Banana Cream Pie (Lucky Peach 2)

Christina Tosi

• 225 g about 2 very ripe bananas
• 235 g (1 C + 1 T) heavy cream
• 55 g (1/4 C) milk
• 100 g (1/2 C) sugar
• 2 g (1/2 t) kosher salt
• 25 g (2 T) cornstarch
• 3 egg yolks
• 2 sheets gelatin (1 t powdered gelatin)
• 25 drops (1/2 t) McCormick yellow food coloring
• 160 g (1 C) confectioners' sugar
• 1 banana, between the mellow-yellow and sweet-spotting stages, peeled and cut into 1/4" slices

If the America's Test Kitchen's version of this is any indicator, Christina Tosi definitely isn't lying about the fact that this isn't the normal way to make a banana cream pie at all.  ATK basically takes a vanilla cream pie and layers sliced bananas in which is admittedly better than making vanilla pudding from a box and starting from there.

In my idol's version of this pie, she lets the bananas get all the way to their ripest points before making the pie itself.  Why shouldn't a banana cream pie borrow from banana bread in terms of the ripeness of their shared primary ingredient?  This should not be so revelatory.

To speed up the process, one can take a banana that looks like the one of the left (or even somewhat less dark) and throw it in the freezer.  Voila!, defrost and you have super-ripe bananas.

Filling mise en place.

Blend the ripe bananas, 75 g (1/3 C) cream [I screw up here and used it all.  I'm a retard.], milk, sugar, salt, cornstarch, and egg yolks.  Dump in a pan and whisk over medium low heat until it resembles glue in color and texture.

Add mixture, gelatin (bloomed in cold water to activate), and as much yellow food coloring as it'll take to satisfy your banana-colored dreams.  Refrigerate until chilled.

Second-day filling mise en place.

Whip remaining cream and confectioners' sugar until medium-soft peaks form.

Add banana mixture very gently until just combined.

FOR THE CRUST

• 1 recipe Chocolate Crumbs
• 8 g (2 t) sugar
• .5 g (a pinch) kosher salt
• 14-28 g (1-2 T) melted butter

Chocolate Crumbs

• 85 g (6 T) unsalted butter
• 105 g (2/3 C) all-purpose flour
• 4 g (1 t) cornstarch
• 65 g (2/3 C) cocoa powder
• 100 g (1/2 C) sugar
• 4 g (1 t) kosher salt

Mise en place.

Spread out onto parchment and ready to be popped into a 300 degree oven.

20 minutes later.

Process cool crumbs until they resemble sand.  Toss with remaining crust ingredients and press into pie tin.

Pour a quarter of the banana cream in and arrange bananas over.

Pour the remaining mixture over the bananas and refrigerate until firm.  I caved and cut into the pie too early, and by the time I was nearing firm slices of pie, my parents were over and I just gave them the rest.  Oh well, no glamorous photos of a slice of this even if there was one lurking in there.
My judgement in terms of taste?  SWOON.
Toxic to eat more than one slice in a day though.

Apple Cake (MMB)

Similarly to the MMB cookies, Christina Tosi's cakes follow a basic formula and I'm stealing from the Milk Bar Project on this one: "are all about texture contrasts. Moist cakes, something gooey, and the dry crunch of the crumb - topped off with an indulgent frosting that adds a final layer of surprise."
There'll be no blog entry about my sister's cake since she's asking me to make my third Arnold Palmer Cake to serve at her bridal shower, but Joe A. presented me with making either the Chocolate Malt Layer Cake or the Apple Cake. Yes, I've been drooling about the former ever since I saw in Bon Appetit magazine months before the cookbook came out (the original East Village location was 3 blocks from where I worked as well).
However I've been spending a bit too much money trying to adequately equip myself for restaurant work (knife guards and decent paring knives though nothing awesome looking like the things L'Espalier line cooks carry around) so I didn't think I show blow some money on a blow torch. They aren't that expensive, but I'm actually broke now. Soon, soon...
So here goes for the Apple Cake:

Liquid Cheesecake
I've always been curious about the Liquid Cheesecake since reading through the MMB cookbook last fall. Is it really liquid? I asked myself even though if my memory of the book was close enough I would have known that it was an under-baked cheesecake that was just more spreadable that a normal cheesecake.

