I have a culinary degree, and have worked as a professional cook, and have been a restaurateur. The “gastronomer” in my url is quite serious. I have Opinions about how people use the word chef (”chef” is a job title, it’s a French word that means “boss” and is a cognate of chief; only someone who actually runs a quality kitchen should be called a chef – you can’t be a “home chef”), about how “spaghetti bolognese” is used (it’s not just any spaghetti with meat sauce, Bolognese is a specific style that includes beef, pork and pancetta), about what a proper key lime pie is like (don’t even get me started).
Because of this, people expect me to be a food snob. I am NOT. You like what you like, and you should eat what you like, and anybody who looks down their nose at you for it isn’t a “foodie”, they’re a fucking asshole. You like Li’l Smokies in your box mac’n’cheese? Right on! You like Taco Bell? So do I! Let’s go get a crunchwrap and a gordita! You buy cheap pink box wine? Sure, I’ll have a glass with you, if you’re offering.
I have food I don’t like, and food I will offer what I find more enjoyable alternatives to (oil packed canned tuna has a very fine taste, while water pack tends to wash out the richer flavors), but hey, if you like the stuff I don’t, you eat that all you want!
I want to make fresh, delicious, high quality ingredients available to everyone, but don’t you dare take away my $1.99 “chocolate” covered waxy-tasting mini donuts! I will fight you!
Foodie-ism has stopped being about just enjoying food for yourself, and has, far too often, started being about sneering at the food other people like. It’s food hipsterism. And it’s bullshit. It’s often classicist and racist and ableist/healthist as well.
Don’t pull that shit around me. I will take you the fuck apart.
Okay, but what IS a proper key lime pie? And what isn’t? I presume it’s not just a lemon pie but with lime-flavored or lime-based filling instead of lemon?
Now you’ve got me curious.
You got me started.
OK, first of all, a key lime pie is NOT made with “regular” (Persian) limes. It is made with key limes, aka Mexican limes. They are smaller than Persian limes, about the size of a ping pong ball. They’re also not a deep green, but more of a yellow-green, and the juice is yellowish. They are considerably tarter than Persian limes, and have a distinctive flavor. They’re also kind of a pain to juice if they’re not fresh-picked, so personally I always buy bottled up here in Seattle. (I’m from Florida, where part of the year you can get good ones from groves or even off your own backyard tree.) Nellie and Joe’s Key West Lime Juice is the only brand I know and trust, and if your grocery store doesn’t have it, Amazon does.
A key lime pie is a custard pie made from key lime juice, egg yolks, and typically sweetened condensed milk, in a graham cracker crust (none of your bullshit butter cookie crusts, save that for some other, appropriate, kind of pie). Traditionally, you *can* put meringue on top, but only to use up the egg whites you separate from the yolks. It’s not fucking lemon meringue pie, there should not be a huge mound. Personally I don’t like wet French meringues (made with granulated sugar, as opposed to Italian meringues, which are made with syrup), I think they feel like sweetened snot in my mouth. You can also add a small amount of sweetened whipped cream when you plate it, but only a dollop.
A key lime pie should never, EVER be green. If it is, the baker doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing, and you should skip it. Even a custard pie made with Persian limes shouldn’t be green, ffs.
A key lime pie SHOULD be both very sweet and very tart, as well and very smooth and creamy. My personal standard for the flavor is that when you take a bite, the first thing you taste should be the creamy and the sweet, and then the tart should hit you, but your mouth shouldn’t pucker until you take a sip of water and wash the sugar away.
A key lime pie filling should not contain flour, starch, gelatin, or other stabilizers. It should be as simple as possible. Key lime pie, historically, is poor people food from the Florida Keys, using the basic ingredients they had lying around: limes from the backyard, eggs from the chickens (they still run around loose on Key West), a can of sweetened condensed milk, some graham crackers, sugar and butter for the crust. You’d stir it up, pour it into the pie shell, pop it in the over with dinner, pull it out and stick it in the icebox (with literal ice) to cool, eat it the next night. (Unless you used a no-bake version, where the key lime juice itself denatured and “chemically cooked” the egg yolks. But it’s too easy to get salmonella that way these days, in the US.) They’re meant to be simple, dammit.
