Gourmet's Adventures with Ruth: Behind the Scenes & on the Cutting Room Floor
This Sunday, in many areas but sadly not mine, Ruth Reichl will visit Jon Rowley's Seattle, the second installment of Gourmet's Adventures with Ruth. Julia Child called Jon Rowley the "fish missionary" and viewers can watch Reichl as she tastes the first Copper River salmon of the season and forages for clams and fiddlehead ferns at his side.
But viewers won't have the opportunity to join the pie class Ruth attended with "pie whisperer" Kate McDermott, Rowley's wife and an accomplished baker in her own right. McDermott spent two years experimenting with pie dough before she arrived at the perfect crust.
If Kate's Art of the Pie class with Ruth had not ended up on the cutting room floor, you would have learned that they baked two pies that afternoon, a rhubarb pie made from enormous red Northwest stalks and an apple pie made with the last of the storing apples.
And you would have been surprised, then delighted by Kate's approach to making pie. She throws the cookbook out the window and breaks all the rules when it comes to baking.
Kate tells you to imagine that you're a mother of six on the plains of the Mid-west in the early twentieth century. There's fruit that needs to be used up, kids that are running in and out of the kitchen, and supper that must be put on the table. These women weren't using the "dip and sweep" method to measure their flour or cutting out perfectly symmetrical apple slices.
Kate beams as she holds up a measuring cup with a little more or a little less flour. Watch as she roughly chops her apples, peel and all, into mismatched sizes. Kate shows that baking a pie need not be a production. And if you had been behind the scenes you might have heard Ruth say, "Kate, your approach to baking has really been liberating."
--Tracy Schneider
