♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Today on  Milk Street,  we travel to Portland, Maine, to the Eventide restaurant, where chef Mike Wiley demonstrates the secrets of his green salad with nori vinaigrette.
Then we move across town to the Tandem Bakery to visit with baker/co-owner Briana Holt, who prepares her amazing maple-browned butter pie.
So stay right here with  Milk Street  as we learn to cook the great recipes of Portland, Maine.
- Funding for this series was provided by the following.
- Ferguson's proud to support  Milk Street and culinary crusaders everywhere.
For more information on our extensive collection of kitchen products, we're on the web at fergusonshowrooms.com.
- For 25 years, Consumer Cellular's goal has been to provide wireless service that helps people communicate and connect.
We offer a variety of no-contract plans, and our U.S.-based customer service team can help find one that fits you.
To learn more, visit ConsumerCellular.tv.
- Since 1899, my family has shared our passion for everything that goes into our Mutti 100% Italian tomatoes.
Only tomatoes.
Only Mutti.
- Designed by cooks for cooks for over 100 years.
Cookware Collection by Regal Ware.
Handcrafted in Wisconsin.
- The AccuSharp knife and tool sharpener, designed to safely sharpen knives in seconds.
AccuSharp: Keep your edge.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The thinking was, we'll open a nice little oyster bar, we'll offer some nice, thoughtful crudos.
Something light and zippy.
We opened the doors and it kind of had a life of its own.
And we realized we were going to need more than two induction burners and a small sandwich cooler.
- Is Portland really deeply changing in terms of sourcing local ingredients, farming, restaurants?
Is that story totally true or partly true?
- For a while, there were a handful of restaurants in Portland that were totally committed to sourcing locally, to the best of their ability.
Real estate used to be so cheap, and a lot of talented chefs came to town, realizing, "Hey, I could open a restaurant here for a tenth of what it would cost me to open elsewhere."
♪ ♪ - I love a lot of things at Eventide, of course, but your basic green salad with a nori dressing and some pickled vegetables.
I don't know why, but it's just outstanding.
- We've got nori, which we toast over flame or over our flat top back here.
It gets toasty, it becomes more aromatic, and, more importantly,  it becomes super-brittle.
So it's really easy for us to grind into a fine powder.
(blender whirring) Yeah, very simple salad.
Seven ingredients, have at it.
- Mm.
Oh.
This is the best, my favorite salad in the whole world.
- Awesome.
- Really great food is a little surprising, right?
You put it in your mouth, something happens you didn't expect, and then it keeps on happening, right?
The best salad in the world, and I don't say that lightly.
♪ ♪ - Now, one might think, if we went to Portland, Maine, to discover something really interesting in the restaurant world or food world, we'd bring back a fish recipe-- lobster, oyster, or something.
But no, we did a salad, and that just really stood out as something so simple, but so different and so good.
The only tricky part was the nori, right?
Because that's not-- do you have nori in your pantry?
Probably not.
So we had to figure out what to do about that and the toasting.
But everything else is just really simple.
- It is, and I have a confession.
I'm not really a big fan of salad.
So you can trust me when I say I love this salad.
It has so many pops of flavor that it actually makes me want to eat salad.
So we're going to prep our vegetables over here.
We're going to slice the vegetables.
You can certainly just use a chef's knife.
Instead, I'm going to use a mandolin.
You just want to slice these pretty thin.
So we have four ounces of red radish.
I'm going to put my fancy cut-proof glove on.
- I hope you're left-handed.
- Very funny.
- (chuckling): Did you put it on the right hand?
- Yes.
So we have a half a small red onion, and we're also going to put this right on here, as well.
So this makes really quick work of slicing.
These are nice and stringy.
The carrot's a little bit trickier.
So, to do the carrot, peel long strips.
And now we're just going to make our pickling liquid for this.
So, to the stovetop, I'm going to add one-and-a-half cups of rice wine vinegar, three-quarters of a cup of water, and then a third of a cup of sugar.
So I'm going to put this over the heat and bring it to a boil.
All that we want to see here is that the sugar has dissolved.
So this is boiling, that sugar has dissolved.
We're ready to pour it over our vegetables.
I'm just going to let this cool to room temperature, and then we'll put it in the refrigerator for two hours.
You could do that up to a week ahead of time.
In the meantime, we're going to make our dressing.
The chef in Eventide uses nori sheets that he sort of roasts over the flat top grill.
Nori sheets are a little hard to find, as you mentioned.
