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At Thanksgiving this year, my apple pie was the star of the dessert tray. The whole thing was sliced up and served out in about eight minutes flat. Poor X wasn’t fast enough to get a piece.

I’ve been perfecting the recipe for a couple of years, and now it’s just right. Try it out yourself, after you’ve cleared about four hours from your schedule. Hey, perfection takes time.

The Crust

A pie lives or dies by its crust. This is why store-bought pies often fall flat, because so many of them use preservatives and other junk in the crust to extend shelf life. Here’s how to do it right. I learned this method from Saveur magazine, although I’ve added one step to improve it.

First take 14 tablespoons butter (nearly two sticks) and dice them up into small rectangles. Don’t spend all day doing this because the butter will start to melt and get slippery – but don’t go too fast because you’ll slip and cut yourself. Put the diced butter into a bowl and put the bowl back in the refrigerator. Go and have a cup of coffee. We need the butter to be as cold as possible when making the dough.

Clear some counter space and wipe it down, make sure it’s clean enough to eat off. Dump three cups of flour on the counter and sprinkle two teaspoons of salt on top. On the side, leave yourself a little bowl with about half a cup of flour, and a glass of ice water. These will come in handy later.

Mix up the flour and salt with your hands. Then get your butter from the fridge and throw that in. The butter is going to start getting warm, and we don’t want that, so it’s crucial to work fast now. With your hands, squeeze the butter into the flour mixture, smash it into the table, and do your best to combine everything quickly. It will become crumbly and not stick together well. This is when you start adding ice water. Form a little volcano with the flour/butter and pour the water into it – keep mixing everything together. Once the water gets in there it will start to look and feel like dough. If it’s not combining well, add a little more water. If it gets too wet and sticky, add a little more flour from your bowl. This whole process should take five minutes or less – you don’t want to overwork the dough, because that will kill your chances at perfect, flaky pie crust. When you’ve got it, split your dough into two halves, shape them into discs, wrap them with cling-film and put them in the fridge. Go and have a beer.

The Filling

You want your dough to sit in the fridge for at least an hour. While it’s in there you can clean up your dough area (just a little, because we’re still going to use it), have a drink, watch some television, and make your filling.

Take six Golden Delicious apples, skin, core, and slice them. Put them into a large mixing bowl. This is a hassle and probably will take twenty minutes. Skinning apples is a pain. If you have one of those fancy apple-coring devices, congratulations, you have too many kitchen machines and likely have wasted money in many other ways as well. You probably have a quad-chambered chestnut roaster.

Take one whole lemon, slice it in half, and squeeze both halves over the apples in your mixing bowl. To avoid having lemon seeds in your pie, squeeze the lemon with one hand, into the other hand, over the bowl. Let the juice through your fingers while catching the seeds. This is a clever yet obvious trick that I learned from Ina Garten.

Add half a cup white sugar, and almost half a cup brown sugar. A good way to achieve this is to pour the white sugar into your measuring cup first, and then put the brown sugar on top of it. Without packing it down, let the brown sugar reach the one-cup mark. Then dump the whole thing into your bowl. Lastly, add a quarter-cup of flour to your mixture, and then stir it all up vigorously. Don’t be afraid to break the apple slices with your stirring spoon – this helps to release some apple juice, and makes for better bite-size pieces anyway. Your filling done, you may return to watch the conclusion of the Simpsons or whatever has been going on in the background. Do not continue until your dough has been sitting in the fridge for at least an hour, and maybe a little more. Leave the filling out on the counter.

The Conjugation

Heat your oven to 425°F. Note that we do not “pre-heat” the oven, because that is a meaningless term. An oven is either heated or it is unheated, and naturally for our purposes it will need to be heated.

Take out your dough and roll out one of the discs with a roller. You’ll need to sprinkle it with some of the flour you set aside earlier. Always roll from the middle toward the edges – don’t just roll back and forth. This is how you stretch out the dough properly. When you have it stretched out nice and big, and you have made it sufficiently thin (too thick and the crust will not cook thoroughly, and your pie will be ruined), place it into your pie pan with all the sides overhanging, and pour the filling into it. We are nearly there!

