Juneau Food

or maybe that should be Baked Alaskan Day...

Sources report to the Red Hat that February 1st is National Baked Alaska Day, and also the first day of National Great American Pie Month. Imagine... a whole month of great american pies, kicked off by something named after this great state.

What's Baked Alaska, you wonder? I've never eaten it, never made it myself, maybe never even seen it. Certainly not anywhere I've been in Alaska. So I hit the books and confirmed my suspicions, that it is something with ice cream, covered with meringue and then browned. Sometimes, desserts containing ice cream but lacking any other original title use the clever term 'Alaska' to designate the ice cream. Baked, well, that pretty much speaks for itself around here. At this time of year, especially. Anything with meringue before baking always reminds me of snow, or maybe that's the other way around....Unfortunately, meringue in Juneau's climate is not the greatest choice, lasts about as long as the snow, but, at least this dessert must be eaten fast so the shelf life of a little meringue is no problem.

Basic Baked Alaska recipes call for a cake base, often using old slightly dried out cake to absorb liquid. It can be white cake, genoise, angelfood cake, even brownies. The cake base is mounded with ice cream, sometimes covered with more cake, re-frozen, then heaped with a layer of meringue and broiled 'til browned. It is served immediately.

A Baked Alaskan is easier to find, and not so hard to make either, but since the 1st also kicks off National Great American Pie Month, here's a recipe for 'Baked Alaska Pie' which might use the term 'pie' loosely but sounds pretty tasty to me. It comes courtesy roughly of the Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook, my copy of which was in fact courtesy of the interesting owner of the now departed Summit Restaurant mentioned in a former post:

Get enough ladyfingers to line a pie pan, and some orange or other flavored liquer. Line the pie pan with the ladyfingers so that their ends hang over the edges and sprinkle with some of the liquer.

Mix around three pints of softened (vanilla or other) ice cream with around half a pound of raspberries. You can crush up the raspberries to pulp and swirl them in, which is a good way to use frozen berries, or if you have fresh ones, why ruin them? Just gently fold to retain their beautiful form. Place half the icecream and berry mixture over the ladyfingers in the pie plate, cover with some more ladyfingers, sprinkle those with more liquer, and spread the rest of the icecream on top. Re-freeze all of this until it is very firm.

At the last minute, really just a few minutes before serving, preheat an oven to 500 degrees F. Beat four or five eggwhites which have been allowed to come to room temperature and maybe have even been warmed gently over a bowl of hot water with a pinch of cream of tartar at high speed to soft peaks. Very slowly add 2/3 cups of sugar or so, and beat to stiff peaks. But, do not overbeat or your meringue will separate and you'll have to start all over again.

As a caution here for those who have little eggwhite whipping experience, it is easiest to separate eggs when they are cold, but best to beat the whites when they are a little warm. Also, impurities and especially anything containing fat will prevent the whites from whipping, let alone getting whipped 'til stiff. Hmmmmmm. So be extra careful to have clean bowl, whip, and separate the eggs very carefully.

Ok, with your heavenly mound of whites whipped stiff, cover the top of your baked alaska pie but let the ends of the ladyfingers hang out around the edges. Make pretty swirly designs if you dare. Don't let any ice cream show. I'd spray the ends of the ladyfingers with a little water myself, although this recipe does not recommend, because the next and last thing to do is to place this concoction in the oven, probably on a pretty high rack, for three or four minutes until the stiff peaks are lightly browned. Wouldn't want blackened ladyfingers in the process, it would destroy the 'Alaska' theme entirely.

Eat up!

And feel free to submit your favorite recipe for Baked Alaskan. (Red Hat's is a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 Rye.)

1. Take a bunch of dry tart cherries, about a pie’s worth, and boil for around 30 seconds in water just barely to cover with a little sugar added but not much.

2. Transfer cherries into lots of brandy to more than cover to macerate for a few days covered in the fridge until they are really nice and plump and one or two gives you a good buzz.

