Emily Luchetti Blog

I am never ready for Gravenstein apple season. My head is still in traditional summer fruit mode- peaches, plums and berries. Rightly or wrongly when I think of apples I think of fall. This hot weather doesn’t help get me in gear.

Gravenstein apple harvest begins in mid August, a couple of months before other apples. Unlike other apple varieties Gravenstiens don’t store well so you have to enjoy them fresh. If you haven’t had them by mid September you are out of luck. Once again, I missed The Gravenstein Apple Fair. To remember I just put it on my Google calendar for next year.

 Gravensteins are sweet, tart, juicy and crispy. Other apples have only a couple of these characteristics but Gravenstiens have them all. Their color is greenish red and a little dull. They may not look like the quintessential apple but don’t let their appearance fool you. Gravenstein apples make the best pies and applesauce.

In The United States Gravenstein apples, like Meyer lemons, are found almost exclusively in California. Highway 116 in Sonoma County is also known as The Gravenstein Highway. The Gravenstien came to Sonoma in the early 1800’s via Denmark and Russia.  (In 2005 Demark made the Gravenstein its national apple). It is hard to determine who actually planted the very first trees but it is believed they were at the Russian settlement of Fort Ross in Sonoma. During World War II there were about 8000 acres of Gravenstein apples in Sonoma. Soldiers received dried apples and applesauce made from Gravensteins as part of their rations. Today there are under 1000 acres of trees as more homes and vineyards caused the trees to be uprooted. Slow Food has put the Gravenstein on its list of heritage foods.

In other apple trivia, in Colonial America apples were used mostly to make apple cider. Fermented it didn’t spoil and was safe to drink. Nothing like starting your day with a kick in your juice.  Also in ancient Greece tossing an apple was a proposal of marriage and if you caught it you accepted the proposal. Be careful when you toss an apple to a coworker or friend.

When you bring your Gravensteins home, if you are not going to use them right away put them in the refrigerator. It may be tempting to leave a bowl on the counter but they deteriorate faster at room temperature.

It’s still not too late to jump into the season. I make apple sauce to eat by itself, spread over toast in the morning or serve as a condiment with cold chicken. It makes a great sandwich when paired with the rotisserie porchetta from the Saturday Farmer’s Market. To make apple sauce you don’t really need a recipe. Core and cut the apples into 1/2 inch pieces. (Gravensteins have thin skins so I don’t bother to peel them and they give the apple sauce a little color.)  Put in a pot with a little water, sugar and a cinnamon stick. You can add other spices like ginger, or allspice but I like the clean flavor of just the apples and the cinnamon. Let them cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently. If they don’t give off much juice, add some more water. Taste for sweetness and add more sugar if needed. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the apples are soft. If you like your applesauce thick cook off more of the liquid. You can keep it chunky or puree it if you like it smooth. At any point you can add more sugar. The sugar amount will vary on the natural sweetness of the apples. In the refrigerator applesauce will last for weeks.

Luther Burbank, the botanist who developed the Santa Rosa plum and the freestone peach, said “If the Gravenstein could be had throughout the year, no other apple need be grown.” Unfortunately we aren’t so lucky so we have to enjoy it while we can.

I made brownies from a mix the other day. I wanted to see what they were like.  Dump the mix in the bowl, stir in oil and an egg and put it in the oven. Very easy, but so are made from scratch brownies. You have to melt the chocolate with the butter and add some sugar but that’s hardly difficult and you get the added bonus of the smell of melting chocolate.

So how was the taste of the boxed brownies? They weren’t inedible but they definitely weren’t great. They weren’t very chocolaty and had an aftertaste of preservatives. With just a few more steps you can get something so much better.

Brownies, like chocolate chip cookies, are a classic American invention. Many of the desserts we love have English, French or Italian pedigrees but not the brownie.

We indirectly have Bertha Honoré Palmer, a Chicago socialite, to thank for the creation of the brownie. In 1893 she was president of the Board of Lady Managers for The Chicago World’s Fair, held to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus‘s arrival in the New World. Mrs. Palmer asked the chef at the Palmer House Hotel to prepare a dessert that wasn’t as large as a piece of cake and could be part of a box lunch. He (I assume it was a man) came up with the brownie.

The chef’s original version included apricot glaze and walnuts but variations appeared soon after.  And we haven’t stopped modifying them since. Each recipe you read is distinct and every recipe has its own way of making them. You can have them with nuts (all kinds but mostly walnuts), dried fruit, white, milk or dark chocolate chips, brown sugar, peanut butter, cream cheese or caramel. There is a store in New York City called The Fat Witch that sells over half a dozen different kinds. Today you can even find brownies at Parisian patisseries.

Obviously the type of chocolate used is a big flavor driver.  Many recipes use unsweetened and some bittersweet. When I make brownies, I like to add some cocoa powder. It deepens the chocolate flavor.

People have strong opinions when it comes to brownies. Fudgy vs. cakey, nuts vs.  no nuts. I am definitely fudgy with no nuts. How do you like your brownies? Who in the city do you think makes a brownie you crave?

After I’ve written recipes for my cookbooks and before they are published I ask home bakers to make the desserts. This way I can make sure “normal” people will be successful when baking the recipes. An instruction that sounds clear to me may be confusing to someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time in the kitchen.

I like to be there when they test them so I can fix problems as they come up. Near my book deadline I have a bake-a-thon where we test the last of the recipes. We often do this at a family property in Lake County where there we have several work areas and plenty of room to spread out bags of flour, pounds of chocolate and piles of nuts.