Key lime pie was the kind of thing they made in shotgun shacks. (Which frequently look a little different in the Keys than they do in those pics. The hallways often have rooms built off both sides of the hallway, and the roof’s peak sometimes runs perpendicular to the hallway, and then additional sections might get added to the back as the family grew, leading to rooflines like ^^^^.) Just a bit of history.
So then. Key Lime Pie Recipe Time! This is the recipe my family has always used, it’s the recipe I used in my restaurant, it always gets rave reviews, and it is thoroughly authentic. Because I hate meringue, it does not include meringue.
You will need:
Hardware:
one mixing bowl
one wooden spoon, stirring spatula, or spoonula
one liquid measuring cup
one small bowl for separating eggs into
one graham cracker pie crust, recipe to follow, or use a store-bought one, I don’t care
Ingredients: 1 – 12oz can sweetened condensed milk 3 egg yolks ½ cup key lime juice
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Mix those things together until smooth. Don’t beat them hard, you’ll incorporate air into the mix, that will mess up your texture and give you bubbles. When it is completely smooth, your oven should be hot, stick your filling in the fridge for a little while. Pre-bake your crust for 15 minutes, trust me, it is so much better if you do this. Do this even if it’s a store bought crust. If you don’t, your crust can get soggy. Pull it out, let it cool 10 minutes. Pour in the filling, bake 15 minutes. Pull it out. Let it cool for 30 minutes of a countertop, then stick it in the fridge for at least four hours, preferably overnight. Share and enjoy. (Or eat it all yourself.)
Graham cracker crust recipe:
You will need:
Hardware:
one mixing bowl one glass bowl to melt butter in one gallon ziplock OR a food processor a wooden spoon
Ingredients:
1/3 of a box of graham crackers 1 stick butter 1/2c sugar one 9″ pie plate one heavy glass with a smooth flat bottom
Dump the graham crackers into the gallon ziplock or work bowl of your food processor. If using a bag, crush them up real good, until you have a lot of fine meal and some small pieces. If you’re using the food processor, break them up roughly, then pulse until you get the same thing.
Put them in the mixing bowl. Add the sugar, and stir to combine. Melt your butter. Mix that in. It should reach the consistency of wet sand, like you’re making a sandcastle. If you pick some up in your hand and squeeze it in your fist, it should hold its shape until you poke it.
Press this firmly into the bottom and up the sides of your pie plate. Then use the bottom of your glass to press it in even more firmly. Really compact it. Then bake it as above.
Great all-purpose graham cracker crust recipe, good for cheesecake too.
If you lose track of this recipe, look on the bottle of Nellie and Joe’s, that’s where we got it!
If you want to get really ridiculous and over the top, make a triple batch of filling and put it in the same crust. That’s what we did at the restaurant. But you might want to find someone to share the slice with!
There. I told you, don’t get me started. It’s a whole fucking thing with me. In the restaurant, if somebody asked in the key lime pie was authentic, the servers would go, “Oh, the owner’s from Florida, she has a thing about key lime pie. I can go get her if you like, she’s got a whole rant. It’s really funny.” And they would go get me out of the office and I would do a whole little standup bit about key lime pie. Much shorter than this was. I just wrote like 1200 words on this. I could write more. I won’t. I’m done.Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk?
I have never liked key lime pie.
Apparently I’ve been eating bad key lime pie and need to home make some asap.
Thank you, random chef on the internet. You may have saved key lime pie in this household yet.
I would also like to say thank you to random internet chef for:
1. Defending the right of people to like what they fucking please, and smacking down classist bullshit.
2. Giving me a fantastic key lime recipe. My dad used to make it properly. He died some years ago, and I could never find a recipe for it. But this looks very, *very* similar to the spread I used to see in his kitchen when he was making it. I’m going to try it, and if it’s even remotely similar to his, I will sit there happily sobbing into my key lime pie. Thank you.
Who wants to guess how many bags of peaches are in my dad’s freezer?
The answer is:
Too fucking many
This is gonna make … a lot of jam …….
