Oh, is there anything better than fresh, warm cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream? I'd be hard pressed to think of it right now. This cobbler can be made with just about any sort of fresh, frozen or re-hydrated fruit. Begin by preheating your oven to 375. Next combine about six cups of fruit with the remaining filling ingredients, and pour into a pie plate (it will form a mound, but don't worry, it will cook down). Put the pie plate on a cookie sheet, and place in the oven.

Next combine the dry ingredients for the biscuit topping in a large bowl. Stir to combine, then add the fat (here I've combined butter and lard, which I highly recommend).

Rub the mixture until it's the texture of coarse meal.

After about 40 minutes, the fruit filling should be cooked and bubbling. Remove it from then oven and turn the heat up to 425.

Now, quickly make the biscuit topping. Pour the buttermilk into the dry mix...

...and with a spatula, bring it together.

After about 30 seconds, you may want to knead it with your hand a little (though I'll warn you, the dough is very sticky).

Pull off pieces of the dough, drop them onto the fruit filling and sprinkle them with sugar. Bake for about 15 minutes...

...or until the topping is nicely browned.

Let cool for 15 minutes, spoon into bowls, and eat with vanilla ice cream.

We picked blueberries on Tuesday, so if I'm going to do that cobbler, I'd better get cracking. Those berries aren't getting any younger. But then using fresh fruit to make cobbler isn't what you'd call "authentic". The fact is that the first cobblers didn't contain any fresh anything, they were simply "cobbled" together from odds and ends by Western trail cooks.

Today we take fresh fruit for granted, but once upon a time there wasn't terribly much of it, especially in the West. Prior to the late 1800's, the vast majority of America's fruit came from the East, where apples, peaches, plums, cherries, berries and the like grew abundantly. Yet there were plenty of people living and working West of the Mississippi, and they liked sweet fruit desserts too. For them, fruit mostly came either dried, preserved in syrup, or in some cases canned.

As for ovens, there weren't any, at least not on the trail. That didn't stop people from baking, however. They simply used camp fire Dutch ovens (though I'm not so sure they stacked them like that), which could handle anything short of a turkey. Yet work space was at a premium, so most cooks shied away from pies and yeast breads in favor of easy, chemically-leavened quick breads.

Here again it's important to note that back in the 1800's people viewed chemically-leavened baked goods in the same way we now view astronaut ice cream: interesting, not particularly tasty, pretty much a food of last resort. The alkaline, chemical taste of baking powder was considered harsh, especially to people who grew up eating yeast-raised bakery bread. But when you're on the trail or eking out a living on a homestead, you have to make do — and even then that meant eating out of boxes and cans.

An old-time peach cobbler probably came together pretty much that way. A can or jar of peaches in syrup was poured into a pan (alternately rehydrated dried fruit mixed with white or maple sugar). Blobs of biscuit dough were plopped on top and the whole thing was baked in a Dutch oven until the dough was browned. Bing, bang, boom. Looked at in that way, this peach cobbler is probably more authentic, at least in spirit, than this one.

White wheat flour is very similar to whole wheat flour, except that it's made from a blend of hard and soft white wheats as opposed the more common (at least in America) red wheats. It has almost identical characteristics to conventional whole wheat flour, save for the fact that it has a milder taste. The reason, because white wheat lacks the phenolic acids and tannins that are responsible for the vaguely bitter and/or astringent taste of red wheat. Increasingly popular among large-scale commercial bakeries, home bakers are using it more and more, especially those whose children and/or spouses are turned off by the flavor or color of whole wheat breads.

Here we have a far easier animal to classify, since whole wheat flour (called "whole meal" flour in other parts of the English-speaking world) is a 100% extraction flour, simply whole wheat berries ground to a fine powder. The types of wheat used in whole wheat flour may vary from mill to mill, but in general whole wheat is a very high protein flour, up around 12-15 percent. That protein figure is deceptive, however, since high protein is usually associated with an open, light crumb, and as we all know a 100% whole wheat loaf can be rather, well, dense.

The reason, because a significant amount of the protein in whole wheat flour isn't actually network-forming gluten from the endosperm, but rather a hodgepodge of miscellaneous proteins from other parts of the wheat berry. Other aspects of whole wheat flour also work to undermine a whole wheat dough's ability to rise. Notably, the jagged bits of bran it contains, which interfere with and/or slice to pieces the gluten networks that try to form. So in terms of performance, whole wheat flour should be considered a modest-to-low protein flour.

Whole wheat flour, because it contains the entire berry, contains more nutrients than white flour, especially in terms of vitamins, minerals, fat and fiber. It also has a much wheatier, more complex flavor. The main drawback of whole wheat flour is its storability. Because whole wheat includes the ground germ of the berry, it's about 2.5 percent fat. The fats it contains, for those of you who've followed previous posts on fat, are mostly unsaturated, which means they go rancid rather quickly — in as little as a month. Which means whole wheat flour is best stored in the freezer, where it will keep for up to a year.