For the testing on my last book there were about 6 of us and we were on day three. There were cookies, pies, and cakes all over the counter and dining room table. The refrigerator was crammed full of mousses, puddings and doughs waiting to be rolled out. We got up early for another day in the kitchen.

We heard a loud noise outside the kitchen and ran outside. About 100 feet above us was a hot air balloon filled with 15 people. They had been in the air for about 30 minutes when the wind shifted and pushed them toward us. (We often see hot air balloons in the distance but they don’t come near the house.) The people inside the balloon, including the navigator, were understandably nervous. We hollered up to them and pointed to a nearby field because every other place was over water or too wooded.

One person went back to the kitchen to tend to what we had already put in the oven, and the rest of us ran to the balloon landing site. It was a bumpy landing. Still in our aprons, we were all trying to hold up the balloon as it came floating down so it wouldn’t rip on the barbed wire fence. On the ground hot air balloons are a lot bigger than they look up in the sky.

The occupants climbed out of the balloon basket and said “Where are we?” It was like a scene out of the Wizard of Oz. They were shook up but luckily except for a few scrapes and bruises no one was hurt. We took them up to the house so they could rest and wait for the van to come get them.

As they were sitting on the patio we discovered one woman was celebrating her birthday. We put candles on a slice of cheesecake and everyone sang “Happy Birthday.” They loved the cake so much we brought out cookies, tarts, ice cream- everything we had made. Once they saw all the desserts they forgot about their ordeal and they couldn’t believe their good luck. If they were going to have a crash landing somewhere this wasn’t too bad a spot and we had so much food I was thrilled to get rid of some of it.

One member of the group was a chef from Mexico. In the “small world” category she had one of my cookbooks, so the conversation really flowed. She said in Mexico there is a saying “It is more important to show up on time than to be invited.” This group had perfect timing; and I collected more feedback on my desserts than I imagined I would.

They all were sorry to leave their dessert oasis and I was offered a free balloon ride for our hospitality. After watching that landing I’ll stay on the ground- with desserts- and wait for the next group to drop in.

I cringe when someone comes into Waterbar or Farallon and wants a dessert sampler. Putting more than one dessert on the same plate reminds me of the Pu-Pu platters in American Chinese restaurants.

The desserts run into the others so you don’t get a real sense or taste of how each one is supposed to taste on its own. Plus it makes the food look really unattractive. By the time you are finished eating you can’t remember what was what. Strawberries running into caramel sauce running into chocolate is not how I or most pastry chefs want their hard work presented.

But at the same time I know many people (myself included) want to try more than one dessert or simply want a bite of something small to finish off the meal. Luckily sharing desserts has become popular.

Sharing desserts allows you to see how the chef attended for the food to look. If you don’t want to commit to a whole dessert you can always depend on someone at the table to clean the plates. If you want to try the whole menu you can. If I am with a group I don’t know very well I politely serve myself some of each dessert on a share plate.  If I am among friends or family my spoon and everyone else’s just reach across the table without even asking. No one seems to mind.

The whole concept of sharing desserts is both psychologically and sociologically interesting. With savory  courses different unwritten rules apply. People are more restrained with their appetizers and entrees. If someone asks for a bite, a small taste is put on the butter plate or the rim of the main plate. When offered to other diners most people say “No thanks, but that looks good”. They are content with their choices and don’t feel the desire to poach.  Not when it comes with dessert. Everyone wants s a taste of it all.  I am not completely sure why the communal approach applies to desserts more than other courses. It could be the sugar or maybe by the time dessert time comes everyone is more relaxed.

Regardless of the reason it ends the meal with an engaging interaction and that’s what eating with others is all about.

My blog is also appearing on the Inside Scoop Column of the San Francisco Chronicle website.

After I create a new dessert the next step is to decide how to describe it on the menu. This can actually be tricky. I don’t want it to be wordy but it needs to cover all the elements of the dessert. It should be enticing but not cute. When I worked at Stars I made a rendition of the Sacrapantina cake from Stella Pastry in North Beach. It was a white cake layered with Marsala- Sherry Zabaglione with chocolate shavings on top and crushed biscotti on the sides. The staff loved it but I couldn’t give it away. After a couple of days I realized no one was ordering it because they didn’t know how to pronounce Sacrapantina and they didn’t want to embarrass themselves by saying it wrong. I changed the name to Tuscan Cream Cake and it sold like crazy. Nuts are always listed so people with allergies will have a heads up. Flavor driving ingredients such as coconut, raspberry, coffee and mango I like to mention even when used as an accent. Their presence influences the overall flavor of a dessert. For example, not everybody likes coconut so I don’t want them to be disappointed if I serve a chocolate banana cream tart and it is covered with candied coconut. It can ruin their night. Unlike most pastry chefs, I am not a fan of chocolate and raspberry together. In a restaurant recently I ordered a warm chocolate cake with coffee ice cream. The cake and the ice cream were both delicious but I was bummed that it had raspberry sauce all over the bottom of the plate. It wasn’t mentioned on the menu and if I had known it was going to be on there I would have ordered something else or asked for the sauce on the side. I know it is a personal quirk of mine but raspberry is a strong flavor and overpowers the chocolate and coffee. The flavors stay separate in my mouth and don’t create a new flavor. Everyone has taste preferences and I want the customers who come to Waterbar or Farallon to be able to dig right into a dessert when it is placed in front of them and not be let down or surprised.