Instead, we're going to use roasted seaweed snacks.
This is a quarter-ounce package of those, and they've already been toasted, so we don't have to take that extra step.
So it's a little bit of a shortcut.
I'm going to break them up into small pieces.
And we're going to put them in a spice grinder, because we really want to pulverize these into really, really small pieces for the dressing.
So I'm just going to process this until this is fine pieces of nori.
(whirring) Might need to shake it up a little bit.
So that should be about two tablespoons of that nori.
And to that, we're going to add two tablespoons of soy sauce,  two tablespoons of mirin, two tablespoons of grapeseed oil, and two tablespoons of rice wine vinegar.
If you wouldn't mind giving that a whisk.
Put you to work.
- (exhales forcefully): Boy, my arm's tired.
- (chuckles) So you can smell all of those really delicious flavors coming out of there.
It's going to balance really nicely with those pickles we made earlier.
Those will be in the fridge for another couple of hours, and then we'll come back and toss the salad.
So, I took those pickles out of the refrigerator.
They've been in there for two hours.
Now we're just going to drain that pickling liquid off.
Okay, and we can start to toss the salad.
So, I have ten ounces of spring mix in my bowl.
You can use any sort of neutral lettuce.
You don't want anything with a lot of flavor, because we're getting a lot of flavor from this dressing.
Baby romaine would work here, but we like the spring mix.
So, Chris, are you ready for my tip?
- (laughing): I don't know.
- Salt your salad.
- Yes, I agree.
We both do the same thing.
- A lot of people don't do that.
- It makes all the difference.
- It does.
So we're just using a little bit of flaky sea salt.
Just going to add some of these pickles in and toss them into the salad.
Get a mix of all of these vegetables.
We want to get those vegetables in every bite.
And if you would hand me that beautiful bowl... And I'm just going to top it with the rest of those pickled vegetables.
And you really want to make sure you do this part of the salad-- you can make the dressing far in advance, you can make those pickles far in advance-- but you really want to make sure to wait to toss the salad until right before you're going to serve it, especially with these pickled vegetables.
The weight of these  can really wilt the salad really fast.
So let's dig in.
- It does look pretty, I'd say.
- It's a beautiful salad.
- Thank you.
- Here you are.
This is what I call a salad with treats.
- Mmm.
What I really love about this is, when people see nori, they immediately assume it's going to be fishy-tasting, right?
- Right.
- It just gives it a, sort of a foundation to it.
It's a little bit salty, but it doesn't taste fishy at all, really.
- No, not at all.
- So we came back from Portland, Maine, with a recipe for green salad with nori vinaigrette and pickled vegetables.
It has a nori vinaigrette, which we ground up some nori snacks, right?
And a little bit of soy sauce and oil and vinegar and mirin.
And then we pickled vegetables with two parts rice wine vinegar and one part sugar.
Put that on the vegetables for a couple of hours in the fridge, and the two are just put together at the end.
Has that interesting flavor you can't quite identify, but it's just fabulous.
And then the pickled vegetables on top.
It is the world's best salad.
Thank you, Portland, and thank you, Mike at Eventide.
♪ ♪ - My most vivid memories are just hanging out in the kitchen.
I mean, I know everyone says this, but, with my mother and my grandmother, who would visit sometimes from western Mass.
And my grandmother was from Austria, so my grandmother would make things, you know, that my mother wouldn't make.
Kuchens, you know, a lot of stuff... Like, plums, spices that we didn't use at home.
- Poppy seed cake?
- Yes, poppy seed cake, yeah.
You know, the ease of kind of, like, connecting with someone and communicating with them when you're doing something like that, that involves some specific tasks and, like, a specific outcome, is... it's really nice-- it just feels good.
- Well, it seems like that's what you're doing here, still.
- Yeah, yeah.
- It's a very fun place to go.
- Yeah.
- And the food's not bad, either.
- (laughing): Yeah.
- You don't know this yet, but I, I teach people how to make pies.
So now I'm here to have you teach me how to make pies, because you know more than I do.
- Hopefully we meet in the middle, yeah.
- Maple pie.
- Maple, brown butter, custard.
- I'm looking at your pie dough and it's clearly got some whole wheat or rye flour in it.
So tell me about that.
- Yeah, it's got whole wheat.
It's about 80-20 whole wheat to A.P.
- Really?
- Pretty sure.
- How do you know when it's the right size?
- I just know in my heart and with my hands.
So I take my pie pan and I just put it down like this.
You're looking for whatever this is.
It's like a knuckle and a half, I guess.
♪ ♪ Then what I do, I take my fingers and I'm squeezing, almost towards myself or towards the middle of the... - Huh, I've never seen that before.
- ...the middle of the pie crust.
I just give it a squeeze.
♪ ♪ - Everything you do is a little off-beat, different.
I just had a scone this morning that was really quite different.
- I wake up thinking of flavors and then try them out.
Sometimes they're insane and don't work.
And there are times where I just think, like, "I'm making this thing, and... "I don't know, "I'm just going to throw this fenugreek in there and see what happens."
And sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't, but it does kind of open doors to other ideas.
I have some Maldon sea salt here.
Big, flaky sea salt.
Just to kind of gild the lily a little bit.
Oh, I'll get you a fork, maybe you need a fork.
- No, I'll just eat it with my hands.
- I mean, that's how I do it.
- You suggested it, huh?
- Yeah.
- Oh, man.
- That's good.
- Wow.
I don't know if it's the vinegar or the cornmeal or both.
It's not one flavor; there's a lot of stuff going on here.
- Yeah, yep.
The brown butter kind of brings it down to... - I mean, it's still going on, my mouth's still going... - Yep.
- "Mmm, something new here."
- Yeah, I can't wait for you to get to that crispy edge there at the end.
- Oh, so stop talking and keep eating?
♪ ♪ - You know, there are quite a few things I love about Briana Holt at that Tandem Bakery.
The first thing is, I asked her about, "How did you know when the pie pastry is the right size?"
And she said, "In my heart."
- Right.
- So am I going to ask you, is that what you're going to say now?
- (laughing): I wish I could say that.
- But it's sort of off-the-cuff improvisational cooking, but it manages to come together.
- Right.
And you can do that with baking.
A lot of people think you can't, but you actually can.
- You can do that with baking, and that's why you're here.
- And we're going to start with the crust, of course.
And as you know, she made a whole wheat pie dough, but because whole wheat flour can be a little trickier to use in pie doughs, we inverted the proportions of all-purpose flour and whole wheat flour.
So here we have three-quarters cup of all-purpose flour and a half a cup of whole wheat flour.
I'm going to add a tablespoon of sugar.
And then a half a teaspoon of kosher salt.
And I'm going to go ahead and just process this to combine the ingredients.
(processor whirs and stops) And now-- this is seven tablespoons of salted butter, which I'm sure, right away, you realize, it's a lot less than you would normally add... - I was about to say... - You were about to say-- I knew you were about to say that.
Whole wheat flour already contains a bit of fat in it,  just from containing the wheat germ.
And also, it doesn't produce the same amount of gluten as all-purpose flour.
So it's already naturally a little bit more tender.
So we cut way back on the butter, to seven tablespoons.
So I'm just going to sprinkle this on top.
And again, this is chilled.
And now we're going to pulse this into the flour.
It's going to be about ten to 14 pulses, and you want the butter to be cut down to, like, small, pea-sized pieces.
(processor pulsing) It's always a good idea to get, get your hands in there and sort of pick it up, and then you can sort of visually see.
There are still a couple of large peas, but generally, it's, you know, the average is about a small-pea size.
- Okay.
So if you err on one side of the other, is it better to slightly over-process or under-process?
- I would say under.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, because we're going to continue to mix.
We're going to add the water in.
- Okay.
- We have ice water here.
I'm going to add between six and eight tablespoons of water, but we're going to add it one tablespoon a time.
Keep, you know, the ice in the water, make sure it's nice and cold.
Sprinkle one tablespoon on.
And then, how I'm going to mix it, I'm not gonna stir it like you're mixing a batter.
You're going to kind of take your spatula, go underneath the mixture, and then fluff it, and sort of toss it.
And what that's going to do is hydrate the flour, but you're not going to overwork it.
So we're just going to keep going.
And what we're looking for, basically, is, we want it to be all, like, sort of pebbly and crumbly, and we don't want any of that dry... You can still see there's a little bit of dry flour.
So let's try one more.
- You sure you want to risk it?
- Yeah, I think... - This is like a game show.
You sure you want it?
- (laughs): I feel good about it, Chris.
- Take the money, go home.
Come on, Erika.
(laughs) - Now, that's looking good.
It's crumbly.
Now we're going to go ahead and pat this into a ball, to sort of bring all those little crumbles together.
I'm going to use my hands.
I'm going to transfer it to my plastic wrap.
- So this is still, at this point, a little shaggy.
It's not like a yeast dough that's really hydrated and soft and pillowy.
This is still a little shaggy.
- It is shaggy.
It's still coming together when you press it together, it still forms a solid mass, and that's what you're looking for.
And then, once I get it on the plastic wrap, pressing it down to about a four-inch disc, I like to use the edges of the plastic wrap to sort of help.
And then, once that's all wrapped, you can really press it into a disc.
Okay, Chris, so now we're going to put in the refrigerator for at least one hour.
And what this does is allow the flour to hydrate and the butter to re-chill and re-firm, and you can leave it in the fridge for up to 24 hours.
- Okay, so it's been an hour, and it's time to roll out the pie dough.
The moment you've been waiting for.
- How many times in our respective careers have you said that to me?
"It's time to roll out the pie dough!"
(both laugh) - It's  Groundhog Day.
- It's  Groundhog Day.
- So I want to use a good amount of flour on the counter here.
Prevent sticking.
I'm going to put a little bit of flour on top.
And I'm going to go ahead and roll this out.
I like to give it a few turns.
This helps to make sure it's not sticking on the counter, and it also helps it roll out to a more even circle.
- You can see fairly large pieces of butter in the dough.
- Yep, and, well, this is what's going to create those, like, big, flaky layers that we want.
And then I'm just going to roll it over the rolling pin here and then gently transfer it in.
And then, like you do with any pie dough, you want to gently-- you don't want to push it down into the corners, you want to kind of gently lift it and let it kind of go in by itself, because if you pushed it down, that would stretch it out, and then... - It'll shrink quickly.
-Yeah, it'll have a better... Yeah, better likelihood of shrinking.
And then we're just going to trim it here.
We want to leave half an inch of dough overhanging the edge of the pie plate.
We're going to fold it under itself now.
And so what we're looking for is the folded edge to be flush with the edge of the pie plate.
All right, and now we're going to crimp it, and I just use,  I like to use my thumb and my pointer finger, my thumb on the other hand.
And I just push them into each other here.
This is to make a nice fluted edge.
Now, before we put it in the oven, we do have to chill it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
Okay, Chris.
So now the pie dough has been chilling for 30 minutes.
You can go ahead and test it if you want.
- I was going to do it while you weren't watching.
- We're going to line it with heavy-duty aluminum foil.
And we want to make sure we really press it down into the corners of the pie to really press up against every part of the pie so that it retains its shape well.
And then, on top of that, we're gonna be putting two cups of ceramic pie weights.
You want to use either metal or ceramic pie weights.
- Conducts heat better.
- Exactly.
Okay, so now it's ready to bake.
We're going to go ahead and put it in that 375-degree oven.
It's going to take 35 minutes.
And unlike when we usually pre-bake pie doughs, often we will remove the weights when there's about five minutes left.
- Right, like, 20 or 25 minutes.
- To sort of dry out the bottom.
This one, we don't want to do that, because again, with the whole wheat flour, it makes this crust a little more delicate, and we found that the edges would slump even after baking.
Yeah, so we're gonna go ahead and leave the weights on the entire time that we're going to bake it.
Okay, Chris, so, while our crust is baking, we're gonna go ahead and get started on the filling.
First part, we're going to brown the butter.
It's eight tablespoons of salted butter.
We just cut it up into some pieces to help it melt a little faster.
Into a ten-inch skillet over medium-high.
Once this melts, we want to make sure that we swirl it, because you'll see the solids will settle, and we don't want them to burn.
- Now, just tell us, because you want to get it just right, how do you know when it's right?
- You want to be looking for-- as you can see now, you can see some toasting happening.
But what I really look for, honestly, is the aroma.
You will really notice a nutty smell.
It kind of reminds me of hazelnuts.
To see the butter, you have to kind of tilt the pan to get the foam... As you can see, it's really-- the solids are really starting to brown.
You don't want to get it much darker than this, because you don't want it to taste bitter.
When it's done, you want to transfer it quickly into a heatproof bowl so that the cooking will stop.
So we're just going to let this sit and cool for about 15 minutes, because we're going to be adding eggs to it and we don't want to cook the eggs.
And you can see that our pie crust is done and it looks great.
It looks beautiful, it's nice and flaky, and it held its shape.
I went ahead and I turned the oven down from 375 to 325.
For baking our filling, we need it to be at a more gentle temperature.
