Holla challah!

Yesterday I decided on a whim to make some challah bread. Baking Illustrated recommends making the dough in a stand mixer or food processor, but what is the fun in that? I broke out the bowls and wooden spoons to mix the dough by hand and greased up the elbows for some old fashioned kneading. What's fun about making challah is that you really get to play around with the dough. Instead of just plopping it into a loaf pan, you get to cut up the dough, roll out the dough, and braid it--twice! The trick to getting braided shape right is actually to make two braids, a smaller braid that is placed on top of a bigger braid. After one last rise, into the oven it goes!

The secret to excellent pie is...

...VODKA!

The day before Thanksgiving, by special request, I made apple pie. One was a regular apple pie (although far from ordinary if I do say so myself!) The second was apple-cranberry pie.


It had been years since I'd made pie. First of all, I'm not a huge fan of it. I don't really like to eat it because of the texture of the filling. Fruit should be chewable, and oftentimes baking the fruit filling breaks it down to baby food consistency. Not feeling that. Nonetheless, many people love pie and I love making it; therefore I have no objections to granting their requests.

Pie crust is one of those things that people obsess over--how to keep it flaky, how to make it the right thickness, et cetera, ad nauseum. Fear not! The first pie I ever made--and to my chagrin got rave reviews--I made in a gallon ziploc bag by shaking up cubed butter with flour and some ice water.

This time, I got a little bit more detailed. Room temperature butter, vegetable shortening and flour--all blended with a pastry cutter (see picture at Green Tea Cupcakes post). A tiny bit of salt and sugar for taste, then the obligatory water. But then--here is the secret--vodka.

This little bit of fire water is absolutely imperative, and here's why: If we add too little water, the pie crust dough is really hard to work with--too dry to hold together and roll out later. If we add too much, then it sticks like crazy and is also a mess to work with. Enter vodka. It adds the liquidity of water during the dough stage, but being 40% alcohol, it bakes off in the oven... leaving a crispy flaky crust as though you'd only used 60% of the water. Tell me that's not genius.

And here's what it looks like: