die.
In fairness, baking can be a bastard