So, the first thing we're going to add to our butter is a half a cup of white sugar, and then we're going to add a third a cup of honey.
Two tablespoons of fine cornmeal.
And then this is a teaspoon of kosher salt.
And we're going to whisk this together.
Really, you just want to incorporate the ingredients.
I want to make sure the honey, which is quite thick, gets incorporated while the heat of the butter helps to thin that out.
So we have three large eggs and one egg yolk, and before I add them, I'm actually going to break them up a little bit to help them incorporate a little bit easier, because again, we don't want to be whipping a lot of air into the pie, because then you're going to get, you know, little bubbles on the surface.
I'm just going to slowly whisk.
Could you mind holding my bowl for me?
Thank you.
- I've got it.
- (laughs) Okay.
We are good.
Okay, so, that's nice, incorporated, and again, you haven't, like, really whipped in a lot of bubbles.
So now we're going to add the main ingredient, the star ingredient.
This is a half a cup of maple syrup.
You want to look for the darkest maple syrup that you can find, because that will really give you the most robust, nice, smoky flavor to stand out against all the other ingredients.
This is a half a cup of heavy cream.
Two teaspoons of vanilla extract.
And two teaspoons-- we're using cider vinegar here.
Not only does it help curb a little bit of the sweetness, but I find that it enhances all the flavors of all the ingredients.
I'm trying to whisk without really incorporating air.
Okay, that looks great.
Going to go ahead and... Pour this into our crust.
I think this is going to be my new Thanksgiving go-to pie recipe, because it is really good.
Okay, and so, it's ready to go into the oven.
It's, again, it's 325 degrees.
It's going to bake for about 40 to 45 minutes.
You want to look for the edges to puff up a little bit and the center to still be jiggly.
- Okay.
- So, Chris, I know this is the moment you've been waiting for.
This baked for 40 minutes.
I baked it until it was a little bit puffed on the edges and still jiggly in the center.
And then I needed to let it cool for four hours, cool completely for it to set up properly, so that we could go ahead and slice it and eat it.
- That ain't happening in my house... - But before I do...
This is an optional, but I really, this is a very welcome touch-- we're going to sprinkle this with flaky sea salt.
Not only does it really enhance the flavors, but it has a really nice crunch, and it's pretty.
Now I'm ready.
And you can see how silky and custardy the center is.
- Yep.
(laughs) Brings back memories.
- And what I really love about this pie, Chris, it's not one-dimensionally sweet, like you might imagine.
You really can taste all the different notes that are in there-- the nice, nutty, butteriness and the maple and the honey.
- So we drove up to Portland, Maine, to the Tandem Bakery, where Briana Holt is a co-owner and chief baker.
This is a fabulous pie, it's the maple-browned butter pie.
It's my go-to pie now for Thanksgiving.
Really interesting ingredients with the cornmeal and the maple syrup and the vinegar.
You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season of  Milk Street  at MilkStreetTV.com.
Thank you, Briana, and thank you, Erika.
- You're welcome.
- All episodes and recipes from this season of  Milk Street Television  are available for free at our website, MilkStreetTV.com.
Please access our content, including our step-by-step recipe videos, from your smart phone, your tablet, or your computer.
- The new  Milk Street  cookbook is now available and includes every recipe from our TV show, from Greek white bean soup  and Tuscan beef stew to Mexican grilled cheese and Spanish almond cake.
The  Milk Street   cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.
Order your copy of the  Milk Street  cookbook for $23.95, 40% less than the cover price, and receive a  Milk Street  tote with your order at no additional charge.
Call 855-MILK-177, or order online.
- Funding for this series was provided by the following.
- Ferguson's proud to support  Milk Street and culinary crusaders everywhere.
For more information on our extensive collection of kitchen products, we're on the web at fergusonshowrooms.com.
- For 25 years, Consumer Cellular has been offering no-contract wireless plans designed to help people do more of what they like.
Our U.S.-based customer service team can help find a plan that fits you.
To learn more, visit ConsumerCellular.tv.
- Since 1899, my family has shared our passion for everything that goes into our Mutti 100% Italian tomatoes.
Only tomatoes.
Only Mutti.
- Designed by cooks for cooks for over 100 years.
Cookware collection by Regal Ware.
Handcrafted in Wisconsin.
- The AccuSharp knife and tool sharpener, designed to safely sharpen knives in seconds.
AccuSharp: Keep your edge.
♪ ♪