• 225 g cream cheese (8 ounces)
• 150 g sugar (3/4 cup)
• 6 g cornstarch (1 tablespoon)
• 2 g kosher salt (1/2 teaspoon)
• 25 g milk (2 tablespoons)
• 1 egg

Mise en place


A slurry of cornstarch, salt, and egg.


Sugar paddled into the cream cheese.


The slurry is paddled in and spread into a small baking pan lined with saran wrap.


Baked for 15 minutes at 300 degrees F.

Pie Crumb

• 240 g flour (1 1/2 cups)
• 18 g sugar (2 tablespoons)
• 3 g kosher salt (3/4 teaspoon)
• 115 g butter, melted (8 tablespoons [1 stick])
• 20 g water (1 1/2 tablespoons)

Mise en place.


Combine dry ingredients and wet in a stand mixer until they form clusters. Spread clusters out on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a Silpat, a silicone baking pad.
I have one by Norpro and not an actual Silpat. Since it doesn't overfills even a normal baking sheet I don't use it often.


Bake for 25 minutes at 350 degrees F.

Apple Pie Filling

• 1 lemon
• 3oo g Granny Smith apples (2 medium)
• 14 g butter (1 tablespoon)
• 150 g light brown sugar (1/4 cup tightly packed)
• 1 g ground cinnamon (1/2 teaspoon)
• 1 g kosher salt (1/4 teaspoon)

Apples cut according to Tosi's directions. I threw them in a medium bowl filled halfway with lemon juice to prevent discoloration.


All the ingredients dumped in a pan.


Simmered until tender. Tosi says to "Be careful not to cook the apples so much that they turn into applsauce." Only a person who has no business cooking such ambitious things and walk away for so long would do such a thing. It's all so easy peasy.

Pie Crumb Frosting

• 1/2 recipe Pie Crumb
• 110 g milk (1/2 cup)
• 2 g kosher salt (1/2 teaspoon)
• 40 g butter, at room temperature (3 tablespoons)
  
• 40 g confectioners' sugar (1/4 cup)

Pie crumb and milk.


Blended.


Sugar and butter. Such small amounts of both (I guess this is my first buttercream frosting!) in comparison to say baking cookies. Well, the frosting's only for the top of the cake.


Creamed together on medium high for 2 to 3 minutes, until fluffy and pale yellow.


Pie crumb mixture dumped in.


Finished Pie Crumb Frosting.

Barely Brown Butter Cake

• 55 g butter (4 tablespoons [1/2 stick])
• 40 g brown butter (2 tablespoons)
• 250 g granulated sugar (1 1/4 cups)
• 60 g light brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 110g buttermilk (1/2 cup)
• 65 g grapeseed oil (1/3 cup)
• 2 g vanilla extract
• 185 g cake flour (1 1/2 cups)
• 4 g baking powder (1 teaspoon)
• 4 g kosher salt (1 teaspoon)
• Pam or other nonstick cooking spray (optional)

Butters and sugars.


Paddled together over medium-high for 2 to 3 minutes.


Add the egg and repeat.


Mise en place for the rest of the recipe.


"Stream the buttermilk, oil, and vanilla while the paddle swirls on low speed. Increase the speed to medium high and paddle for 5 to 6 minutes, until the mixture is practically white, twice the size of your original fluffy butter-and-sugar mixture and completely homogenous. You're basically forcing too much liquid into an already fatty mixture that doesn't want to make room for it, so if it doesn't look right after 6 minutes, keep mixing."

