Hello from NL 41, and a big welcome to the latest flurry of subscribers who have joined me here; this is Bake Sense—a somewhat ordered record of ramblings concerning the world of baking. Along the way, you’ll find recipes and insights from life in and out of the professional bakery and plenty of fruitful chat.
I intended to merely spectate and enjoy the time that is ‘PIE’, those weeks in November when folks celebrating the holiday of Thanksgiving pour their love and energy into flaky rounds of dough. For the most part, I am very much still watching on with enjoyment rather than participating. I did, however, get to thinking of pie parallels, the analogous anatomy of pies, and their DNA.
At the same time, my baker’s mind had done what I can only explain as the equivalent of getting out your winter coat and packing away your summer wardrobe. It had turned to gingerbread, custard, treacle, rum, and thoughts concerning how best to increase the carb content of everything I made. Frugality and cold weather go hand in hand in Yorkshire; the colder you get, the more frugal you become, and I had a stack of breadcrumbs that needed using.
One ingredient, treacle, stuck around, as treacle does. If 1 + 1 = 2, it follows that pie = tart and treacle + tart + breadcrumbs = treacle tart. A rummage through some recipes revealed that, more often than not, treacle tart is golden syrup tart, golden syrup once being considered a light treacle. As a truly dark treacle fan, I find this a considerable mis-selling. It niggled at me in the same way that it niggles me when people take their shoes off and leave the right shoe on the left and the left shoe on the right. I had to restore order.
Many a great pie or tart recipes begin and end with custard. It is common for the pie/tart filling to be a custard base, and it should be expected for the pie/tart to be served with custard. Custard is rarely never the answer and pretty much always the answer.
To resolve my compulsion to make a treacle tart with treacle (it is not advisable to simply sub-black treacle for golden syrup), I turned to the often misidentified custard pie, the pecan pie. Pecans dazzle, and rightly so; they are one of my favourite nuts, but if you look past their distracting beauty, it's easy to see that the rest of the humble ingredients in a pecan pie converge to form a custard in which the pecans are suspended.
As with any problem-solving and arithmetic, it pays to show your workings. The recipe below is where I am at so far…a pie/tart filling that speaks treacle in a voice that soothes, all its bitter edges rounded by vanilla and rum, its texture buttery and truffle-like thanks to stale but still soft brioche breadcrumbs.
Take the idea and run with it to make a pie/tart that comforts you in the cold weather. The etymology of the word treacle reveals its long association with something that soothes, whether it’s poisonous snakebites or coughs and sore throats, so it’s worth the effort to seek out a good quality organic treacle if you can for the truest taste.
If you can’t find black treacle, blackstrap molasses would give a similar depth of flavour, or follow the analogous ingredient ideas in my notes to find a route to your preference.