Tandem cider is a small producer with an enthusiastic brewer. Is “brewer” the right word? In any case, Tandem makes an English-style cider, which allows most of the sugar to be turned into alcohol. This makes for a complex and often subtle product.

Two of their ciders are effectively without any noticable carbonation. It’s not at all what one would expect if one has only had, for example, Woodchuck as their only cider experience. Indeed, before a tasting, they are sure to ask if you’ve had apple cider before, to gauge how shocked you’ll be when you taste.

If you go to Leelanau, please do go by. Just look for the building with the Tandem bicycle as a sign.

During my recent trip to Asheville, for which you’ll get an overview and a disclaimer soon enough, we took a quick trip to Wake Robin Farm to visit the bread makers and their oven. There is a lot to be said about both, but right now I want to focus on one small part.

A brick oven is a relatively ancient technique for making bread. Not the original method, of course, because ovens are a pretty recent invention as far as cooking is concerned. If it wasn’t done on an open fire, it’s probably not one of the first cooking techniques.

Still, centuries ago, a single town or village might have a single wood fire oven that is shared across the community. Generally, the ovens I’ve seen haven’t deviated much from what you might have seen back then, except most of the ovens I’ve seen are smaller and may have some design differences for aesthetics or because of the skill of the builder.

It wasn’t until last week that I saw something that is truly modern and, to my mind, vital for anyone building a new wood fire oven.

What’s shown in the picture above, embedded into the side of the oven, is a series of thermocouple interfaces. Thermocouples are effectively thermometers that can handle a wide range of temperatures, especially at the extreme range of what the typical cook would have to deal with (as opposed to what the typical physicist might have to deal with, which would go significantly higher or lower).

These thermocouples are set in the oven so that Steve Bardwell, co-owner of Wake Robin Farm Breads, can plug in a compatible meter and see what the temperature of not only various parts of the interior surface of the oven, but also a few points between the interior surface and the exterior surface. This gives him a tremendous amount of information about how fully the oven is heated and should allow him to predict how long the oven will retain its heat.

Were I to build a brick oven, I would steal this idea. Without a doubt. I would then connect the sensors to a computer to allow me to graph the temperatures and keep a record of historical heating curves. Because there’s no geeky idea that can’t be made just a little better by recording and graphing the results.

Everone of a certain age enjoys a few foods, drinks, and other orally-injested substances that, when first tried, were simply unpalatable. Coffee is a good example of this, though maybe not the best example. More on that later. In any case, this class of substances is known as “acquired tastes.”

Most acquired tastes are bitter substances. We don’t like bitter things because poisons are traditionally bitter. Poisons such as caffeine. After all, a tiny but of caffeine will easily kill a person. It’s also one of the most addictive substances we know of. And yet, we love the stuff. What’s wrong with us?

The thing we know best about caffeine is that it provides us with some handy if imperfect benefits, like giving us something of a wakefulness boost. Conditioning being what it is, if we taste something that disagrees with us, followed by a pleasant sensation, then eventually we’ll come to like what we tasted.

I mentioned that coffee was not a perfect example of this, because coffee only tastes bad when it’s prepared improperly. There us so much great flavor in coffee that the bitter should just be an underlying note.

Which is, incidentally, another way that tastes are acquired. You taste something terrible, but sense another taste underneath that is really good. Conditioning happens again, until you not only look forward to the underlying taste, but the bitter taste as well.

The photo accompanying this article is of a beer float, which combines a bitter stout beer from the Highland Brewing Company in Asheville, NC with a stout beer ice cream from the Ultimate Ice Cream Company. Depending on how you combine the ingredients, you’ll often start with a bitter hit, then have that mellowed out by the ice cream. As you go on, you appreciate the dish more and more. It’s a very quick way to acquire a taste.

Crust from The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook. Pie adapted from BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking with Over 200 Magnificent Recipes by Shirley Corriher.

Ingredients

The Crusts

• 2 package of Nabisco Chocolate Wafer Cookies, crushed or food-processed
• 2oz Confectioner’s Sugar
• 6oz Butter, melted
• Hefty pinch of Salt

The Filling

• 2 cups heavy cream
• 6 large egg yolks (from pasteurized eggs, preferably)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 tablespoon of water (don’t combine the waters)
• 3 Tbls Knob Creek bourbon
• 1.5 packages of unflavored gelatin. If you have a hard time guessing, lean towards having more

Directions

The Crusts

Preheat oven to 375°F, and let sit for another 20 minutes.

Mix the ingredients. Press the mixture into a 2-9″ pie-plates, divided evenly. Press down on the crumb using a round glass or measuring cup sprayed with non-stick spray. Try to get an even edge around the pie. Cut the top of the pie level with a butter knife. Bake for 15 minutes. Cool on a baking rack.

The Filling

Whip the cream to soft peaks. Set aside.

Add the sugar to the egg yolks. Using a mixer with a beater attachment (unless you are mighty and prefer just using a hand whisk), whip the yolks and sugar until they increase significantly in volume and turn several shades paler.

Pour the gelatin into the 1/2 cup of water. Let sit for two minutes. Microwave for 20 seconds until just barely dissolved. Combine the gelatin, rum, and egg yolk mixture. Mix thoroughly.

Add 1/3 of the whipped cream to the egg yolk mixture and mix thoroughly. Fold the yolk mixture into the rest of the whipped cream. Divide among the two pie crusts and refrigerate until set (probably an hour or two). Feel free to drink any of the left over filling mixture.

Adapted from The Pie and Pastry Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

Ingredients

The Crust

• 200g Cold unsalted Butter, cut into 1/4″ cubes
• 320g All-Purpose Flour
• 3/4 tsp Salt
• 126g Heavy Cream
• 1 Egg White, lightly beaten

The Base Layer

• 85g Lindt White Chocolate (all but one column of a 3.5oz bar)
• 4oz Cream Cheese
• 2 Tbl sour cream

The Cooked Layer

• 1 cup fresh strawberries (after rinsing, drying, hulling, and halving)
• 2 Tbl Cornstarch
• 118g Water
• 67h Sugar
• 1 Tsp Fresh Lemon Juice
• 1 pinch Salt

The Fresh Layer

• Enough whole strawberries, to cover a 9″ circle when stood point up, hulled, dried, and rinsed.
• 72g Currant Jelly (1/4 cup)
• 1 Tbl St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur

Directions

The Crust

Put 1/3 of the butter into the freezer in a medium-sized mixing bowl.

Whisk the flour and salt together. Mix in 2/3 of the butter with a pastry cutter until it looks like course meal. Once the butter is mixed with the flour, minimize exposure of the dough to your warm, warm hands, or you will melt the butter.

Place the butter/salt/flour mixture into a gallon-sized zip-top bag. Add in the last 1/3 of the butter and put the bowl back into the freezer. Get rid of all the air you can and seal the bag. Take your trustiest rolling pin and roll the contents of the bag until the butter turns into flatten flakes. Place the bag into the freezer for 10 minutes or thereabouts. The goal is to reverse any melting from the butter and make it reasonably solid again.

Take out the bag and the bowl, and transfer all of the dough to the bowl. You will need to scrape the sides of the bag, as the butter will have stuck to it during the rolling. Sprinkle the heavy cream into the mixture and mix. I use a silicone spatula to mix, as it won’t melt the butter and it’ll resist some of the sticking.

Put the mixture back into the bag and seal, removing most of the air as before. Knead the dough inside the bag with your fingertips until it sticks together. When you pull it, it should stretch a bit.

Divide the dough into two 6″ discs and refrigerate for anywhere from 1 to 24 hours. 8 hours is ideal. Although you’ll only need one of these discs for this pie, as it was a competition, I baked two in case something went horribly, horribly wrong.

Preheat the oven to 450° and let sit at that temperature for another 20-30 minutes.

Roll out the pie dough into a 13″ circle and place into the pie pan. Shape the top as you like. Freeze for at least 20 minutes.

Dock the sides and bottom of the dough. Crumple a piece of parchment paper, unroll it, and place over the pie, fitting it down close to the dough. Put in your dried beans, rice, or pie weights. Bake for 20 minutes. Carefully remove the weighted parchment paper, cover the top edge of the crust with aluminum foil, and bake for another 5-10 minutes, until the inside of the crust has a light golden tinge and feels more like crust than dough. Let cool for 3 minutes, then brush on the egg white to the sides and bottom. Let cool completely.

The Bottom Layer

Put the white chocolate into a microwave safe dish and microwave on high for 20 seconds at a time. At the end of each, stir. Repeat until there’s more melted bits than solid bits, then keep stirring until all of the solid bits turn into melted bits. Let cool to room temperature.

In a small mixing bowl, mix the cream cheese with an electric mixer until it’s somewhat fluffy and whipped. Add in the cooled white chocolate and mix. Add in the sour cream and mix until combined. Cover the bottom of the pie with this mixture.

The Cooked Layer

Lightly crush the strawberries with a fork in a small saucepan. Add the sugar, water, salt, lemon juice, and cornstarch. Bring to a boil. Simmer for 1 minute. Pour into a bowl and let cool to room temperature. Stir occasionally during the cooling process. Once cooled, pour over the bottom later of the pie.

The Fresh Layer

Your strawberries should have the tops cut off so that they could stand up on the a flat surface. Place these point side up on top of the pie.

In the small saucepan which has been washed and dried, melt the currant jelly until it is melted. It will bubble. Strain into a glass, which will involve a lot of pressing with a spatula. Stir in the St. Germain. Brush this mixture onto the fresh strawberries.

The Pie

Cool in a refrigerator for an hour or two or overnight. Slice and eat, or slice and serve to judges. If the latter, try to save yourself a slice.