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Aug. 25th, 2006 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickThis evening I am embarking on a new journey in pie: Adventures With Lard. The local grocery store has Manteca, which (besides being a brand name) is Spanish for lard. I bought some. If you want to buy lard for yourself, check in the meat and dairy/egg parts of the store -- my store had it near the eggs and butter. Unlike some other lard products, Manteca is 100% transfat free. (Transfats are added to some lards to increase their shelf life.) The container has both Spanish and English on it, but judging from the amount of Spanish on the lable, I got the distinct impression that they were aiming it at the Spanish-speaking segment of the population.
Lard is rendered from the fat of piggiewigs. This means that it is not kosher. Things made out of pig are nonkosher and could only be MORE nonkosher if they were drenched in cream sauce and leavened for consumption during Passover. I am only mentioning this because I have a variety of people who more-or-less keep kosher and may need to know about the ingredients in my pastry products. (You know who you are.) Lard is also not vegetarian or fish-and-bird-itarian, for those of my friends who are trying not to eat the flesh of mammals these days. (And you also know who you are.) Appropriate disclosures regarding pie crust composition will be made when next I take a pie to a function, so don't worry that I'm trying to sneak animal products in on you so's to condemn you to hell or wreck your aura or whatever eating piggiewig parts is supposed to do to you.
As regular readers are aware, it is my considered opinion that Blue Crisco (the 100% transfat kind) makes godlike pie crusts. It's also more acceptable to the dietary dictates of those who don't eat pigs or mammals or whatever because it's made from crushing up seeds of some kind of plant. However, the transfat thing is a no-no. Pie crust made with Blue Crisco apparently kills on contact, or would, if we kept using it now that we know how bad transfats are for us. So, I'm looking for a new fat to use in pie crusts. As the Boston Globe reports, I'm not the only one. (They report that Manteca has transfats added but I'm sitting here looking at the container and it says otherwise... and it warn't in the "baking" aisle at my store, it was in the fridgerated animal products aisle, near the cheese and eggs and butter. Perhaps they add transfats to the no-fridge-required kind?)
In response to the transfat mess, the fine people at Crisco have given us Green Crisco, which is allegedly just like Blue Crisco (the colors refer to the cans the stuff comes in. All Crisco is white except for the jaundiced hue of the abomination known as butter-flavor Crisco.) except that the exact same techniques which make godlike pie crusts from Blue Crisco make shitty pie crusts from Green Crisco. Since pie crust is one of the very few things I use Crisco for, I cannot imagine that the fine people at Crisco didn't test out the Green Crisco on this recipe. They had to have. If this was the best they could do, I am not impressed. It sux0rs. The pie crust tastes okay but it's impossible to work with. It tears and shatters and has none of the elasticity that makes Blue Crisco pie crust easy (relatively speaking) to work with. If you can get it to work enough to make a pie out of it, the pie tastes okay even though it looks like the edges were fluted by a distrated ten year old.
My mom tried mixing real butter and Green Crisco, half and half. She suggested it as an improvement over Green Crisco. I tried it out last weekend and it makes passable pie crust -- tastes okay, works okay, but gets too brown and shatter-y (The wrong kind of shatter-y. Not the proper kind.) when baked. I don't like the crispity texture of the finished product. Also, brown==bad. This is better than straight Green Crisco, at least in terms of the handle on the dough, but it isn't *right*. Fuck. (If further efforts do not improve results, this is the current leader for best method. But...damn, I was raised on Blue Crisco pie crusts and unfortunately, Blue Crisco pie crusts define perfection for me. Mom? This is your fault.)
I am still trying to find something I can live with for pie and lard is the next candidate on the list. I don't really want to use lard. It's made out of pigs, for fuck's sake. Pigs have nothing to do with fruit pies. I don't see the point, here. I'm heading into a world where Fruit Pies Are Made Of Pigs. How can this be a good idea? But... the existing choices are insufficient. They are not good enough. People used lard for the entire history of this great nation until 1911 when Crisco was invented. Were they all wrong?
But anyway. Lard. Here we go!
Lard is rendered from the fat of piggiewigs. This means that it is not kosher. Things made out of pig are nonkosher and could only be MORE nonkosher if they were drenched in cream sauce and leavened for consumption during Passover. I am only mentioning this because I have a variety of people who more-or-less keep kosher and may need to know about the ingredients in my pastry products. (You know who you are.) Lard is also not vegetarian or fish-and-bird-itarian, for those of my friends who are trying not to eat the flesh of mammals these days. (And you also know who you are.) Appropriate disclosures regarding pie crust composition will be made when next I take a pie to a function, so don't worry that I'm trying to sneak animal products in on you so's to condemn you to hell or wreck your aura or whatever eating piggiewig parts is supposed to do to you.
As regular readers are aware, it is my considered opinion that Blue Crisco (the 100% transfat kind) makes godlike pie crusts. It's also more acceptable to the dietary dictates of those who don't eat pigs or mammals or whatever because it's made from crushing up seeds of some kind of plant. However, the transfat thing is a no-no. Pie crust made with Blue Crisco apparently kills on contact, or would, if we kept using it now that we know how bad transfats are for us. So, I'm looking for a new fat to use in pie crusts. As the Boston Globe reports, I'm not the only one. (They report that Manteca has transfats added but I'm sitting here looking at the container and it says otherwise... and it warn't in the "baking" aisle at my store, it was in the fridgerated animal products aisle, near the cheese and eggs and butter. Perhaps they add transfats to the no-fridge-required kind?)
In response to the transfat mess, the fine people at Crisco have given us Green Crisco, which is allegedly just like Blue Crisco (the colors refer to the cans the stuff comes in. All Crisco is white except for the jaundiced hue of the abomination known as butter-flavor Crisco.) except that the exact same techniques which make godlike pie crusts from Blue Crisco make shitty pie crusts from Green Crisco. Since pie crust is one of the very few things I use Crisco for, I cannot imagine that the fine people at Crisco didn't test out the Green Crisco on this recipe. They had to have. If this was the best they could do, I am not impressed. It sux0rs. The pie crust tastes okay but it's impossible to work with. It tears and shatters and has none of the elasticity that makes Blue Crisco pie crust easy (relatively speaking) to work with. If you can get it to work enough to make a pie out of it, the pie tastes okay even though it looks like the edges were fluted by a distrated ten year old.
My mom tried mixing real butter and Green Crisco, half and half. She suggested it as an improvement over Green Crisco. I tried it out last weekend and it makes passable pie crust -- tastes okay, works okay, but gets too brown and shatter-y (The wrong kind of shatter-y. Not the proper kind.) when baked. I don't like the crispity texture of the finished product. Also, brown==bad. This is better than straight Green Crisco, at least in terms of the handle on the dough, but it isn't *right*. Fuck. (If further efforts do not improve results, this is the current leader for best method. But...damn, I was raised on Blue Crisco pie crusts and unfortunately, Blue Crisco pie crusts define perfection for me. Mom? This is your fault.)
I am still trying to find something I can live with for pie and lard is the next candidate on the list. I don't really want to use lard. It's made out of pigs, for fuck's sake. Pigs have nothing to do with fruit pies. I don't see the point, here. I'm heading into a world where Fruit Pies Are Made Of Pigs. How can this be a good idea? But... the existing choices are insufficient. They are not good enough. People used lard for the entire history of this great nation until 1911 when Crisco was invented. Were they all wrong?
But anyway. Lard. Here we go!
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-26 02:32 am (UTC)Anyway, the pie is in the oven. It will be done enough to take out of the oven in approximately forty minutes. It will not be ready to eat for another hour, so I won't have an update on taste until tomorrow morning.
No, I cannot eat the pie while it's hot. Persons who eat pies hot out of the oven (before the innards have a chance to sediment into their lovely final form) and/or dump ice cream all over the delightful and flaky crust are abominations unto Nuggan.
The handle on the made-with-lard pie dough is as good, if not better, than Blue Crisco. It's pretty damned amenable. It rolls out easily and holds together well. It flutes very nicely, with none of the shattering that characterizes Green Crisco. I thought I would not like the taste because, y'know, piggiewigs. However, the taste is... melty. It does not taste like pigs. I tasted it plain, with a spoon. I made it into pie dough and I tasted the raw pie dough. It was better than unobjectionable, bearing in mind that I adore raw pie dough.