Whole wheat flour comes ultra fine, fine, medium, coarse and stone ground.

Its other names are "family", "occident" or "plain" flour. It is by far the most common type of flour sold in stores, but at the same time, the hardest to define. Why is that? Because all-purpose flour is a blend of hard and soft wheats that almost every miller combines in different proportions. Part of the reason for that has to do with local availability. Harder wheats grow better in the plain states and softer ones grow better in southern states and the Pacific Northwest.

However different mills also have different ideas about what a good "all-purpose" flour is. "AP" flour is by definition a utility player in the kitchen, so it must be of at least passable use for everything from bread to cakes to brownies, as a thickening agent or a coating for fried foods. That's a tall task for a single product, so no wonder regional mills have historically tried to tailor their flours to meet the needs of their local markets. For example, in the North where people have historically eaten more yeast breads, higher protein (gluten) flours are favored, since more gluten gives bread a taller rise and a lighter crumb. In the South, where the biscuit is king, home bakers prefer a softer low-protein flour for a finer, more tender quick bread to eat with their country ham. Switch the two, and you've got trouble, buster.

Southern all-purpose flours can have a protein content as low as 7.5 percent. That's almost as low as the lowest protein cake flours. Try making a rustic bread with that! Big national brand AP flours (mostly made in northern locales) are quite high in protein, about 11.5 percent on average, which is very good for bread, since even commercial bread flours top out at around 13 percent protein. But think of that for a second: the jump from, say, King Arthur all-purpose flour to King Arthur bread flour is 1 percent protein. The variation between different brands of American all-purpose flours, however, can be as much as 5.5 percent. Amazing.

Of course, the amount of gluten isn't the only thing that makes these flours different from one another. As I wrote in the gluten post below, the character of gluten varies from one variety of wheat to another, opening up a whole different set of reasons for why recipes from one region often fail in another. Be aware that if you buy all-purpose flour from a local mill that's unbleached, it will have a shelf life of roughly eight months. After that the fat in the flour (and yes, flour has fat) will start to go rancid. Conventional bleached flour will keep for an almost unlimited period without turning, though it will eventually dry out (because yes, flour has water in it, too).

Cobbler has come to be synonymous with a too-sweet top crust over a too-sweet filling. The result is, er...you know. This recipe sweetens both of the key elements only slightly, so as to let the taste of the fruit shine through.

For the biscuit topping:

6 ounces (a generous cup) all-purpose flour
1 1/2 ounces (scant 1/4 cup) sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 ounces butter (or 1 ounce each butter and lard), cold
1/2 cup lukewarm buttermilk

For the filling:

30 ounces (about 6 cups) blueberries
3 ounces (scant 1/2 cup) sugar
grated zest of 1 1emon
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon cornstarch
pinch cinnamon
pinch salt

Preheat your oven to 375. Combine all the ingredients for the filling and pour into a pie plate (it will form a mound in the plate, but don't worry, it will cook down). Put the pan on a cookie sheet and put the sheet into the oven. Bake for about 25 minutes, until the filling is bubbling and thickened.

Meanwhile, prepare the biscuit topping. Combine the flour, sugar, leavening and salt, then rub in the fat until the texture resembles coarse meal. Measure out the buttermilk and have it ready.

When the fruit is ready, take it out of the oven and turn the oven up to 425. Combine the buttermilk with the biscuit mix, and with a spatula, bring the ingredients together gently into a dough. Tear the dough into eight pieces, and place on top of the hot filling. Sprinkle the biscuits with sugar and put the pan into the oven. Bake for about 15 minutes, until the biscuit topping is browned. Let rest about twenty minutes and serve with vanilla ice cream.

So let's pretend that you run a flour mill and you're making a pretty standard, 70-ish extraction white flour. If you were to grind it and bag it, you'd have what's known as "straight flour". Straight flour isn't commonly used in the US, though it is in places like France. Usually American mills process their flour it a bit more, by sifting it. Sift a bunch of straight flour and you get fine, so-called patent flour and the darker, coarser leftovers, so-called clear flour. Patent flours are divided into several grades according to their gluten (protein) content. From softest to hardest those grades are: Extra Short, First Patent, Second Patent, Medium Patent and Long Patent. Clear flour is divided into three grades according to coarseness: Fancy, First Clear and Second Clear. Fancy clear flour is actually quite fine, fine enough to be used in some types of pastry flour. First Clear is rather coarse, though it's often used by artisan bakers to create sturdy, rustic loaves. To give you a sense for just how coarse Second Clear flour is, it's most common use is as an animal feed.

