This post is part of my challenge to bake my way through all the challenges of the Great British Bake Off. The challenge below is the showstopper challenge for week five (pie week) of series three: an American pie.
There are many types of people in the world, and many ways of sorting through them. One of them is what I think of as ‘the bruschetta test’. Bruschetta is an Italian word, and, in Italian, the ‘ch’ is pronounced as a hard ‘k’ sound: brus-ketta. There are people who know this, and people who don’t; and people who are very relaxed about how to say it and people who deliberately pronounce it, with much pleasure, in the most authentic way possible.
Which is all well and good, if you’re speaking Italian, but if you’re saying ‘pass the bruschetta’ at a dinner party in the English-speaking world, I…do not think it matters at all if you pronounce it ‘broosh-etta’. It’s inevitable that when a word is borrowed from another language that its pronunciation is massaged a little to fit more readily into the borrowing language’s flow and rhythm. I actually find that pronouncing ‘bruschetta’ in the Italian style sounds a little jarring in English. Maybe this relaxedness about ‘mispronunciation’ comes from me being a native Dutch speaker: if there’s one language a native English speaker mangles to distraction, it’s Dutch, with its plethora of guttural, back-of-the-throat sounds, its rolled Rs, and the spattering of French-style inflections.
I was thinking about this because there’s a super-snarky comment on the Wikipedia page relating to this episode of GBBO which notes that ‘During the broadcast, Ryan’s pie was identified as a key lime pie. However, it was made with ordinary limes rather than key limes, and thus was not a key lime pie. Moreover, the pies described as American-style were actually tarts. American pies are baked in a smooth, slant sides pie pan, not the fluted tart pans that were used.’
This really is taking pedantry to the next level – in the UK, at least, ‘key lime pie’ now just refers to a particular style of pie: I doubt most people would even know that ‘key’ refers to a particular type of lime grown in the Florida Keys – and even if we do know, getting hold of them is very difficult. It did make me smile, not to mention shake my head, because Brits have had, after all, to accept that they’ve lost the battle on how to pronounce Worcestershire.
The pie I chose to make was a recipe from Brooklyn-based pie shop Four and Twenty Blackbirds: a malted chocolate pecan pie. I love a traditional pecan pie, with its translucent, almost gelatinous filling of brown sugar custard holding cupfuls of pecan pieces, but the Four and Twenty Blackbirds version has depth and gravitas, anchored by the addition of deep dark chocolate and the sticky, comforting flavour of malt.
It was a wonderful pie, but I would add that you do need to follow their (meticulous!) instructions on chilling the pie crust. I don’t have a freezer, and my fridge was broken and consequently not very cold when I made this; as a result the pastry started melting before it set in the oven and I had to perform some hasty surgery. Nonetheless, it was absolutely delicious: sticky, chocolatey and much less sweet than a typical pecan pie.
You will need to buy malt extract for this recipe, which I bought ages ago at Holland and Barrett, but I see it a lot in almost all health food shops.
Continue reading “Baking challenge: Miss American (Pecan Malt) Pie”