Like much in life that is desirable, sour cherries are hard to come by, hard to keep and worth seeking out.—Domenica Marchetti

The (Terminally Ill) Granny Smith of Cherries

Sour cherries, aka “pie cherries,” have basically the same relationship to sweet cherries that baking apples have to eating apples, magnified. They’re much more acidic than inky Bings or blushing pink-gold Raniers. Raw, sour cherries make your mouth pucker like a slice of fresh lime, which is way too tart for most American palates (some people in Europe and Asia enjoy them). Cooked, they have far more flavor and retain their shape better than their sweet cousins, which lose their brightness and fall apart when exposed to heat.  I have nothing against canned cherry pie filling (which I think is especially fantastic on cheesecake) or the typical roadside diner cherry pie (a la mode almost compulsory). But a sour cherry pie is just an entirely different creature altogether.

Where sour cherries differ from baking apples, which tend to be crisper and slightly more durable than eating apples, is that they’re softer and even more perishable than sweets. That’s also why they’re far less common. The ones grown in Michigan—home to the “cherry capital of the United States” are bright red and look almost translucent, perhaps because the flesh is paler pink or yellow. Hanging on the tree in the sunlight, they almost seem to glow. But they’re so delicate that they will begin to fade if you even let them sit in the sunlight for a few hours. If they aren’t cooked or dried within a day or two of being picked, they will begin to rot or mold. And their season is short—they begin to ripen in mid- to late June, and the trees are barren again by mid-July. 

My maternal grandmother had a sour cherry tree in her yard, and now and then when we were in town during the critical window, she would send me outside to pick some, always warning me not to eat any. She was of the generation that considered a flaky pie crust one of the most important tests of home cooking skill—seriously, in a 1953 Gallup national survey, both men and women named pie first in response to a question about the “real test of a woman’s ability to cook.” Second place went to roasts (men) and cake (women). My grandmother didn’t just pass the test, she obliterated it. I wish I could tell you this was a recipe I learned from her.

It’s not that she didn’t cook with me—we made vinegar taffy every summer, and I remember learning to shape yaki mangu (Japanese cookies filled with adzuki bean paste) while watching grainy soap operas and game shows on the tiny television in her kitchen. But pie-making she mostly kept to herself. It was kind of a family joke that she could have three pies in the oven before anyone else was even awake—only “kind of” because it was true, a testament both to her skill and to the invisibility of much of the domestic labor she performed on top of working a full-time job and being active in her church and various social clubs and charitable causes.

My mom makes superb pies too, although less often because her familial and social obligations aren’t generally of the pie-requiring sort. I learned from her how to roll out a crust as thin as possible and get it into a pan in (mostly) one piece. The rest I’ve mostly figured out myself through trial and error and the advice of trusted sages like Alton Brown and Rose Levy Beranbaum. Regarding the crucible of the flaky pie crust, the variables that seem to matter most are what kind of fat you use and what you do with it.

Choosing Your Fat

The fat must be solid to create a flaky pastry (just like for any “short” bread, which I explain in the footnote here). Butter is probably the tastiest of the solid fats, but its high moisture content (~20%, depending on the brand) slightly compromises the texture—the water in the butter promotes gluten formation, however slight, before the fat can entirely coat the proteins in the flour. Ghee would theoretically be ideal because it would provide the buttery flavor without the extra moisture, but it’s expensive, clarifying your own is kind of a pain and—if you haven’t done it already—adds an extra step and chilling time. I usually compromise by using a 3:1 ratio of butter:shortening. I may be fooling myself, but I think I that makes the crust significantly flakier and crisper than using all butter.

As for the shortening, my grandmother was loyal to Crisco, but I avoid that because of the trans-fat issue,  which may be an unnecessary precaution since they’ve switched to a formula that’s mostly trans-fat free. Instead, I sometimes use an “organic” shortening made of 100% palm oil, and the rest of the time I use lard, which Alton Brown swears by. Taste and texture-wise, I can’t tell much of a difference between the palm oil shortening and lard. I suspect that flipping the ratio to 1:3 butter: shortening would produce an even flakier, crisper crust, although you might miss the butter flavor.

One final option: Rose Levy Beranbaum has a recipe that calls for cream cheese, which I tried a few years ago when I neurotically made four pecan pies in order to figure out which recipe to use for Thanksgiving (verdict: John Thorne’s recipe using Lyle’s Golden Syrup). The cream cheese crust was easier to work with than the butter/shortening crusts, but wasn’t as crisp as I like. I suspect that was because of the higher moisture content in the cream cheese. However, if you want an incredibly forgiving dough or a softer crust, give that a try.

Using Your Fat

You need the fat to do two things: 1) coat the proteins of the flour so they don’t form gluten strands when you add the water and 2) remain in large enough pieces to form solid layers of fat in the rolled-out pastry and melt during the baking process to leave thin pockets of air in the finished crust. Those are basically contradictory—on the one hand, you want to distribute the fat really well, which is best achieved by breaking it into small pieces. A liquid fat would actually work best. But you also need big pieces or undistributed chunks. I kind of wonder why there aren’t recipes that add the fat in two steps—the first half in liquid form and the second in small, well-chilled pieces (if you try that or know why it wouldn’t work, let me know). Instead, most pastry recipes include at least one or two, if not all, of the following steps designed to distribute the fat, but not too much:

1) cut the fat into small pieces and chill it well (~15-20 minutes in a freezer; if you have to leave it for longer, let it warm up for 5 minutes or so before trying to cut it into the crust)

2) integrate the fat into the dough by “cutting” it with crisscrossing knives, a pastry cutter, several pulses of a food processor, or by rubbing it between your fingers—but only do the latter if your hands are cold enough that they won’t melt it

3) use ice-cold water, which will help keep the fat cold and prevent it from melting before you bake it

4) chill the dough before rolling it out, usually for ~30 minutes (you can leave it for up to 2 days and let it warm up for 5-10 minutes before rolling it out)

5) handle the dough as little as possible from the time you add butter or water until the point where you put it in a pan

There are other things that help but may be out of your control, like working in a cool kitchen (which is part of the reason my grandma always used to make her pies in the morning) and having cool hands. Fortunately, even a less-than-optimally flaky pie crust will generally still be delicious (see: pies at diners and grocery store bakeries across the country, which tend to be way better than the cakes in the same dessert cases). I’m not as good as grandma yet, but I’m getting there.

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CSA 2010: Needle Lane Farms

For the uninitiated, Community Supported Agriculture programs (CSAs) are like subscription plans for local food—usually vegetables, but in some regions, you can get CSAs for meat, seafood, dairy, frozen produce, or even prepared foods. Generally, you pay for the whole year or growing season before it begins and then every week, you pick up a pre-packed box that contains a selection of whatever’s in season. After an extraordinarily helpful consultation with Kim Bayer of The Farmer’s Marketer (which I highly recommended to anyone in the Ann Arbor area who’s interested in exploring their options for buying locally-produced food; for $25, she will distill her vast knowledge about the dizzying number of options and all their idiosyncrasies into an hour-long “matchmaking” session tailored to your wants and needs—it probably saved me 15+ hours of research), I decided to get a “single” share from Needle Lane Farms for the 2010 growing season.

The evidence about the environmental impact and health benefits of local, organic agriculture vs. industrial-scale conventional is mixed, so I’m not subscribing to a CSA because it’s morally or nutritionally superior. And I’m not convinced the stuff tastes better either—I’m still learning how to get all the grit out of the lettuce and acclimate myself to the occasional worms and bugs that are inevitable in unsprayed produce. My main motives are 1) to try things I can’t get from a normal grocery store and 2) to be forced to eat a lot of fresh vegetables while they’re in season, which improves my well-being whether or not the veggies are healthier than their conventional analogs. Kim recommended Needle Lane because they grow a lot of novel things, unlike farms that focus more on producing mostly familiar, popular crops. True to form, the first box of the season included the package of stinging nettles and handy warning/info sheet pictured above. 

Plant Bigotry

Nettles are often considered a “weed,” but that’s a troublesome term. Like “dirt,'” it refers less to any inherent properties of the object than to the context where it appears. If dirt is “matter out of place,” meaning what might be dirt in one context (sand in your clothes) is totally appropriate in another (sand on the beach), weeds are essentially plants out of place—e.g. grass may be the only thing many people want growing in their lawns, but when it shows up in their flower beds, it’s a weed, and often an especially tricky one to remove. But there are also things—like soil—that count as “dirt”  no matter where they are, and nettles are that kind of weed, along with plants like thistles and dandelions. Even when the New York Botanical Garden deliberately grew dandelions for their recent tribute to Emily Dickinson, NPR reported that they had to “keep the staff gardeners from uprooting the tiny yellow flowering weeds.”

It’s not an issue of the usefulness or prettiness of the plant—many “weeds” are edible and beautiful, like the flowering “invasive species” that park services staff and volunteers do battle with. And it can’t just be an issue of thorniness, because obviously: roses. The main thing that seems to make something inherently weedy rather than contingently weedy seems to be whether it’s cultivated. Not the specific plant—many people welcome volunteer plants in their yards or gardens as long as they’re a species someone cultivates somewhere, but if the plan qua plant—i.e. not a nettle, but Nettle—isn’t deliberately grown anywhere, it seems to be a “weed” even if you eat it or sell it just like a “crop.” Nettles have been harvested for human consumption for centuries, but as far as I can tell, it’s almost always foraged instead of farmed. People don’t plant it or encourage it, it just grows… well, “like a weed.”

According to an article in the Telegraph about last year’s Stinging Nettle Eating competition in Dorset, where people eat the leaves raw, even people who consider the plants edible tend think of them as an “infestation”:

The contest began more than 20 years ago when two customers at Marshwood's 16th century Bottle Inn argued over who had the worst infestation of stinging nettles. "One of them said, 'I'll eat any nettle of yours that's longer than mine"' said Rory Macleod, 34, the pub landlord. "And so they had a competition. They're both dead now.”

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