23
Oct 06
Food Science Day 2: Gala Pie/Long Egg footnote
While shopping this past weekend my eyes were drawn to this book called “Pie”. Ready for the xmo buying season, the publishers have spent their publicity cash getting it in those prime places in the bookshop, and the book strikingly LOOKS LIKE a pie – but isn’t (curses). However this book is a sham in other more important ways, so DO NOT BUY IT. Let me explain…
A crucial ingredient of the food science ethos is the idea that making food is alchemical and exploratory. We no longer buy books of recipes based on simple authority (sorry Delia), but because the authors have been to scary and exciting places we haven’t got the guts (hello St Johns and Hugh Fearnley doo da) or time for. So the idea of a (quite thick) book on JUST PIES would suggest that the authors have gone to great efforts to explore the outer limits, the furthest possibilities of pies, pie making, and pie theory.
So, still on a long-egg tip, we flick to the gala pie recipe only to see a large picture of a rectangular pie tin containing four boiled eggs in an end-to-end row. To make it quite clear, they use words to the effect that “how they make them so that every slice has a bit of yellow is a trade secret and nobody knows how its done”.
THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. In the same way it would not do for a thick, richly illustrated gift book called “Stage Magic” to have a picture of someone sawing a lady in half with the caption “Nobody knows how this amazing trick is done”.
I didn’t read any further. I bet they didn’t even have pie pie in there either. swizz.
Side qn: what is the most well known magic sekrit?
egg from out of the ear?
card on the ceiling?
the book i DID buy instead of swizzpie book was Derren Brown’s xmo bid which I am already enjoying v much, which is about all manner of goodies including simple magic tricks
A long egg from out of the ear would be quite impressively horrible.
Surely everyone knows how sawing lady in half is done.
is it just me or does the front of that book look like one times FACE??? look the holes in p and e are the eyes, the i is a nose and the shadow/author’s name looks like an mouth…
A RLY big tube of pritt-stick!
pieface! it all fits!
i set ‘em up, you bat ‘em out ;)
I had Tesco Gala Pie just now, and slice one only had egg on one side (ie it was the tip of an egg) and there was just a sheer side of meat on the other frontage, and slice two had two different eggs meeting in the middle.
Unfortunately I have no pictorial evidence as I have no camera and I was hungry.
jona did you detect the presence of a BEEF GELATIN SLEEVE
Traces of sleeve (if we’re thinking of the same thing, the jelly between the meat and the crust?), but not a huge amount. Also the crust was a bit broken before I bought it, and had come away from the meat. Perhaps this enables jelly to evaporate? I’m no scientist.
yes it would be stretched very thin OR EVEN TORN bcz the meat has been clevertly slipped in between the egg and the JELLIED INTEGUMENT
(further food-science experiments needed re: existence of jelly in gas form!)
i too have found gala pie with egg end in it. it’s a scandal.
Someone, somewhere, must know how it’s done. I can get a linear tube of yolk ok, then chill it, but getting a linear sleeve of white around the yolk is another matter. Plus the coaxial product would sag in the middle of a metre long pie. In the middle of a 6″ pie, come to that. Perhaps the egg tube is suspended vertically….. ?
check out our attempts in the ‘related articles’!
industrially i believe that it is achieved horizontally in a water bath