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Date: 2006-08-26 04:05 pm (UTC)I totally just make my pie crusts with butter, but then again, I am not good at it anyway.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-27 01:21 am (UTC)(I find the Adventures in Pie interesting. It's good to know what the different options are.)
no subject
Date: 2006-08-27 02:32 am (UTC)(You have previously resisted all attempts on my part to train you up into the proper making of pies. While I do not understand your reluctance on that front, I seem to recall you saying that it had something to do with the general desireability of finding your own Way on the pie front. [This, in spite of the fact that I am The One, True Way TM and that only through me can you pass go and achieve eternal li-- Sorry. My bad. Different One, True Way.] Anyway, I'm not sure that my Way can serve you as anything but an example of What Not To Do. Certainly a little more fixed authority on the Way would be preferable over the wandering-in-the-wilderness mojo that I've currently got going on over here.)
no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 12:56 am (UTC)(You know about his Adventures with Fundies due to his previous girlfriend, right?)
Re the resisting Pie Discipleship - sorry, I'm afraid that is entirely due to my aspirations to become the Pie Disciple of my mom. And her Way is not your Way. Her Way is the Way of the Butter Crust, brown and tender, not so much with the flaky.
Heresy, I know.
Nevertheless, it is useful and fascinating to find out how lard measures up to Crisco the Blue and to Crisco the Green with some Butter In.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 01:55 am (UTC)Also, having made butter pie crusts in my life: They brown way too fast, make a somewhat tougher crust (higher moisture content than crisco or lard), and are somewhat fussy to work with as a dough (more sensitive to temperature than crisco -- about the same as lard). The cooked texture is not suitable, crumbles instead of flaking.
*sigh*
A spot of internet research suggests that there are a whole lot of butter-is-for-pie-crusts people out there. They are all wrong. Of course, from where they sit, I eat barely-done pies made from rendered pig fat. Probably I'm wrong to them... but my pies are lightly browned and very flaky. If I gotta be wrong to have that, well, hell, at least I get good pie in the process.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-26 02:48 am (UTC)I found your LJ via your website, which I found via google, which gave me your article about why chicks like fanfic smut - and agree with you. I thought you'd like to know.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-26 12:53 pm (UTC)On the fanfic porn thing -- thanks! I get more feedback on that thing than a little, most of it fairly enthusiastic. Of course, I also get the occasional "You sick evil pervert person!" fan mail, but I consider those compliments in their own way. Also, what were those people doing reading my page anyway? It's not like I gave it a really misleading title along the lines of Five Steps to a Better Relationship With God and *then* talked about fanfic porn. I gave it the title Why Chicks Like Fanfic Porn... and that's what I talk about in the page. I TRIED for truth-in-advertising. If they read it and get offended, well, that's not really my problem.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 02:11 am (UTC)Theory the first: It's like guys with "lesbian" porn. You get a screen (mental movie, for slash fic) full of the stuff you wanna look at with no inconvenient bits you don't find interesting.
Theory the second: Slash fic enables authors and audiences to consider teh hawt sex0r without the boring gender politics parts. Particularly, folks seem to think that issues of power exchange (this would be most of your kink smut) are a lot clearer when everyone has the same plumbing.
Theory the third: Chicks, particularly younger chicks who don't make with the fucking in their real lives, use slash fic to, uhm, mentally deal with relationships in a nonthreatening fashion. (I didn't say that I liked all of these theories. This is the "pat on the head" theory of male journalists and social psychology types. I'm not a fan.)
Theory the fourth: Chicks are using the vibrant and fleshed-out characters in mass media like, uhm, paper dolls. Most of the really interesting characters are male, so that's what they use. (I'd have bought this a lot more easily back in the days of the original Star Trek. Nowadays, you get a better selection of chick characters on TV.)
Theory the fifth: Slash fic isolates the TWOO LURVE part of the relationship -- you see a fair amount of this in fic that goes the "I'm not Gay, I just find so-and-so irresistably hot even though he's a dude like I am. But I'm NOT GAY." route. I don't hold much truck with this theory, but I'm mentioning it for completeness.
Theory the sixth: It's porn, mostly. Porn works at least partly on its transgressiveness and slash helps with that. (Illustrating the issue of transgression in porn: Look at the development of portrayed sex practices in het romance novels (very conservative, they are) over the past thirty years or so. Used to be, none of our heroines ever went down. Neither did the guys in the flow-y white shirts, for that matter. Nowadays, everyone goes down. Used to be that the only proper non-rape position for sex was missionary, guy on top. Nowadays, the couple can bang in a variety of positions. Yay!) Transgressiveness is probably easier when it's the kind of sex0r you are not having... hence the gay sex thing in slash. (And if you've done a close reading of the literature, depicted practices on that front have started to sprawl into WTF territory since the advent of the internets. Take rimming, for example. Easy to find in fic, though not so ten years ago.)