My Food: Creating an Upper Crust
The traditional Thanksgiving dinner dessert is pie, an indulgence long evaluated as much on the quality of its crust as its filling. Generations of home cooks have strived to create the prized ideal: “loose and flaky,” as Joe Schlott, owner of Gray House Pies in Westlake and Lakewood, describes it.
But the man who’s been turning out holiday favorites — Pumpkin Pecan, The Crawler (cranberry apple flavored with triple sec), Three Wise Men (pecan spiked with Jack Daniels, Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker), and yes, even the much-maligned mincemeat — for over a decade insists that making a great crust isn’t that hard. He offers tips for producing one that even the most discriminating great-grandmother will praise.
Use a recipe that calls for butter. Schlott says it yields a better-tasting crust than shortening. “Unequivocally, there’s no contest,” he declares.
Let the butter soften to a workable consistency. Schlott concurs with common cookbook wisdom that cold butter produces a dough that’s easier to handle and more likely to yield a flakier crust (see next tip). But he emphasizes that it doesn’t have to be chilled to rock-hardness. “If you’re having to struggle to cut the butter,” he says, “it’s too cold.”
Don’t overmix. Schlott calls it “the cardinal sin” of crust-making.
“Flaky is layers of butter and flour, almost infinite layers,” he explains. He adds that cold butter increases the chances of producing a flakier crust because it is less prone to blending completely with the flour, along with sugar and salt. He recommends cutting the butter into the flour until pea-sized pieces form, then mixing two to three tablespoons of cold water into the dough with a knife or fork to loosely bind them together. “You don’t want to make it a solid mass,” he emphasizes.
Pave the way for smooth rolling. Schlott liberally flours the counter where he rolls out his dough to prevent sticking. He suggests novices place the dough between two sheets of waxed paper, roll the dough out to the desired circumference, peel one sheet off, and lay the dough side down on the pie plate before peeling off the remaining sheet.
Keep it cool. Place the dough in the refrigerator to firm it up if it looks “too wet, too soft” after mixing and/or rolling. Bake a piecrust, filled or unfilled, that’s too warm, and “the butter is just going to want to melt out of the crust,” Schlott warns. To help ensure success and reduce stress, he recommends making piecrusts ahead of time, sticking them in the freezer once they’re in pie plates, then filling and baking them at a later date.
My Holidays: Giving the Gift of Food
Food is a perennial go-to holiday gift. Local chefs reveal their favorites to give.
Brandon Chrostowski, owner, Edwins and Edwins Too, Shaker Square: artisanal cheese, olive oil, vinegars, hazelnut oil, spices, Turkish pistachios, $100-a-pound butter from Normandy. “You’ve got to source the greatest in the world,” he advises.
Douglas Katz, partner, Amba, Ohio City; Zhug, Cleveland Heights; and Provenance, Cleveland Museum of Art: pickles. “They’re a jarred product that are bringing the fresh seasonal produce into the winter season,” he says. The green color, he adds, is festive, particularly when packed, say, with red chilies like his father, Dr. Robert Katz, puts in his sour fermented cold-pack pickles. He recommends checking out Cleveland Heights-based Happy Pickler’s selection at happypickler.com.
Michael Symon, owner, Mabel’s BBQ, East 4th Street and Woodmere; B Spot Burgers, Cleveland Browns Stadium; and Symon’s Burger Joint, Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse: jerky from J & J Czuchraj Meats at the West Side Market. “I’ve never given it to a chef friend that hasn’t said, ‘This is the best jerky I’ve ever had in my life,’” he says.
Jeremy Umansky, co-owner, Larder Delicatessen and Bakery, Ohio City: anything from The Cleveland Chocolate Co. (He singles out bar samplers and bonbon assortments.) “They do so many amazing things from bean to bar there,” he raves. Each dollar spent, he adds, supports a local small business. “It proliferates, more often than not, to another small business in the area.”
My Home: Off the Wall
Many people know the Murphy bed as nothing more than a comedic prop. But that prop is actually a practical solution to a problem faced by space-challenged hosts: turning the spare room-turned-home office, gym or craft space into acceptable accommodations for visiting friends and relatives.
“The three days of the year that you have company, you can pull it out and have a very nice guest room without having to do a blow-up mattress on the floor,” says Cindy Coulter, a sales manager and designer at storage-solutions provider Closet Factory’s Cleveland franchise.
