Sage Advice | Artisanal Butter | Recipe: Whole Wheat Pie Crust
Issue No. 60
Sorry we missed you last week (it’s been a long couple weeks; you understand). This week we raise a glass of our favorite potent potable to salute the great Alex Trebek.
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My father is an occasional reader of this newsletter, or my “Facebook printout report” as he has called it. He recently suggested that I should include more practical advice about healthy eating. This made me laugh, as this newsletter is explicitly not about healthy eating. Matt and I try to encourage a bigger-picture approach to food choices — less focus on the individual and more on the interconnected.
My father is weathering a health crisis, so it makes perfect sense that he is more concerned with reducing his sodium intake than with the sociopolitical implications of the particular tomatoes in his salad. And I could use a distraction from the state of the world too. So in honor of my dad’s request, we’re going to talk about nutrition. Sort of. I won’t be the one doling out the advice. Instead, I’ll be sharing just one piece of solid dietary guidance from the great American food writer M.F.K. Fisher, who were she to be alive, I hope would want to be my best friend. Her 1942 essay collection “How to Cook a Wolf” is a classic and so ahead of its time (she was talking about nutrigenomics — the cutting-edge field of personalized nutrition tailored to our genetics — almost 80 yeas ago!). She spends the first essay, “How to Be Sage Without Hemlock” being catty about boring people who insist on three boring, balanced meals each day:
But instead of combining a lot of dull and sometimes actively hostile foods into one routine meal after another, three times a day and every day, year after year, in the earnest hope that you are being a good provider, try this simple plan: Balance the day, not each meal in the day.
Damn do I love that advice. It just feels so right to me. So freeing! Carbs for breakfast, veggies for lunch and dinner, a big hunk of protein a few times a week. Or whatever variation feels right to you. And think of all the time you’ll save with this streamlined cooking routine!
Fisher was writing in the midst of World War II, when normalcy was an impossibility, not just at the dinner table. With time and resources so tight, why should homemakers jump through hoops to create those traditional three square meals a day, just because their mothers did so? She wrote, “it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present...that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.” The world turning upside down is an excellent opportunity to take a hard look at business as usual and ask, does this really make sense for me anymore?
Her sage advice about what and how to eat strikes me as being about much more than food, and just as radically useful today as it was in 1942. At the table and in all aspects of life, let us keep questioning, keep pushing boundaries, keep applying creative solutions to build happier lives and a better world. Now that’s my kind of nutritional advice!
love,
Jackie
Our advice: Send this issue to your friends!
Watch this 📺
Meet the Willy Wonka of artisan butter
Insider’s Regional Eats series offer lively glimpses into unique cooking traditions. Their most popular video — on making traditional butter in Brittany, France — is an Internet sensation not just for its insights but for the quirky artisan at the center of the process.
Jean-Yves Bordier leads a butter factory where workers use a 19th-century technique called malaxage to churn, knead and shape the butter by hand. His passion shines through in this short documentary. At one point he refers to himself as a “little good man who makes little good things.” He describes the clattery process of removing water from the butter by saying “when my butter sings, it cries.” It’s all so adorably French.
Fall in love with traditional maison du beurre (butter house):
-matt
Fresh Links
🎨♵ Don’t Eat the Breakfast Cereal. It’s Made of Plastic. | New York Times
Here’s a work of art combining two of my passions — freaking out about single-use plastic and experimental puppetry! “The Plastic Bag Store” is multidisciplinary artist Robin Frohardt’s latest work, “part art installation, part immersive puppet play.” Audiences enter what appears to be a run-of-the-mill corner store in the middle of Times Square. But look closer at the merchandise and one discovers that every single item in the store is made out of plastic waste, from the spring mix to the sheet cake to the boxes of “Yucky Shards” cereal.
The pandemic has transformed the piece, which had been planned to include large roaming audiences and live performance. Now an intimate number of masked audience members enter the installation and watch a 45 minute puppetry film about consumerism and climate change.
🍃The town that built back green | Washington Post
In 2007, an EF5 tornado swept through Greensburg, Kansas. The storm almost wiped away the small farming community. But in their efforts to rebuild, they chose a method that might seem at odds for a town in a county that in 2016 gave 83 percent of the vote to Donald Trump. Greensburg transitioned away from fossil fuels and created a place that conserves energy — and their community leaders are frequently “consulted by communities around the world grappling with devastating weather events from wildfires, tsunami, earthquakes and floods.”