So, I managed to fit all but one big bowl of peaches into the two stock pots …
An hour and a half later, here they are simmering away …
How long is it gonna take to reduce them to jam, you ask?? Fuck if I know at this size lmao
In case you were wondering, it is, in fact, longer than 5 hours, as I am still stirring this jam over the oven 🙂 🙂 🙂
Oh and also there was another large bowl of peaches in the other fridge that I did not see until later, so I did not in fact fit ALL the peaches into the stock pots
On a brighter note, the whole house smells like a Victorian Christmas dinner
Hello again friends, it is currently REAL JAMMING TIME and I have been in stirring hell for seven hours
Went through two whole containers of pectin and a bunch of cornstarch already and things are looking just PEACHY
So, uh, the first stock pot alone yielded 272 ounces, so I … may have accidentally made about 68 8oz jars of jam …… and I only had 36 jars …
Guess I’m going back to the store tomorrow … and going to have to join the local farmers market to sell them …
Anyway, TEN CONTINUOUS HOURS OF WORK LATER, here I am at around 3am sealing my first batch of jars … (entire other stock pot of jam lurks ominously in the background)
God, it’s like when you overestimate how much pasta you’re gonna end up with, only 300% worse
So I woke up today after sleeping like a log to fibd my dad had already gone back to the store (which is like 30 min away) and gotten me more jars because he saw that I needed them
As you can see one of those pachages is the wrong size jar (4oz) so we’ll see if I can fit all the jam into these suckers (plus the two 8oz ones I had leftover)
My dad also put all the jars of jam in the fridge, although since they were all properly sealed (aw yeah) was totally unnecessary lol
He said he accidentally dropped one on the way to the fridge but I checked and it amazingly A) didn’t break, and B) remained properly sealed, so hats off to Ball corp, and also me I guess
Update: WE BE JAMMIN’
Spices I used for this recipe:
-Cinnamon
-Nutmeg
-Ginger
-Allspice
-Vanilla Extract
The combination worked out very well!
Gotta can the rest of it after I eat tho 😛
So, I FINALLY managed to can all the jam, except for like … 6 oz of it, so I made shortbread cookies to use that with 😉
Altogether I did end up with 72 jars of jam, 12 of which are the 4oz size though. What the fuck am I gonna do with all this jam, jesus christ
Anyway, thanks for coming to my jam-filled TED talk guys, take care
send me some jam op
This is my bfs grandparents with pecans. They have two full deep freezers filled with pecans
listen the ONLY part of a mr mime thats edible are the red spots, and thats ONLY after being properly cooked – if you bite into any part of their body while its still raw youll suffer near immediate food poisoning
luckily, just like red kidney beans, the potential toxins are easily to remove provided you take the right steps
once theyve been safely removed from their inedible surroundings, the larger red spheres are ready to begin working with – its worth noting that the smaller spots on the hands and cheeks also fall into this category, but theyre almost always too small to be considered harvesting by most professionals
youll want to start by cutting away any flesh thats still directly touching the pale parts; when in doubt, a wider cut is always preferred. better safe than sorry ! one benefit of working with mr mimes is that, along with many others in their typing, their bodies are held together with physic energy and thus dont require deboning
the next part is going to require boiling in a large pressure cooker- some may find it a challenge to to find a pot big enough to host all the parts, so cooking them individually is fine. remember to follow the instructions to the letter
after theyve been removed and dried, an easy way to text if theyre safe to eat is to cut them in half and check the spongy center – a darkened purple core means theyve been boiled long enough, while any lighter, greenish tints means you probably needed a bit more time
once theyre out of the danger range, you can now safely use them in variety of dishes ! their almost mushroom-like texture means they absorb flavors well, and pictured above is one of my personal favorites
THIS guy though, you can just pop em into your mouth whole. its fine
Coffee at work today comes in VERY LARGE, apparently.
OH and I get to work with my very least favorite co worker today.
Lovely.
I need to go make more tea.
The driver coming in to pick up the recycling, who knows that we monitor the weather radar 24/7; “Are we going to get any more storms today?”
Me, who sits right next to a monitor dedicated to weather radar, since we watch for lightning strikes in the area, and call work suspensions if any lightning gets close. “There’s a few patchy storms around yet but the bad stuff is all past us.”
Driver; “Oh good. Have a good day.”
Me; “You too.”
