Expired Milk Bar news
milk bar is fine, I'm just late to the party
Hey friends,
This week we’re talking everything Milk Bar. We’ve got some news (even though none of it is news at all, just new to me) and some tips I have for Milk Bar recipes I’ve attempted.
Getting clean off Crack Pie
This Christmas I was invited to go to my friend’s parents’ house. I was explicitly told I didn’t have to bring any presents, but as a person of Chinese descent I insisted that I must not show up empty handed lest my popo reach down from wherever badass Chinese gmas go after this world and smack me on the head. I was told “ok, bring a pie then.”
My friend’s mom is from Louisiana and I’m not foolish enough to, as a Californian, attempt to make a pecan or sweet potato pie for an actual real-life Southern woman. So I turned to a modern New York classic: Milk Bar’s Crack Pie.
I went to Milk Bar’s website where the recipe is available for free (🎉) only to find that Crack Pie is no longer Crack Pie, it is now called Milk Bar Pie. The name change apparently happened back in April but I’m just finding out now.
I protested. What’s so bad about calling it "crack”? Why should Milk Bar change their signature playfully edgy branding just for the PC police? But then I read some articles criticizing the name for minimizing both the racially charged crack epidemic in the 80s and the ongoing problems surrounding diabetes, eating disorders, and food/sugar addiction.
Though my personal offense to the name hasn’t changed too much, I find it similar to my own practice of trying to eliminate the words “crazy” and “insane” from my vocabulary when I really mean “wild” or “preposterous”. I chose to start doing this a couple years ago in order to be cognizant of those with actual mental health problems. So I’m now proudly on team Milk Bar Pie as well 👍.
In case you’d also like to stop using “crazy” and “insane”, here are some of my fave substitutes:
wild (spoken as wiiiiiiild)
preposterous
deranged
absurd
ludicrous
outrageous
unreasonable
Milk Bar recipe tips
I’ve only made a couple recipes from Christina Tosi and the other fine folks over at Milk Bar but I’ve got a couple tips for the specific way some of the recipes are written.
Milk Bar Pie
First up, we’re once again talking about Crack Pie, I mean Milk Bar Pie. As mentioned, the recipe is available for free online which is awesome since the pies retail online for $46 and this recipe actually yields 2 pies! Without further ado, here are the tips:
A bit of a repeat, but do notice that this recipe makes 2 pies and be prepared to have that much deliciousness around. I personally take one to work and one to my friends and then I’m world’s most popular person for a couple days
Tosi is very adamant that the filling can only be mixed in a stand mixer because a hand mixer or hand whisking will incorporate too much air. I think this is bullshit. The first time I made it, I didn’t have my stand mixer yet. I used a hand mixer with just one of the two paddle heads in. I simply kept it on the lowest speed and the pie still came out fantastic. If you really want, you could probably tap your bowl against the counter a bit post-mixing to get rid of any bubbles that may have formed
The entire recipe uses 9 egg yolks! So you’ll also want to prepare some ideas for what to do with the egg whites. They suggest nougat, but you can also try macarons, meringues, swiss meringue buttercream, super healthy omelettes, lol
The recipe calls for milk powder. Milk powder should be available at most grocery stores (even in my tiny New York grocery store) in the aisle that also has evaporated milk and condensed milk
The recipe also calls for corn powder. You’re meant to take freeze dried corn and whiz it in the food processor until super fine. You can find freeze dried corn on Amazon, but if you’re like me and only remember to buy ingredients day-of, you can also try corn flour. Just get the finest grain corn flour you can find. I used Bob’s Red Mill the first time. Real talk though, it’s such a small amount (1/4 cup across 2 pies) you can probably just leave it out and it’ll still be a pie filled with so much butter and sugar that it’ll still be mind-bogglingly delicious. Omitting it entirely might alter the consistency a tiny bit though.
I don’t know if my oven is messed up somehow but for me, the bake times on the pies were SO WRONG. The first of my two most recent pies was drastically underbaked (I still ate it though because I kind of love underbaked gooey things). The recipe has you start out at 350°F and lower it midway to 325°F. After baking the prescribed time, my pie was still jiggly all around and super pale. My second pie I baked for a full 10 minutes extra and it still had pale spots and was a bit under. My recommendation is to bake until the entire surface has browned and only the center few inches are still jiggly.
Cakes
I’ve only baked 2 cakes out of the book All About Cake but I do have a tip for the mixing process. In most of Milk Bar’s cakes, the liquids are added right after the creaming of the butter + sugar. Tosi writes:
You’re basically forcing too much liquid into an already fatty mixture that doesn’t want to make room for it.
She says the way to mitigate this is to stream the liquids in oh so slowly, pouring in the 2ish cups of milk and oil should take approximately 3 minutes. The first time I made her corn sheet cake, I poured that shit in almost drop by drop, and still it broke into a gross curdle-y mess.
However, thanks to some weird Amazon digital credit nonsense, I was able to purchase the kindle version of the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook just the other day for just $2. An extra tip that is in the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook but NOT in All About Cake (although maybe it was in the intro that I absolutely did not read yet) is this:
…if it doesn’t look right after 6 minutes, keep mixing.
If you’ve made swiss meringue buttercream, it’s a lot like that process. In SMB, there’s usually a point when you’re incorporating the butter where it looks like the frosting has split and you wonder why you say you “love baking” and you question every minute spent on this “fun hobby”. But then you just keep mixing and through some magic of time or chemistry or friction, it all comes back together. These cake recipes are just like that. No matter how slowly you stream in the liquids, it’ll look a little broken. Just keep mixing, maybe take a seat and a sip of wine, then the cake batter will magically come back together.
Alright friends…
that’s all I’ve got for you this week. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, please consider sharing with a friend!
xx Shawna