3. Make a regular pie crust with about a third of the flour substituted with finely ground almonds, and add a drop of almond extract to the crust and also the cherries. Make a topper too, maybe cut out some fancy things for vents to make it attractive.

4. Mix a little flour, butter, maybe a shake of cinnamon or whatever in with the cherries and brandy, making sure to taste to be sure. Be sure of what? Better taste again... More sugar? Come to think of it, brown sugar, yeah. One more try.

5. Ok, spread a little flour on the bottom of the crust, fill, top and make it look pretty, with cut-outs and add-ons and little sugared flowers and things.

6. Bake at 425 degrees F. in the middle of a preheated oven (oops, you remembered to preheat right?) for around 15 minutes and then turn down to 350 to finish it out ‘til done.

7. Let cool until it will not burn your mouth to eat it. Shave some of the darkest chocolate you can manage, add some really fine ice cream, cut in, breathe deep, and, by all means, you must promise to share!

Stay tuned for our Grand Opening this weekend of the Juneau Food section with our first contribution from local food wizard and passionate, "Red Hat." We are lucky, and excited, to have her as a contributor to JuneauMusic.com.

One fine summer evening not so long ago and just down on the under end of Franklin Street, I wandered into a place called Summit to meet up with some brand new friends. I'd just arrived in town a few weeks before, walked around watched the sunsets hang their colors for what seemed like forever shifting, lived in my truck for a while, then in a boat, thought about finding a place to live where I could keep my dog for when the weather turned, all in all not an uncommon story. Until that evening, that is.

We, our dining party, were approached by a woman assumed to be the hostess, greeted, seated, and presented with menus bearing our names. I thought it was clever, until I looked down, down past the appetizers, salads, expensive entrees, to the list of desserts. (That's 'stressed' spelled backwards, 'case you did not notice.) There was chocolate, there was cheesecake, there was even creme brulee. But, I saw to my dismay, there was absolutely nothing like pie. No tart, not even a cobbler, just an apple crisp. What a disappointment! For, you might have guessed, I in fact have dreamed of pie in the sky.

The meal was fine and besides the point, and there was a Perseverance play to get to. The presumed hostess came to take our dessert orders and I could not keep my mouth shut. I complained. "No pie! How sad...." So I settled for some of that apple crisp. It's never a good idea to settle.

The hostess asked for my feedback at the end of the meal, and I sure gave it to her. Verbally, of course. "Why not at least just place a little butter over that apple crisp before re-warming it in the microwave so that it tasted like a dessert?" I asked her. Eyebrows went up, at least on her face if not at the next table. "And," I added, "why no pie??" And she, who turned out to be the restaurant's owner which might have explained the raised eyebrows, asked about my special interest in pie. I told her a little about my dreams. She asked me for my birthday, disappeared for a few minutes, and when she returned she asked what were my favorite kinds of pie to make. "Oh," I skimmed off the top of my head, "this thing with cherries reconstituted in brandy, almond crust served warm with shaved chocolate and some really fine vanilla ice cream that I dreamt up and then had to try, or plain and simple lattice-topped peach, southern-style."

"Can you do sweet potato?" she asked. "Can you do pecan, and lemon meringue?" And finally, "Can you come back Monday and make me peach cobbler?"

And that was the beginning of my Juneau pie-in-the-sky dream. Fresh out of another career entirely, soon I was making desserts at Summit by day, and certain evenings playing music in its tiny bar, watching people eat my pie and smile. I knew there was such thing as dreams come true. I moved into the apartment of a friend of a friend who had done every job under the sun including cook, and he presented me with the very first Red Hat. It's just gone on from there. The Summit has since closed but the Red Hat bakes on.

In Juneau, food has it's ups and downs, fun and foraging, dining that is sometimes delicious and sometimes just dull if it were not for excellent company, great recipes going around, potluck as a hobby, and always, interesting stories and dreams of, you guessed it, pie in the sky. Stop by Juneau Food at JuneauMusic.com to look for new ones and share yours! And remember, everyone should have a piece of the pie.