The David Lebovitz effect

I'm very suggestible. Reading this post on David Lebovitz' blog, along with the fact that I had some chickpea liquid in the fridge to use up, led directly to a completely unnecessary, yet somehow very necessary S'mores Pie.

It got a bit burnt under the grill, but I'm pretending that was intentional.

The crust is the Press-in Almond Crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky with some dark cocoa powder added. I baked it at 350 F for 10 minutes.

The chocolate pudding is this one, halved and veganised. (I added a tiny bit of liquid smoke but it was pretty subtle.)

The marshmallow topping went like this:

75 g chickpea liquid
75 g sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
0.5 g xanthan gum
vanilla
--whipped together

Then things get a little bit hazy...
I heated up agar (0.7 g?) with water (not a lot) and sugar (some). It got to at least 108 C (I was originally planning on letting it get to 118, but it was starting to look right so I pulled it early.) I poured this mix down the side of the mixer bowl as it mixed the meringue on high speed. (This is based on my recipe for marshmallows, but with more liquid [here the chickpea liquid is straight out of the can, not reduced]. It ends up marshmallowy but softly set.)

Spread the marshmallow topping on top of the pudding. Put it under the grill and watch it carefully. Put it in the fridge to set up.

Lemon ice box pie

Well, actually, since this was just a test run, I skipped the biscuit-crumb base, so technically this is just lemon ice box pie filling, veganised. I wish I'd made a whole pie: this was fantastic!

I read about this pie in the Tipsy Baker's review of John Besh's book My Family Table (searchable on Google Books). You fold a lemon/sweetened condensed milk mixture through whipped egg whites and freeze, for something that is almost better than a perfect bite of lemon meringue pie. (I say almost because the one thing you are missing is that touch of caramelised meringue. Still, this is really delicious and perfect in its own way: a fluffy sweet lemon mousse-meringue.)

Here's what I did:

14 oz (1 3/4 cups) sweetened condensed soymilk*
1/2 cup lemon juice
3 t lemon zest
1/4 t salt
144 g chickpea liquid
pinch of cream of tartar
2 T sugar
0.8 g xanthan gum
60 ml water
0.8 g agar powder

Mix together the sweetened condensed soymilk, lemon juice, lemon zest and salt.
In a stand mixer, whip the chickpea liquid, cream of tartar, sugar and xanthan gum until you have a nice firm meringue.
Put 60 ml of the condensed soymilk mixture in a small saucepan with the water. Whisk in the agar, and bring to the boil. Simmer a couple of minutes to activate the agar, and then with the stand mixer going on high, pour the agar mixture down the side of the bowl and whip until it is well incorporated.
Fold the meringue into the condensed soymilk mixture, and freeze for at least three hours.

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* Sweetened condensed soymilk =  3 parts by volume Better than Milk original soymilk powder, 2 parts sugar, 1 part boiling water, and 3 T vegan butter per cup of soymilk powder, processed in a blender until smooth. (It makes just slightly more than the volume of milk powder you use: so if you need 1 cup of condensed soymilk, use 1 cup of powder, and you will end up with a little bit leftover.)

Catchup

Good things I ate (or drank) in the second half of 2014:

From Vedge, Broccoli Rabe Philly Style (seriously bitter homegrown broccoli rabe [which I cut with gai lan to tone it down a bit], roasted red capsicum, porcini mayo)

 Pizza and roasted cauliflower at Pizza Domenica in New Orleans:

 Birthday/journal acceptance cake (Chocolate/root beer):

Asparagus pizza:

Enchiladas Especiales Tacuba style (wish I'd had poblanos; made do with green chillies and used rehydrated yuba sticks as chicken, and cashew cheese)

Pasta with a pureed caramelized onion / nutritional yeast sauce and cubed smoked tofu:

Pumpkin and pecan pie(s):

Home brewed saison:

Lemon meringue pie, again

I love experiments where you can eat the data.

 

I've almost perfected my meringue recipe from last time.

This is a small batch: it made enough to cover 3 ramekins. I think if you double it it would be enough for a pie.

60 g water
50 g caster sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
vanilla
1 g versawhip 600k
0.5 g xanthan gum
0.6 g agar powder

1. Mix the water, sugar and agar in a small pot and bring to the boil.
2. Put the cream of tartar, versawhip and xanthan in the bowl of a stand mixer. Add the agar mixture and whip with the whisk attachment. Add a little bit of vanilla extract.
3. Whip the mixture until you have a thick foam. When you lift the mixer head, the whisk should have a big blob of meringue in it. It should be thick enough to just stick there, not dripping off.
4. (You could put it on your pie at this point, but here's what I did.) Cover a baking tray with parchment paper, then make meringue circles the right diameter for the ramekins. Put the tray under the grill for a minute or two, watching closely because they brown fast.
5. Put the browned meringues in the fridge or the freezer. If you serve them straight out of the freezer the foam is slightly firmer, and I find the cooler temperature pleasant. Out of the fridge they are perfectly acceptable, just slightly less firm.
6. Place the chilled meringue on top of your lemon pie (or ramekin) to serve.