Roll out the other disc. When it has achieved size, cut some vents in it. These can be done in any kind of pattern you like, but don’t overdo it. Any small incision you make will be made larger while the pie bakes. Carefully place the top over the pie. Now crack an egg yolk into a bowl to create an egg wash. Using a brush, get the egg wash underneath the edges where the bottom and top crusts meet so that they will be sealed. Then crimp the edges of the pie however you’d like (perhaps with a fork, perhaps with your fingers) and trim the excess crust off. If you want to get fancy, you could roll out the excess dough and cut shapes out to put on top of the pie.

The last step is to brush egg wash over the entire top of the pie. This is what gives your perfect apple pie that shining, golden glow that really makes people want to eat it. If you have cut out shapes, use the egg wash to make them stick to the top of the pie, then brush egg wash on top of them as well. Sprinkle a pinch of white sugar over the entire pie and put it in the oven.

Bake for 15 minutes at 425°, then lower the heat to 350° and cook for another 40-45 minutes. Keep your eye on it, because pie filling is going to bubble up out of the vents and spill onto the oven floor, which is a real pain to clean. When your pie is done baking, it needs to cool for at least a half hour before eating or traveling.

Ingredient List

• 14 tablespoons (nearly two sticks) butter, COLD
• 3 cups flour (plus another half-cup for throwing around)
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 6 Golden Delicious apples
• 1/2 cup white sugar (plus a pinch for sprinkling)
• Nearly 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 lemon
• 1 egg yolk (for egg wash)

Nota Bene

Some will say the missing ingredient is cinnamon, and some others will say both cinnamon and nutmeg are necessary. The truth is that neither is required, but add a little of each to the filling if you desire (1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg). Xhates cinnamon so I make my apple pies without it, and I’ve found that I like them just fine.

Welcome to Lyon

Lyon I will always remember for the bouchon. Xianyi read about a special kind of down-home restaurant that lives only in this city, the gastronomic capital of France, and so we found ourselves one night in a small, red room with a bar and eight little tables. There was no one else there, although it was nearly eight o’clock, surely a reasonable hour for dinner, no? we thought, as the young but solemn waitress seated us in a small table by the end of the bar.

We were surrounded by pigs. Hung from the ceiling and sticking out of the walls were pigs, large and small, in the pictures and on the wallpaper. As I was about to learn, bouchons are all about meat, and not just pork chops – tripe, gizzards, hoofs and cheeks.

“Apertif?”

If I had done my homework, I would have ordered a communard, a mixture of red wine with blackcurrant liqueur which the guide book spun a romantic tale about, but I hadn’t seen that yet, so we had local red wine, and together with that the girl brought us a basket of breaded, deep-fried pig fat – tablier de sapeur, pork rinds. Oh, stupendous wonder! Wine and salted fat!

We hadn’t ordered a thing besides the wine, but very quickly she came out with another dish, a poached egg floating in a deep red soup which may have been wine and blood for all I know. It was rich and salty; I drank it down and ate more breaded tripe. This is going to be good.

Then, it got better. A dozen boisterous men walked into the place, and they all had the same look on their face, the look of a man who’s about to sit down with 11 of his buddies, eat a good meal, and get hammered. It was on!

The 2 waitresses jumped to life in an effort to mash tables together for these guys, and then they just started bringing out the dishes and bottles, passing everything down the line because there was no room to even walk around their party. The men bellowed a singsong of conversation and laughter at each other and flirted with the waitresses, drinking and clinking and shouting and pointing, not a word of it intelligible to us, but all of it making perfect sense and perfect comedy. We were at a great party!

The chef came out and spoke with us. It turned out that his son lives and works in New York, and he has visited. He gave us a small dish with two meatballs. I wish I had one of those meatballs right now, it was so good. The chef, who spoke fairly good English, did not know the word for what was in the meatball. He struggled. Then, Aha! he reached behind the bar, and pulled out a stuffed pig’s foot, complete with black hair. I couldn’t believe it. Where was the meat on a pig’s foot that could make this much meatball? I never liked pig’s feet in China, but this meatball was something else.

