Stewed Rhubarb Recipe

This is the recipe that accompanies Suzanna Crampton & Imen McDonnell’s recipe for Rhubarb Sheep’s Milk Ice Cream in the Spring 2014 issue. The leftover cooking liquid can be used to flavor lemonade, tea, or even just sparkling water. The liquid can also be reduced to a syrup consistency and then drizzled on top of the rhubarb ice cream. This recipe makes just enough for one batch of ice cream, but the recipe can easily be doubled or tripled.

Stewed Rhubarb

Makes 2/3 cup needed for ice cream recipe

1 ½ cups diced fresh rhubarb (about 4 large stalks)
1/3 cup sugar
¼ cup water

1. In a small saucepan set over low heat, combine the rhubarb, sugar, and water. Bring the mixture to a simmer, stirring gently, until the sugar has dissolved and the rhubarb has softened, about 10 minutes. Strain the rhubarb from the cooking liquid (reserving both separately). Allow the rhubarb to cool to room temperature and then store in a covered container in the refrigerator until ready to make the ice cream. Use the cooking liquid as noted above.

Photo by Hilary Kline.

Basic Pie Dough

For our Tennessee issue, we turned to Dale Mackey, owner of Dale’s Fried Pies in Knoxville, Tenn. for a little inspiration and for her candied sweet potato fried pies. When making a fried hand pie, Dale reminds folks that the consistency of the dough should be a little bit “wetter” than regular pie dough. With regular pie dough you are just rolling it out once and you are done manipulating it, she says, but with a fried pie you are cutting it, folding it and crimping it. If the dough is erring on the side crumbly, it is going to be too hard to work with when trying to crimp it shut.

While Dale keeps her pie dough recipe a closely guarded state secret, we did manage to get the basic ingredients out of her, which means that you can use this basic double crust pie dough recipe to great success.  

Basic Pie Dough

2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. sugar
1 ½ sticks cold unsalted butter
8 tbsp. cold water

1. Add the flour, salt, and sugar to the work bowl of a food processor. Process briefly to combine. Cut the butter into ½-inch pieces and add to the flour mixture. Using short on-off pulses, cut the butter into the flour mixture until the butter pieces are the size of small peas.

2. Add 3 tbsp. of the water to the bowl and pulse on and off again for 5 seconds. Add 3 more tbsp. water and, again, pulse on and off for another 5 seconds. Add the remaining 2 tbsp. water and pulse on and off for another few seconds. Remove the lid and pinch a piece the dough. It should hold together easily. (If it doesn’t, add another tbsp. of water and pulse to incorporate).

3. Turn the dough out onto a floured board and shape it into a solid ball. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour before rolling out. Roll out the dough as directed in Dale’s recipe in our fall issue. Just be careful when frying.

Science and Food at UCLA with Chef Alex Atala

Professor Amy Rowat leads a popular undergraduate course titled “Science and Food: The Physical and Molecular Origins of What We Eat” for UCLA’s Life Sciences program. The class offers students the chance to learn the origins of food texture and flavor – i.e. why lettuce is crispy, or why different cuts of meat have different textures.

The class is punctuated with course lectures by highly regarded chefs and farmers from Los Angeles and beyond.  This year, for example, Chef Jeremy Fox will be giving a class lecture entitled “The Art of Vegetable Texture” and Chef Michael Voltaggio will be lecturing on “Meat Texture and Elasticity.”

Accompanying the class each spring is an evening lecture series that is open to the general public.  Similar to Harvard’s “Science and Cooking” lectures, this series is presented for nominal ticket prices with the intent of introducing food science to those outside of the program.

Just last week, Alex Atala, the chef and owner of D.O.M. in São Paulo, Brazil, kicked off the 2013 public lecture series with a discussion on the intersection of the primitive with the modern. Once described by Chef David Chang as more interesting than the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the Word, Atala is renowned for a devotion to regional cuisine using indigenous Brazilian ingredients.

Atala works closely with anthropologists and scientists to discover and classify new foods from the Amazonian region. Among his favorite discoveries are priprioca, a fragrant Amazonian root used in savory and sweet dishes, and a new variety of wild palm perfectly adapted for sustainable and environmentally sound farming, which he serves as fettuccine with butter, sage, and popcorn powder (see recipe below).

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