Note: I bet it would work if you put all of the ingredients into the pot in step 1.

Vegan lemon meringue pie

Here's how you make a meringue that doesn't set:

I based it on my pavlova recipe, but used water instead of flax goop. In the pavlova recipe, I think the baking step provides the heat necessary to activate the agar, but I didn't plan to bake this meringue, only run it under the grill to brown, so I whipped half the water with the versawhip and sugar, and heated the other half in a pot with the agar (using twice as much agar as in the pavlova recipe). I then poured the agar mixture into the versawhip mixture and kept whipping. I ended up having to add more versawhip because it was taking forever to whip up properly. The agar left a few little lumps in the meringue, I guess because it solidified when it hit the room temperature versawhip mixture.

 I put the meringue on the pie, ran it under the grill, and it browned charmingly and the surface firmed up. Overall, the meringue layer was way too soft. It was runny rather than marshmallowy. Tasted good though. I guess the agar didn't do much work at all. It might have helped to use warm water in the versawhip mixture, and then leave the meringue to cool down and firm before grilling/serving.

Here's how you make a meringue that sets:

Take the pie you made in the first version. Freeze it. And voila!

The pastry wasn't that good frozen. So in future I might make a meringue disk, brown it, freeze it, and then place on the lemon tart to serve. It was the perfect texture.

Banoffee pie

Banoffee/Banoffi pie, veganized:

The crust is the shortbread tart shell from Vegan Pie in the Sky (but with some of the margarine replaced with coconut oil). Then there's a layer of soy 'dulce de leche', then a layer of sliced bananas, and then it's topped with coconut whipped cream (1 cup coconut cream, 0.5 g xanthan gum, whipped in the cream whipper) and there's some chocolate flakes on top. (I decided to skip the coffee from the original because I wasn't sure how it would go with the coconut.)

Mulberry pie

Thanks to a little urban foraging, we had mulberry pie.

For the filling, I was inspired by the blackberry pie in Vegan Pie in the Sky, but even though I used less lemon than the recipe suggested, I still found it overpowering. Maybe the long cooking time doesn't suit mulberries -- a quick mulberry sauce I made (mulberries, sugar, lemon, heated on the stovetop just until juicy, then pureed) had a much better flavour.

My quest for good vegan pie dough continues. I tried this Serious Eats recipe, using mostly shortening with some vegan margarine, but the crust ended up on the short/crumbly side.

Pie

Summer can be brutal here. I try to avoid heating up the kitchen if possible, so I haven't been doing much baking at all. (I think since November I have only made one batch of cookies, and pizza for dinner one night. No bread -- this time of year, my sourdough starter is for pancakes only.)

But this week, finally we have had a break, so I made pie! Totally unseasonal, courtesy of a random bunch of rhubarb that was on sale at the grocery store, this is strawberry and rhubarb pie with a streusel topping:

The recipe is from Vegan Pie in the Sky, but for the pastry I tried veganizing this recipe by replacing the butter with coconut oil. My quest to master pie dough continues. This ended up okay, but the texture was short rather than really flaky. I should have known that something was off, when I blithely added the water called for in the recipe and it ended up way too wet. I was able to pour some off, but still it was too wet. (Normally I would have added the water cautiously, but the recipe claims to be for an unusually wet dough and doesn't urge any caution in adding the water.)

We ate this with homemade burnt caramel ice cream, and it was delicious.

Blueberry pie

This was my first blueberry pie. I usually think of pie as something to make with excellent seasonal fruit, but this one was made with frozen blueberries and it was pretty great. The filling was blueberries, lemon zest, sugar and some tiny tapioca pearls.

I used the 'one pie dough to rule them all' recipe from Chez Pim, but with refined coconut oil instead of butter (80% by weight). (I liked the dough technique, where you push the fat into the flour with the heel of your hand to make long flakes. But cold coconut oil tends to be hard and lumpy, so I don't think it worked as well as butter. The recipe has you fold the dough several times, kind of like the laminated dough for croissants, but I found that the coconut oil dough was very fragile, and the carefully-formed layers were falling apart. I wonder whether whipping the oil might work -- Lagusta uses this technique for her croissants.)

I am nitpicking. The crust worked out fine, and the pie was delicious!

Key lime pie

I've never actually had real key lime pie, so I don't know how authentic this was, but it was good. I used Isa's recipe for Latchkey Lime Pie, with a few substitutions. (In particular, I didn't want it to be too coconutty, so I used 250 ml of Oatly cream and some pureed avocado, topped up with coconut milk.)

Noho lunch

Back in Noho for a lightning visit, we had a perfect lunch of baked beans (a Deals & Steals score: two cans for 99c) and rosemary bread from the Hungry Ghost (still warm!) plus a mini (vegan) apple pie also from the Hungry Ghost. Yum.