My dickhead co-worker, as soon as the driver walks out; “I didn’t know we were the fucking weather service.”
Me; “…he knows we monitor the radar all day and that I don’t mind him asking, and he was talking to me, not you, and again he knows I don’t mind, so chill.”
Him; “Muttering”
The weird thing is that this dude USED to be an okay guy with a good sense of humor.
But about a year ago, he started the keto diet, and he has lost a lot of weight…but he’s been a complete asshole since he started the diet. Just, will snipe at anything and everything anyone says.
Eat some bread and be happy, dude.
Oh, so his body is perpetually poisonning itself in a desesperate attempt to produce enough sugars for his brain. That’ll make me cranky too tbf.
I had no idea, but another comment here made me look it up and apparently major changes in mood are a Thing on keto. Like, a LOT of people become assholes when they go on a keto diet.
I’m no expert on the long-term effects of keto diets but…like…that can’t be a good sign.
Eat some bread. If anyone makes fun of you for being chubby, fuck ‘em.
I cannot second this hard enough. For everyone following me who may not know that: the human brain cannot use any other form of energy that glucose and ketone bodies. If it doesn’t have any available your liver will make them, producing toxic by-products and working less efficiently to purge the usual riff-raff made on a daily basis by your metabolism. Eat carbs. Fuck this fatphobic society.
A loaf of bread made in the first century AD, which was discovered at Pompeii, preserved for centuries in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. The markings visible on the top are made from a Roman bread stamp, which bakeries were required to use in order to mark the source of the loaves, and to prevent fraud. (via Ridiculously Interesting)
(sigh) I’ve seen these before, but this one’s particularly beautiful.
I feel like I’m supposed to be marveling over the fact that this is a loaf of bread that’s been preserved for thousands of years, and don’t get me wrong, that’s hella cool. But honestly, I’m mostly struck by the unexpected news that “bread fraud” was apparently once a serious concern.
Bread Fraud was a huge thing, Bread was provided to the Roman people by the government – bakers were given grain to make the free bread, but some of them stole the government grain to use in other baked goods and would add various substitutes, like sawdust or even worse things, to the bread instead. So if people complained that their free bread was not proper bread, the stamp told them exactly whose bakery they ought to burn down.
Bread stamps continued to be used at least until the Medieval period in Europe. Any commercially sold bread had to be stamped with an official seal to identify the baker to show that it complied with all rules and regulations about size, price, and quality. This way, rotten or undersized loaves could be traced back to the baker. Bakers could be pilloried, sent down the streets in a hurdle cart with the offending loaf tied around their neck, fined, or forbidden to engage in baking commercially ever again in that city. There are records of a baker in London being sent on a hurdle cart because he used an iron rod to increase the weight of his loaves, and another who wrapped rotten dough with fresh who was pilloried. Any baker hurdled three times had to move to a new city if they wanted to continue baking.
If you have made bread, you are probably familiar with a molding board. It’s a flat board used to shape the bread. Clever fraudsters came up with a molding board that had a little hole drilled into it that wasn’t easily noticed. A customer would buy his dough by weight, and then the baker would force some of that dough through the hole, so they could sell and underweight loaf and use the stolen dough to bake new loafs to sell. Molding boards ended up being banned in London after nine different bakers were caught doing this. There were also instances of grain sellers withholding grain to create an artificial scarcity drive up the price of that, and things like bread.
Bread, being one of the main things that literally everyone ate in many parts of the world, ended up with a plethora of rules and regulations. Bakers were probably no more likely to commit fraud than anyone else, but there were so many of them, that we ended up with lots and lots of rules and records of people being shifty.
Check out Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony by Madeleine Pelner Cosman for a whole chapter on food laws as they existed in about 1400. Plus the color plates are fantastic.
ALL OF THIS IS SO COOL
I found something too awesome not share with you!
I’m completely fascinated by the history of food, could I choose a similar topic for my Third Year Dissertation? Who knows, but it is very interesting all the same!
Bread fraud us actually where the concept of a bakers dozen came from. Undersized rolls/loaves/whatever were added to the dozen purchased to ensure that the total weight evened out so the baker couldn’t be punished for shorting someone.
Steel Phoenix Studios 