According to Coulter, today’s wall beds, as they’re generically known, generally pull down and lift up into a cabinet attached to the wall rather than the wall itself. “They only take up about 19 inches of depth,” she says. That cabinet, depending on the product line and client’s budget, can be finished to complement an existing decor. For example, Murphy Bed/Lifestyles by Closet Factory offers over 30 melamine finishes as well as a number of door and drawer faces, moldings and trims.
“We have quite a few clients who have mobility issues and don’t have upper-body strength like they used to,” Coulter says. Installing a lock at the top of the cabinet, she adds, helps ensure the safety of children tempted to play with the bed.
Coulter recommends determining the size of wall bed needed and estimating how often it will be used, factors that in turn drive budget, before shopping for one. Prices at the Closet Factory, for example, range from about $5,200 for a basic “bed-in-the-box” twin to $7,200 for a high-end queen model, not including the mattress. (Only the king in this line requires a box spring.)
My Earth: The Life of Any Holiday Party
There’s a pine-scented, happy-ending alternative to trimming a cut Christmas tree that ends up on the curb: bringing a balled-and-burlapped or potted counterpart into the home, then planting it outside. Ethan Johnson, plant records curator at Holden Forests & Gardens (an integration of the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland with the Cleveland Botanical Garden), says the practice does come with a time limitation. He recommends bringing the tree inside for no longer than five days.
“The quicker in and out, the higher probability you’re going to have a success,” he advises. “Every day above 50 degrees, the plant’s going to lose hardiness.”
To help ensure that success, he recommends:
Digging a hole for planting (or loosening the soil with a spading fork) before the ground freezes. Wait until the day after Christmas, and the task could be slowed by a large rock, obscured tree stump, etc. as well as hard earth. “You probably want to check to see if there’s any utilities there,” Johnson reminds. The soil should be amended with no more than 5% organic matter. Use too much, and the soil will be too wet in the winter and spring, and too dry in the summer and early fall.
Selecting a hardy fir. “Firs have the best needle retention,” Johnson notes. He suggests a Canaan fir, a variety popular in the cut-tree industry; white or concolor fir; Nordmann or Caucasian fir; or Korean fir.
Preparing a decorative container. Purchase an attractive, well-drained vessel in which to place the balled-and-burlapped or potted tree. (Those who opt to temporarily transplant a tree from a utilitarian pot will need potting soil to help fill its replacement.) Keep the soil moist — Johnson says it may well require watering every day (test with the more-sensitive back of the hand) — and keep the tree away from direct sunlight, fireplaces, registers and forced-air vents.
Planting with care. “You want to take the burlap off before you plant [the tree],” Johnson instructs novice gardeners. The tree should be planted so at least one root is visible at top of grade. “Roots grow down very efficiently,” he explains. “But they don’t grow up.” He suggests fencing for at least a year to protect the tree from deer.
My Health: Does Cold Cause Colds?
Mothers have advised their children against venturing into freezing temperatures without bundling up so they won’t “catch their death of cold.” While that phrase may be overstated, a study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology indicates there is science to support it. Researchers found that cold air diminishes the immune response in the nose, one of the body’s first sites of contact with respiratory viruses.
Research shows when a virus enters the nose, the cells lining it begin creating basic copies of themselves called extracellular vesicles, or EVs. The intruding virus sticks to one of these decoys and is expelled in mucus, stopped before it can enter the body and multiply. The study, completed using human tissue in the lab, found that dropping the temperature by as little as 9 degrees Fahrenheit kills off nearly 42% of those EVs and reduces the number of receptors. University Hospitals associate medical director of pediatric infection control Dr. Amy Edwards, who was not involved in the study, explains that because the protein decoy is not a living cell, it’s going to have a much narrower range of survival.
“Proteins typically are in their naturally folded [functional] state at body temperature,” she says. “So you could see a world where things that aren’t living cells don’t do as well with temperature change.”
But Dr. Edwards says she’d like the study repeated in a larger patient population. She raises questions such as whether length of time outdoors, core body temperature and/or temperature of the respiratory lining figure into the weakening of the nose’s immune response and at what decreased EV level viral infections actually increase. Still, she echoes study researchers’ suggestion: Wear a mask, what study co-author Dr. Benjamin Bleier, director of otolaryngology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, has likened to “wearing a sweater on your nose.”
“As much as everybody hates masks,” she says, “masks are our primary defense against catching illness,” she reminds.