I threw in the towel after 12 and messing up my whole workspace, stand mixer, and Kindle. I realize now that my usual approach to buttermilk (dry buttermilk) might have broken my attempt since I was just trying to combine water into the mix rather than milk since the milk powder was in the dry ingredients. Maybe I should just start using clabbered buttermilk.


Fingers crossed.


Baked for 30 minutes at 350 degrees F.
It might've been way moister and brown buttery if I hadn't screwed up but at least I had something that was definitely serviceable as a cake.

Apple Cider Soak

• 55 g apple cider (1/4 cup)
• 5 g light brown sugar (1 teaspoon tightly packed)
• 0.25 g ground cinnamon (pinch)

I'm just whisking all these ingredients together. This didn't appear to justify a photo.

Apple Cake

• 1 recipe Barely Brown Butter Cake
• 1 recipe Apple Cider Soak
• 1 recipe Liquid Cheesecake
• 1/2 recipe Pie Crumb
• 1 recipe Apple Pie Filling
• 1/2 recipe Pie Crumb Frosting

Punching out the 3 layers with my 6-inch cake ring. I just recently bought a second one.


Bottom layer is composed of scraps pressed in. No one will ever know, but they will know if you've broken all the layers of the cake and the damn thing collapses in my first attempt at Tosi's cakes.


The layer is brushed with the apple cider cake and then 1/2 the Liquid Cheesecake is smoothed in.


Followed by a third of the Pie Crumb.


Apple Pie Filling.


Repeat once more and then top with the unbroken round of cake and the Pie Crumb Frosting.


Top with the remaining Pie Crumb. Wrap top in Saran Wrap and throw the whole thing in the freezer for at least 12 hours or 2 weeks.
Will report back with a picture and feedback in the latter amount of time.

Blueberry & Cream Cookies (MMB)

Blueberry & Cream cookies are far and away my favorite cookies among all the cookies I've ever had in my life. These were actually the first Momofuku Milk Bar items I made, back before I bought a digital camera and started this blog.
There are comparatively few pictures of me actually making cookie dough because honestly you can see the same process in my entries for Compost Cookies and Cornflake-Marshmallow-Chocolate Chip Cookies. We'll start with the component in the ingredient list for the cookies: the unbelievable...

Milk Crumb (MMB)

• 40 g milk powder (1/2 cup)
• 40 g flour (1/4 cup)
• 12 g cornstarch (2 tablespoons)
• 25 g sugar (2 tablespoons)
• 2 g kosher salt (1/2 teaspoon)
• 55 g butter, melted (4 tablespoons [1/2 stick])
• 20 g milk powder (1/4 cup)
• 90 g white chocolate, melted (3 ounces)
  

Mise en place.


Didn't burn the hell out of my white chocolate while melting it down in the microwave. Unlike the first time.


Twenty minutes at 250 degrees F.


Broken into cluster no bigger than 1/2 inch and tossed with more milk powder (A common ingredient in baking recipes in general). I went through a few pairs of latex gloves tossing the result with white chocolate every 5 minutes until it was no longer sticky.
It was probably still a bit sticky by the time I finished tossing.


It doesn't look like a I pulled out WAY too soon even though I had to bang it with a rolling pin a bit before baking these:

Blueberry & Cream Cookies (MMB)

• 225 g butter, at room temperature (16 tablespoons [2 sticks])
• 150 g granulated sugar (3/4 cup)
• 150 g light brown sugar (1/4 cup tightly packed)
• 100 g glucose (1/4 cup [I use 35 g or 2 tablespoons of corn syrup])
• 2 eggs
• 320 g flour (2 cups)
• 2 g baking powder (1/2 teaspoon)
• 1.5 g baking soda (1/4 teaspoon)
• 6 g kosher salt (1 1/2 teaspoons)
• 1/2 recipe Milk Crumb
• 130 g dried blueberries (3/4 cup)

Mise en place.


Unbaked.


Baked to perfection. Planning on doing it all again in the next few days.