I was *this* close to making custard this weekend, just to prove a point.
In the end, I did not, simply because even with this weekend's near-surrealistic levels of humidity and heat in New York, the stove Chez PTMYB was hopping all day yesterday. The lovely Bunni came to visit, to get out of the heat, to join us in the viewing of our new Comic Strip box set (with a sidetrip into the splattery goodness of Scanners) and to finally get her share of the Blogathon focaccia, which I promised to bake for her the next time she came over. I had promised her a share of the corn salsa, too, so off I went to the market to pick up a dozen ears of corn and as many tomatoes as I could get home without smashing into juice. Within five minutes of getting to the market, I knew that there would be pie, too; I could not walk around smelling apricots and blueberries and basil all around me, and leave without something for pie. I ended up with bags of something, bags of raspberries and blackberries and blueberries and a pint of day-neutral strawberries, so sweet that you can't help but smile as you eat them, all bumping happily against each other in my big ceramic bowl, dressed with sugar and lime juice and cornstarch, turned into a pie shell, topped with a lattice top and baked into the bubbling purple riot that is bumbleberry pie. Because we all filled ourselves so well on corn and tomatoes and bread last night, we still have almost the whole pie left in the fridge. We could breakfast for a week on this pie. My more restrained impulses won out. We would not be having custard, in any form. No vanilla pudding, no creme chantilly, no creme brulee, no lemon curd, not even ice cream, which normally I know is correct for pie but this time I felt would be overkill, cutting into the sweet sharp flavor of our purple pie.
So I won't be cooking eggs and sugar and milk (or cream or juice) just to prove a point, and yet I can still feel myself spoiling for a fight, wanting to prove something. It has been almost 30 years since my stepdad was foolhardy enough to buy my mother a Daisy Seal-a-Meal for Christmas, almost 30 years since we took a pass at making big batches of stew, vacuum-sealing them, freezing them and reheating them in boiling-water bags, only to decide that the results weren't worth the added time, the cost of the Seal-a-Meal bags or the increased amount of plastic in our garbage, 30 years since we said goodbye to all that, and yet I am still, still hearing about how boil-in-bag -- excuse me, I mean sous-vide -- cookery is the wave of the future, the truc par excellence of the smartest chefs in New York City, the Girl Most Likely To Make the Transition from the Restaurant to the Home Kitchen. I read it again this morning, in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, from the enthusiastic pen of Amanda Hesser.
I will admit that I have not worked in restaurant kitchens in years, and that it's easy for me to take pot shots from my lumpy uncomfortable living room chair. I have not tried watermelon vacuum-sealed to a pressure point that pushes the fruit cells together and gives it a meat-like texture, nor have I tried Wylie Dufresne's flash-pickled water chestnuts, and I probably should before I tar the whole sous-vide movement with a wide brush. There is a difference between the type of boil-in-bag cooking that exemplifies the worst of large-scale industrial food processing (Weight Watchers chicken alfredo, anyone?) and the careful, methodical testing going on in fine restaurant kitchens, although every time I think about the sous-vide experiments Ms. Hesser describes, I think of the passage in The Taste of America in which John and Karen Hess describe the trend of luxury restaurants relying on precooked frozen food. (So far, the restaurants in Ms. Hesser's article do show some scruples about using fine, fresh produce and smart flavor-building principles, and I hope that they will continue to do so.) I should show a little restraint, and not just work myself up into a lather based on something I read in the New York Times. So I told myself, until I read this:
Chefs have found less lofty ways to employ [sous-vide] as well. At CityZen, in the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington, they make ice cream bases in sous-vide. "There's no putting your sugar and egg and cream in a pan and stirring," says Eric Ziebold, the chef. His pastry chef blends the ingredients, seals them in a bag and cooks it in water.
I am trying to repeat the Litany of the Humble Pastry Cook, the one where I remind myself that in a restaurant kitchen, speed is the name of the game, that flavor may be paramount (if you're working in a good kitchen) but efficiency follows close behind. I remember my own pastry-monkey work, in which I churned ice creams and sorbets while simultaneously keeping an eye and ear and nose on the cookies baking in the convection oven across the kitchen, and in which the pastry sous-chef stood at the stove, making ice cream bases while the flourless chocolate cakes baked in another convection oven across the kitchen, and while egg whites and boiling sugar syrup whapped around in a Kitchen Aid bowl, waiting to be turned into semifreddo. At any given moment, we had to do at least three things at once and not blink at any of them, lest the custard scramble or the egg whites and sugar stick to the bowl or the cakes overbake or the butterfat separate out of the ice cream base due to overchurning. In this kind of environment, you don't have the time to ooh and ahh over how pretty the whole custard-building enterprise is; you only have time for a brief appreciation of how egg yolks and sugar beaten together turn a light lemony color, and you certainly can't stand there, enraptured, as the proteins in the egg yolks do their thing and turn everything creamy and smooth and unctuous on the tongue. If the pastry chef at CityZen can get a perfect creme anglaise by mixing everything together into a sous-vide bag and setting the whole thing into gently simmering water, then who am I to get all waspish about it?
No, I'm sorry. I can't do it. I am a home baker, that's who I am. Food-industry magazines describe people like me as "foodies," a term that I have never liked (except when used by Joy Rotondi, the editor and webmaster of foodies.com and one of the nicest women alive), or as "passionate amateurs," a phrase that makes me want to hurl a nice heavy glass ashtray through a nearby window. Food-industry magazines also describe people like me as the ones who are the first in line to buy into the home-game version of restaurant technology, which means that it's only a matter of time before I will be queuing up to buy Seal-a-Meal 2005 (This Time It's Personal!) for my custard-making needs. Except that it's not, and I won't. I *like* that moment where the egg yolks lighten to their lemon-colored goodness, and I love the moment where the custard reaches its moment of optimum thickness. I even like the element of danger involved, the temptation to cook the custard as thickly as possible, and the knowledge that if you push it too far, you will overdo it and end up with sweet scrambled eggs, and you have to use your brain, your eyes, fingers and tongue to keep that from happening. I love the tightrope walk of knowing how many egg yolks to use: skimp on eggs and you sacrifice thickness; overdo it and you run the risk of letting the egg dominate all other flavors, an unlovely phenomenon with a lovely name: "overegging the pudding." This is why I do what I do, and until the sous-vide enthusiasts can convince me that the end result of their bagged custard is far superior to my jerry-rigged double-boiler custard, I will refuse to give up this impractical, time-consuming, luscious dance.
Edit: I had the feeling that the sous-vide story would catch the gimlet eye of Regina Schrambling at gastropoda. Reader, I was not disappointed. Scroll down to the seventh bullet point from the top of the page.