The travels of Justin

Why can’t I stop thinking about this tonight?

A fellow TRU exchange student in Austria has written a few times about cooking that once in a while gave me those pangs of food from home. In December she wrote about cooking a Christmas turkey and then baking cookies in January. No matter how much I love Chinese food, there are moments I just want to bake my own foods instead of buying them, but I’ve had a roadblock: Chinese kitchens simply do not have ovens. In Canada I use my oven all the time, but it’s just not an option here in China. To meet the demand for baked goods, bakeries are everywhere, but the style and taste isn’t like home and some items — like pie — are not on the menu. Since my friends in China are always introducing me to traditional dishes from every region of the country, I wanted to reciprocate while satisfying my own craving for comfort food.

Homemade Apple Pie

Thankfully, a very kind-hearted fellow opened up a booth in one of the TUT cafeteria’s selling Chinese-style pizza which happens to require an oven to bake. Within his first week of operation, a friend helped me to ask permission to use the oven which he agreed to without hesitation — so cool!! It didn’t take long to decide that apple pie would be our first attempt at baking at TUT. A phone call to mom made sure I had the perfect recipe to share with my friends, and a trip to the supermarket supplied most of the ingredients.

The only flour I could find is a special self-rising kind that seems to include yeast, thus making it unsuitable for our task. The bakeries make bread so we looked for a supply at the source. A supermarket manager gave us the phone number to the guy who supplies bread flour to Wal-Mart; however, before pursuing our lead we found a much easier source by buying our flour from the bakery on campus — no fuss, no muss! Cinnamon was the only other difficult ingredient. You can buy cinnamon everywhere, but it’s sold as sticks, not powder. Using a small cheese-grater, it took more than an hour to render the couple teaspoons of cinnamon required for delicious pie. Well worth the effort!

I only two mistakes: the crust recipe made half as much as I expected, and I confused “chill” with “freeze” which give very different results. By freezing the mixed pie-crust dough, we had giant rock-solid disks that were totally unusable until thawed. Meanwhile, the oven was only available to us during the off-peak time and the window was closing fast. Thinking on his feet, Ryan brought the disks to the cafeteria and only 1-minute in the hot oven brought the dough out of its cryogenic state. I’ve since learned that if the dough had been chilled like mom told me to do, it would have been simple as pie to put the crust in place.

Before cooking, we could tell it was not the most beautiful pie I’ve ever seen, but the crust did go on and cooked very well. It’s the taste, not the looks, that matter and in every respect we had a divine success. The vanilla ice cream melted perfectly and our group of chefs silently devoured our authentic apple pie a la modé.