posted
Tonight I was baking two spinach cheese pies to serve for lunch on Saturday. I was in a hurry, so I used store-bought pie crusts.
I don't know what kind of shortening they put in commercial pie crusts these days, but as soon as the pies got to oven temperature, the pie crust softened so much that pieces of the edge crust "melted" and fell off the pie onto the floor of the oven.
I got my first clue that this was happening when I noticed the smell of something burning. I looked inside the oven, observed burnt pieces of pie crust on the oven floor, and decided there wasn't much I could do about it while the oven was at 350 degrees. So I closed the oven door and let the pies continue baking.
The smell got worse. I opened the oven door again, and a piece of crust had fallen on the heating element and had burst into flames! I blew out the fire. The edge of my pie crust had burnt, but the insides were still okay. I said to Sarah, who was present to observe this whole fiasco, "So, I'll cut off the burnt part and serve the rest."
I walked into the next room. A few minutes later, Sarah said, "Are you sure there isn't something still burning?"
Back into the kitchen. Smoke was pouring out of the top of the oven door. The air in the kitchen was getting very hazy. I opened doors and windows to air out the house, but the smoke wasn't dissipating very fast. Finally, I took a long-handled spatula, and scraped the pieces of burnt dough out of the oven.
My pies are done now. The edge crusts are all burnt, but the insides are still fine. We'll eat them on Saturday, as planned, with the crust cut off. The oven is a big mess. The house smells like smoke.
Next time I'm buying a different brand of pie crust.
Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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My mom has the best pie crust recipe EVER. It has vinegar in it, which seems weird, but it gives the crust a tangy taste. I've never burned it, and I'm an incompetent cook.
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So, rivka, what brand of pie crust do you use? (Probably wouldn't be available on the east coast, anyway, but it's worth a try...
We used to use Oronoke Farms, and the crusts were great, but that brand doesn't seem to be around here anymore. At least not in the stores we are shopping in. Plus, I like a deep dish pie crust. Really hard to find something that's fits our requirements and is kosher, too.
Even harder if we need a pie crust that is not marked "dairy."
Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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1) Never ever use an electric range or oven for cooking anything whatsoever.
2) Always have a cookie sheet, pizza pan, etc on a separate rack between what is being baked and the heat source.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I was trying to make croutons once and they caught on fire. I finally had to douse them with baking soda.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Annie! Manteca! Boy, that brings back memories. That stuff is deliberately made to look, feel and taste like lard so that people who used to use lard in their cooking would feel more comfortable switching over. I don't even want to think about how much I ate in Central America. I would generally avert my eyes so I wouldn't see how much my hosts were putting in the beans. (Usually a whole plastic sleeve of the stuff for one pan of refried beans)
Posts: 1652 | Registered: Aug 2003
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My father, many years ago, would go deer hunting.
To make sure he ate food, my mother would cook him things. Then he would load up his RV, with its icebox, freezer, and stove, and head out with his buddy.
One year she made him a great apple pie, and wrapped it in Saran Wrap.
My dad and his buddy got up early to go hunting, and saw how cold it was. What a better way to warm up the RV than to put the pie in the oven and let it thaw and cook until noon.
They came back and my dad's friend was greatly impressed.
"How does she do it?" he asked as they pulled the pie out of the warm oven.
"Do what?" my Dad asked as he sank the knife into the now glistening and steaming pie.
"Get that wonderful glaze on that pie."
The both realized it wasn't a wonderful glaze.
It was melted Saran Wrap that they had forgotten to take off the pie before they stuck it in the oven.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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I realize that the proper pie crust is crucial, but what I want to know is what kind of cheese you used, Ela. What you made sounds divine, and very much like spanakopita (without the philo dough). Love me some Greek food.
Posts: 822 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Awww, you shoulda been here for greek night at my house. We need a jatraquera greek night, even if people have to fly in from other countries. We had spanikopita, hummus on pita, salad and baklava. Mmmmmmm MMM!
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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You know, I've been sitting here trying to think up a dobie for this thread for the past hour. I can't get one good enough that I could also find a link for. I'm going to have to give up, but the best one I could think of was:
"Can you take a pee without pulling your pants down?"
Then I thought most guys probably can, so that's not very good. I can't think about this anymore. My head hurts.
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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My favorite fire in the oven story is when I had a self-cleaning oven. We had made some fish sticks the previous night and Tom, for some reason, cooks everything in the oven on a cookie sheet. Hence some of the grease had dripped down into the oven bottom. I turned on the self-cleaning for 3 hours and walked away. Went back into the kitchen an hour later for a snack and noticed that my oven was glowing! The grease had caught on fire and was burning clean. You cannot open the oven once set to self-clean and so I sat back and watched the flames. Luckily and surprisingly no damage was done to the oven.
My favorite pie story is baking with CT. We made a particularly juicy apple pie and hadn't added any flour to the apples. Consequently, the pie was a bit soupy. CT thought to drain the pie and the glass pie pan shattered in her hands! Thankfully she wasn't hurt, but the look of complete horror and disappointment on her face will stay with me forever.
Posts: 1777 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote:1) Never ever use an electric range or oven for cooking anything whatsoever.
What wonderful advice, aspectre! /sarcasm
Unfortunately, electric was what came with me house and I do not choose to quit cooking. I hate it and much prefer gas, but there's not much I can do about it right now.
Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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I had the idea once to invent a self-cleaning house. You just close all the doors and it gets really hot and burns out the impurities. What do you think?
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Annie, I think my books would never be the same!
Ela, until recently I always used Oronoque also (and they DO make a nice deep-dish), but now I've switched. The Mrs. Smith's crusts became parve about a year back, and they're very nice. No idea whether they're national. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Yeah, I know all about how nice the Oronoque Farms crusts are (also the deep dish ones), but they don't seem to available around here anymore.
Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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I'm not sure if they are here either, actually. I can't remember seeing them in months -- although that may simply be since that I stopped buying them. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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"Oh. I thought this thread was for people that HAD burned their houses down while making a pie.
I'll just leave now."
I feel your pain and desperate solitude, Narnia. It was hot dogs for me... OK, ALMOST. Although there WAS that incident with that stew...
Ela, two words... well, possibly three; I guess it depends on whether or not you hyphenate it, but I digress. Self-cleaning oven. Posts: 165 | Registered: Apr 2004
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I set the stove on fire the other day. We have those lovely spiral elements, and I was trying to boil a big pot of water, so I set it on high. What I didn't know was that someone had spilled soup recently and never cleaned out the burner guard. My mom looked over and the element was in flames. The pot was all black on the outside. Ick.
At least the spill was someone else's fault.
Posts: 2849 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:Ela, two words... well, possibly three; I guess it depends on whether or not you hyphenate it, but I digress. Self-cleaning oven.
How I miss the self-cleaning oven we had in our previous house! It never seemed to get that dirty, spills seemed to burn themselves off or be easily wiped off, and we only had to actually use the self-cleaning function once in a while.
But in this case, I worry that the mess in my oven would ignite a fire like the one Christy described further up. When I baked chicken for last night's dinner, the oven started smoking again, and I had to open all the windows and turn on the fan, again.
I hate cleaning the oven! Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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I have electric, but it's one of the glass-top numbers. It's very nice, and quite easy to clean with the flat surface. The only thing I don't like is that you don't have the instant on- instant off like you do with gas. Of course, I've been cooking with electric most of my life so I'm used to it.
Posts: 4089 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Replace with: 1) Sell house and get a new one with a gas range&oven (Many folks useta hammer TomDavidson for putting j/k after his tongue-in-cheek statements.)
Seriously though, when using an oven, and especially an electric oven: 2) If there is room, place a cookie sheet, pizza pan, or pizza stone on a separate rack between the burner or heating element and the item being cooked. This prevents too much direct radiant heat from the burners or heating elements from overheating&burning the bottom of the food. 3) Preheat the oven to 25to50degrees above the recommended cooking temperature. Then turn down the thermostat to the recommended level immediately after placing the food into the oven.
The cold dish/food soaks up stored oven-heat very quickly, then the thermostat turns on the burner or heating element. The radiant heat from a burner or heating element is MUCH hotter than the recommended temperature and causes scorching... ...while radiant&convection heat from that stored by the ovens sides&top&bottom (and pizza stone/bricks) is just right. Preheating the oven hotter than recommended cooking temperature then turning the thermostat down allows the cold dish/food to warm longer at near ideal cooking temperature before the burner or heating element fires up again. And allows greater amount of cooking by radiant&convection heat stored at the right temperature by the oven's mass instead of the scorching radiant heat from the burners or heating elements.
For items with short cooking times like cookies, the burner or heating element will often stay off during the entire cooking process. Perfectly cooked unscorched cookies, cakes, pies, pizzas, etc every time. Unless the food is left in too long.
posted
That actually sounds like it's worth a try, aspectre. I usually set my oven lower than the recommended temp, as it runs hot. But I never had anything like this happen with a pie crust before.