Here’s what Greensburg looks like more than a dozen years after the tornado:
A decade later, Greensburg draws 100 percent of its electricity from a wind farm, making it one of a handful of cities in the United States to be powered solely by renewable energy. It now has an energy-efficient school, a medical center, city hall, library and commons, museum and other buildings that save more than $200,000 a year in fuel and electricity costs, according to one federal estimate. The city saves thousands of gallons of water with low-flow toilets and drought-resistant landscaping and, in the evening, its streets glow from LED lighting.
Not everything is perfect. The rural versus urban divide still makes it hard to attract business and new residents to the town of 900 people (1,400 lived there before the tornado). Still, the area doesn’t plan to turn back. The townspeople largely support the cost-saving, energy-efficient changes that put the green in Greensburg.
🎃Experience: I got my head stuck in a pumpkin | The Guardian
I wouldn’t have minded spending the last two weeks with my head stuck in a pumpkin, instead of refreshing the web nonstop for updates on Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Rachel Ralphs recalls the time she earned her 15-minutes of fame after getting her noggin caught inside a pumpkin as a 16-year-old in a viral video in 2015. Her ponytail got caught on the rim of the gourd, and you can see her struggle here.
If something similar ever happens to you, well take Ralphs’ advice:
Dad was summoned – less, it seemed, in expectation of practical help than to make sure he didn’t miss out on the spectacle. I heard him propose calling the fire department. “Stay tuned,” said Mom; she’d mentioned she was going to upload the video to Facebook, but it was only then I realised she’d been filming the whole time. I was stuck for five or six minutes though it felt much, much longer. The video cuts before my rescue – Dad got me to push my head farther into the pumpkin so Mom could reach in and undo the rubber band round my ponytail. I emerged with squash-conditioned hair, a sore chin and my nose plugged with pulp.
All-Butter Whole Wheat Pie Crust
Being able to make a pie from scratch should be a requirement for graduating from high school (Why did they stop teaching home ec classes? 😡) . Here is a simple, whole wheat pie crust recipe that you can use for whatever pie your heart desires. You don’t have to use whole wheat flour, but the flavor will be better, and we gotta sneak in that fiber wherever we can! Next week I’ll be featuring a Maple Sweet Potato Pecan Pie recipe, so think of this as part one.
The most important thing to remember when making pie crust is to work fast and keep everything very cold. Some folks go a lot further in this department by prefreezing the flour and butter cubes, but this feels overly fussy to me. As long as you keep the butter cold enough so that it is visibly flecked throughout the dough, you’ll end up with a lovely flaky crust. The easiest way to do this is to start with very cold butter and work fast so that the warmth of your hands doesn’t melt the butter.
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (if you can have access to whole wheat pastry flour, use that)
1 cold stick of butter
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
big pinch sugar
ice water
extra flour for rolling out dough
step-by-step
Add a few ice cubes to 1/4 cup water. Set aside.
Mix flour, sugar, and salt in a large mixing bowl.
Cut cold butter (straight from the fridge) into 1/2 inch cubes. Add to flour and toss to coat cubes in flour.
Working quickly and confidently, use both hands to work butter into flour. Pinch butter with your fingers and mix continuously until butter pieces are pea-sized and uniformly flecked throughout the flour.
Measure out 1/4 cup ice water (no ice cubes) and pour into flour-butter mixture. Working quickly, mix by hand, kneading until the dough is hydrated and comes together, this should take well under a minute.
Form dough into a disc, wrap in Bee’s Wrap or plastic wrap and allow to cool in the fridge for at least one hour or up to a day or two.
To roll out dough, unwrap dough and place on work surface. Generously flour the surface and the dough.
Using a rolling pin (or wine bottle!), start at the middle of the dough and roll out to the edge in every direction. Flour and flip the dough every so often, so that it doesn’t stick to the counter. Keep rolling out the dough, working from the middle outwards until it is about a 1/4 inch in thickness throughout and the right shape and size for the pie dish. Clean up the edges and drape into the pie dish.
To bake blind (without pie filling), place a piece of parchment paper on top of the crust, so that it that goes up the sides and fill at least 1/2 inch up with dried beans or rice* to weigh down the dough. Baking the crust with a weight on top like this will keep the crust from forming bubbles and cracks as it bakes. Place in fridge or freezer and preheat over to 350°F. Bake for about 30 minutes, then allow to cool and fill as directed. Otherwise, add pie filling to raw dough and bake as specified in the recipe.
*Save the rice or beans afterwards for the next time you make pie! You can use them over and over again.
I support a Low-Key Halloween 2021.
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is a cook and kitchen educator based in Stuart, Fla. She is co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a communications specialist at the ACLU of Texas. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.