The chef then listed for us, from memory, tonight’s menu. There were about six delicious-sounding choices, and I felt limited to choose just one, but I chose the blood sausage with baked apples, because I’d never had blood sausage before, and Xianyi ordered the cheek. Mine was really good, although I could have had less of it (I did eat it all, though!); hers was better.

After we polished those off, they asked if we’d like some cheese. Sure, why not? They bring us a cutting board with five big hunks of different cheeses and some bread, plus a big bowl of fresh cottage cheese! We looked at each other like, Are we supposed to eat all this cheese? Well, we did our best…

There was still room for dessert, of course. Xianyi had a pear, drowned in red wine and sugar, and I had a coffee ice cream. And naturally there was espresso to finish. Total perfection.

***

Another day in Lyon, we went for a long walk to find the cathedral at the top of the hill that overlooked the city. You can see it from anywhere. It’s right near the imitation Eiffel Tower. Walking across the city, to the base of the hill, was no problem. It took about 30 minutes from our hotel. But from there, we had to go nearly straight up. We walked in the sun up a long hill, and some cars and scooters were driving down, at high speeds. It was a tough slog. Along the way, a man was sweeping the street. He tried to say something to us, but we didn’t understand. He repeated himself, but a car drove by in between us, and we couldn’t hear. He crossed the road and spoke to us, but we said we didn’t speak French. He said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I was just asking if you’d like a glass of water.” How nice!

Turned out he was not actually a street-sweeper, but was cleaning up outside the hostel of which he is proprietor. He invited us in and poured two glasses of ice-cold water, much appreciated at the moment, as we had been sweating and climbing up the steep hill of the road. He led us out to the back porch, which overlooked the entire city. We sat and cooled ourselves, enjoying the view, and thought about the kindness that we were experiencing. Then we thanked him again and continued on our way.

At the top of the hill is the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière. Check out the view:

Breathtaking View

Burgundy from the Train

Ah, Burgundy, the heart of France. Wine country. The stuff French vacations are made of.

[Note: The trip is now over, and we are safely home. But I'm going to continue the story right where I left off...]

Beaune train station was bereft of cabs, so after a 20-min wait we finally dragged our bags across town to the Hotel Foch, which is basically a pub with some rooms in the back. The guy running the place was really nice, and spoke great English. In fact, in all our travels in France, we never found one rude person. Talk about a stereotype destroyed.

Red or White?

We sat at a cafe in town that afternoon, drinking wine, which was delicious and cheap. We could hear a couple at a nearby table who were American, and whom I guessed were from Texas. They were likely in their 60s. At a certain point, another couple walked up to them from the street, and it became clear that they were all traveling together when the approaching man said:

“Ya’ll look like ya’ll’re havin’ a good time with ya’ll’s selves!”

Hearing this, how could I not have instantly recognized this same Texas guy when we saw him again 5 days later in Marseille, walking along the sidewalk near the Vieux Port?

Our first dinner in Beaune was gorgeous: beef Bourguignon, and an angel hair pasta with veal and liver. So rich! The woman running the restaurant suggested a nice red for us, and we talked with an English guy who was driving his dog, a chocolate lab, across the country.

We wanted to see a vineyard, but instead we decided to go to a cellar. Unfortunately, we didn’t really pick the most tourist-friendly cellar. Rather than walking into any of the numerous places with signs outside welcoming tourists, we went to a place where the book said locals buy wine in bulk. There was nobody near the front door, and no obvious way in once we walked up the driveway. A guy with big boots on pointed down a staircase, and then called to a woman down below who beckoned us to follow her into the basement. She had two clients down there trying wines. We waited until she had finished with them, then absolutely failed to make any meaningful communication with her about trying wines. Although there were tons of barrels down there, and it looked like it could be tapped, we ended up drinking from three bottles, two of which we bought. They were modestly priced. We drank half of one that night in the room, then left it and the full one on the train the next day when we left. Money well spent!

A random stop in Beaune was the Museum of Wine, which was somewhat amusing but sadly did not include a glass of the stuff at the end of the tour!

Dionysus in the wineless Museum of Wine

Another attraction is the Hospices de Beaune, which was founded in 1443 to care for the poor as a free hospital. It has a magnificent great building with a beautiful roof:
But it also has random mannequin nuns, tending the sick and cooking in the kitchen. Strange.