I blame the piecrust. Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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Okay, I'll admit it, I was laughing at all of the stories here and thinking some people should not be trusted with major appliances.
But then yesterday I went outside to take the trash out. I went through the back door which I rarely use.
Noticed that the built in (gas) grill was on.
I haven't used it in a couple of weeks, maybe even a month. It's been on all that time.
On high!!!
I didn't turn it off!!!
Not sure what the gas bill will be, but I've decided to worry about that once the bill arrives. When I called them, the gas company said they'll "work something out."
Yikes!
The house didn't burn down. The grill didn't melt itself. So I'm happy.
Meter reading is Tuesday. I'll try to post after that.
If I'm not having a stroke.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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Wow, people have been having fire issues, this is interesting.
My mother burned down their garage last Thursday. I was on vacation at the time otherwise I would have posted it on hatrack.
I feel bad for saying it, but she was an idiot. She had a refridgerator and a freezer plugged into the SAME extension cord, draped halfway around the garage. They both kicked on at the same time and had a meltdown.
The firemen had to chop a hole in the roof into the dining room to get the flames that were coming through the attic. They did save most of the structure, but there is severe smoke damage. Most of their kayaks and bicycles are destroyed as well as the rocking chair that my grandaddy carried on his back from town so that my grandma has something to rock my dad in when he was a baby. But they are all ok, there were no injuries, and most of the stuff that was destroyed was just paperwork in storage.
quote:I realize that the proper pie crust is crucial, but what I want to know is what kind of cheese you used, Ela. What you made sounds divine, and very much like spanakopita (without the philo dough). Love me some Greek food.
Actually, larisse, now that you mention it, the pie's ingredients are similar to spanokopita, except that I use cottage cheese and cheddar cheese in this pie, instead of cottage cheese and feta cheese (which is what I use in my spanokopita). It's a pretty yummy pie; you could probably substitute feta cheese for the cheddar.
And the pies came out delicious, btw, in spite of the burnt crust edges. The rest of the pie was just fine. Whew! Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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This also looks like the place to mention my Shepherd's Pie Home Improvment Cooking Incident*.
Steve and I were living in a townhouse in Oklahoma while finishing up college. We had a wonderful property manager, and I was trying to figure out a way to convince him to let me have a second dog (Ciara) but I wasn't going to get her without his permission.
So, there is a recipe on the back of the Brownberry Seasoned Crouton box for Shepherd's Pie. That recipie has been on the back of that box for nearly a decade. I got adventurous and decided to try it. We had ground beef and all the ingreedients so why not.
I had Steve supervise, but when I put it into the casserole dish to bake it seemed like the consistency wasn't right, but we didn't know what was wrong. Anyway the thing overflowed and the oven (an electrical one) started smoking, though I don't think it was an actual fire. It turns out on closer inspection LEAN ground beef is specified. We were poor college students trying to save a penny by buying the fatter stuff. I did drain the grease after browning the meat but it wasn't enough.
So it was smoking pretty badly though, and I went around throwing up windows so that we didn't asphyxiate ourselves. The back door had a screen storm door. When I threw the sash up (which I had done numerous times before), the frame holding it broke and the entire plate of glass fell out of the window. I could feel my luck turning though, because it remained intact and didn't shatter.
Steve went well, guess we need to call the landlord. I said, I'm not going to call him and tell him this when I want to beg him from another dog, and tell him what good care we are taking of the place! So I went to Home Depot. Since it was the metal frame that had actually broken I was hoping I could find a replacement. But the door was too old and nothing was similar.
I talked to the window and door guys for a while and we tried to come up with a solution. Finally the one guy said, well what are the dimensions on the door? I called Steve and made him measure and lo and behold, they were having a clearance sale on top of a sale on storm doors. There was one left, and it was in my size! I believe I walked out of the Home Depot paying about $35 for a door that originally cost about $150.
Steve installed it. I called the landlord and told him my tale.
I got the dog
AJ
*reason number 37 why AJ doesn't cook
Posts: 11265 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Well every now and then I decide to try it even though it is a lost cause. Don't know why, it is rather sadomasochistic of me, isn't it? AJ
Posts: 11265 | Registered: Mar 2002
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quote: *was under the assumption that manteca meant lard in Spanish*
Manteca means butter.
And I second or third or whatever number the "Would you really serve something containing animal products to a vegetarian?" question.
Posts: 1658 | Registered: Sep 2003
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