Extraction is a word you hear quite a lot in artisan baking circles. A better word might be "yield", since the extraction rate denotes how much of the whole wheat berry has gone into a particular type of flour. Thus 100% extraction is a whole grain flour, nothing removed. It contains all of the bran (the hard husk around the wheat berry), all of the germ (the fatty embryo) and all of the endosperm (the starchy majority of the berry).

The general rule of thumb is that as the extraction rate goes down, the whiter the flour gets, since the bran and germ are the first components of the wheat berry to be removed. A typical white flour is around 70% extraction, though extraction rates can go far lower. Why? Because the endosperm of a wheat berry is not a uniform mass. It has layers, the inner parts being the finest, purest repositories of starch. Extraction rates for especially fine, white flours can be as low as 30%.

That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view and what you're making. Higher extraction rates tend to deliver more nutrients and fiber, which is good, lower ones tend to deliver a finer eating experience. Also good.

Bleaching gets a very bad rap in many baking circles (I'm thinking specifically of artisan bread bakers), though it can be a very important thing when it comes to pastry making. Why? Is it so important that our flour be perfectly, pristinely white? And isn't that racist? The truth of the matter is that bleaching is only incidentally about color. It's mostly about batter/dough characteristics and rise.

But first what exactly is "bleaching"? In general, bleaching means exposing flour to chlorine gas via some sort of aeration mechanism. The gas bubbles though the flour leaving no residues or residual flavors. Nor does it, contrary to popular myth, diminish the flour's nutritional value. What it does do is partially denature the protein (gluten) in the flour. This has the effect of making the batter and/or dough the flour is made from somewhat less extensible and springy, and therefore more tender.

However the chief effect that chlorine has on flour is that it renders the starch more susceptible to gelation. Which is to say it increases the tendency of individual starch molecules to break off from starch granules (i.e. bits of ground wheat endosperm) when they're exposed to moisture and heat. These individual molecules go on to bond with one another (loosely) to form the various structures that allow a baked good to rise.

All that translates into three things. First, it means a higher rise generally, which is great for things like cakes and éclair shells. Second, the increased gelation means a pastry maker can add more liquid and/or sugar to a given recipe without having the pastry fall (more liquid and/or sugar mean increased tenderness and/or sweetness, both good things for the pastry arts). Lastly, the increased/quicker gelation keeps doughs like, say, biscuit doughs, from spreading out on the pan, which means a taller product and prouder Southern grannies.

Bleached flour isn't good for everything, of course, bread being a great example. here you generally want as much extensibility and elasticity in your dough as possible (it creates big holes). You also want as much flavor as you can get, and bleaching, truth be told, does tend to mute the wheaty taste of many kinds of flour. So, different flours for different uses. I keep a supply of both bleached and unbleached flour around and so should you. But as a general rule of thumb whenever you're making pastry or cake: reach for the bleached variety.

Here in the states, we're used to classifying flours based on how much gluten (protein) they contain, and that's reasonable, since the gluten in our wheat, regardless of the type of wheat, is pretty much all the same. It's elastic and strong, which means the molecules readily link up with each other to form long, stretchy chains that don't pull apart very easily. That's not true of a lot of European flours, which often contain glutens of very different characters. In Italy, for example, most wheat gluten is weak (which is to say, not stretchy), but very, very hard (i.e. firm to the bite). So when we say an Italian flour is "high in gluten" that's technically correct, though that gluten doesn't deliver the same result as an American high gluten flour, if you follow me. And that's why, when American bakers start talking about foreign flours as they relate to baked goods like pizzas and baguettes, things tend to get very confusing very fast.

Italians are far more likely to speak of their flours in terms of the fineness of the grind. The French, how high the "ash" content is. Try talking gluten to bakers in either one of those countries and you're likely to be greeted with a blank stare. It's part of the reason baked goods are so hard to translate from say, France to America. We not only speak different literal languages, we speak different technical languages.

The main thing to remember, the more you get into the finer points of international baking, is that on the far side of the ocean gluten is a highly variable thing. It's not like fructose in an apple or citric acid in a lemon — it's either there or it isn't. Rather, it's more like, oh don't know...coffee or pizza. Wherever you go you're pretty much guaranteed to find it, but it changes (sometimes radically) from place to place.

The majority of the flour we consume is made from a single species of wheat: Triticum aestivum, also called "bread wheat" or "common wheat". It's a species that's been cultivated for hundreds of years, and like all crops that have been widely grown over long periods, different forms of it have evolved and/or been created over time. Nowadays we grow many different types of T. aestivum, all with different properties.

In America our most common wheats are Hard Red Spring Wheat, Hard Red Winter Wheat, Soft Red Wheat, Hard White Wheat and Soft White Wheat. All are used, sometimes alone but usually in combination, to make the flours we find on grocery store shelves. