I need to start writing these recipes down somewhere. So they'll go here.
After watching countless hours of The Great British Bake Off, a.k.a. The Great British Baking Show as it is named when it airs on PBS here in the U.S. (must Americans be so obnoxious, they won't even let overseas TV shows keep their own names?), I decided to try to bake a loaf of bread. I had never used my oven for anything other than seasoning cast iron pans, after I cooked bacon of chicken or some other meat thing to gnaw on. But baking shouldn't be too hard, a recipe is a recipe so just follow it, and remember the little tricks that Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry taught us. Put the salt on one side of the mixing bowl, and the yeast on the other. If you pour them on top of each other, the salt kills the yeast. Mix bread dough well, but doing it in an electric mixer can overwork it quickly. Blah blah blah.
That loaf of white bread, just plain white sandwich bread, was gangbusters. Delicious. I haven't bought bread in the store since. Thick but not heavy, without those air bubbles found in loaves from bread machines, it was the recipe from America's Test Kitchen, so I don't need to write that one down. It's easily found again. Note: I didn't knead that dough on the counter. I did it all in the mixer and I didn't mix it very much. And I proofed (proofed? proved?) it for a lot longer than the instructions said. Maybe because it is humid in Kansas? Is that why proofing takes longer? I dunno.
Anyway--
So the recipe I am writing down here is for lemon tarts. I used this Martha Stewart recipe for dough--which makes 2 crusts, but I needed only one. I used Gold Medal flour, and I weighed it to 130 grams per cup, from there just do the math. Weighing is much more exact than scooping, because the flour can get packed down an you end up with a lot more than you would want.
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 cup ice water, but then another 1/8 cup was added as I mixed because 1/4 isn't enough!
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) water, poured from a bowl of water chilling with ice
Blend the dry ingredients in a food processor, then add frozen cubes of dough and blend for like 7 seconds. Becomes little peas of butter.
Use a hand-held dough cutter thing to mix in the water little by little, sprinkle by sprinkle. It forms a crumbly mess. Scoop up those crumbs and dump onto some plastic wrap, then wrap it up, and smush into a disc. It doesn't look like it is going to work as actual pie crust. BUT IT WILL. Remember, that butter should still be semi-frozen.
Freeze that crumbly pile of doughstuff for a few hours. Or a few days. I froze mine for 2 hours, and then I cooked little round shells in a cast iron biscuit pan, but that made the taste strong and nutty, and a milder-tasting crust lets the lemon flavor really pop. Actually, just use anything, it will turn out fine. See, they don't even have to be perfectly formed:
So the important part: that lemon curd/cream. I don't know which category it falls into, because it isn't really either curd or cream. It is whatever it wants to be. This is 2017. My Lemon Creation will not be defined nor confined by binary labels. It is label-fluid.
3 eggs and 1 egg yolk (what to do with the extra white? so wasteful) from large eggs, not extra large, those are for breakfast and not for cooking, recipes are created using large eggs as a standard
3 lemons, regular store lemons, they don't need to be fancy hipster lemons
1 1/2 sticks of butter, unsalted
3/4 cup sugar, I use a mix of regular and a little bit of turbinado, which I keep mixed in a tub because I like the taste of the mix
a little tiny pinch of salt, so keep salt in a bowl somewhere nearby
2 capfuls of vanilla, and yes I use the fake stuff because I like it better! I don't like real vanilla extract. It's too oily.
Put a saucepan on the stove and fill it halfway with water. Boil it. Put a glass bowl (not metal, which I found out can make everything taste like a mouthful of pennies) on top of it, so the bowl is close to the water but not touching. This is a double boiler.
Take a kitchen rasp, which everyone needs so if you don't have one you should buy one, and being super-careful and scrape off the yellow part of the lemon rind. SCRAPE OFF NO WHITE. That's the pith and it's nasty. Do this slowly and gently, so you get juuuuuuust the yellow part of the rind. Do all 3 lemons, into the bowl. Cut one lemon open and, after picking out the seeds, squeeze the juice in. Just one lemon is enough. The lemon juice is there more to start the chemical reaction of thickening things. The lemon skin is the flavor.
I also added a splash of lemon extract, like 1/8 teaspoon at most. I used the alcohol-based extract If you want to use some, smell it first. If it smells good, put it in. I have used lemon extract that smelled weird, and surprise surprise it didn't taste any better. Lemon is all about the smell. You smell it on your tastebuds. But if you don't have lemon extract, no need to buy some. The lemons you've got are plenty of flavor.
With the zest and stuff in the bowl, add the sugar, the vanilla, and the little pinch of salt. Mix mix mix. Add the egg parts and really stir it. You're using a whisk, btw, with a long handle.
Stir for like 20 minutes, probably longer. Directions say to cook past 160 degrees to be safe, if you have a thermometer; but after 160 degrees, it's going to start to get thick, so that's a big giveaway. Keep stirring until it is like pudding. When it starts to thicken, you can taste it to see if you need to add more lemon, but you probably won't need to add anything. Then turn off the stove, take the bowl off the pot and put it on the counter, and stir it a little more to cool it down.
Use an immersion blender to blend in butter, slices at a time. In trial runs of this recipe, I also tried whipped cream, but for some reason the cream killed the lemon taste and made it bland. Stick to the butter.
Spoon it into dishes or into the shel(s) of your choice, and chill for several hours. The lemon continues to work magic while it's in the fridge. The longer it sits, the creamier it gets. But don't wait too long. Like, a day, tops. FYI, don't let it rest in that bowl. It has to be put into crust or cups or something right away, because it becomes too thick to work with very quickly.
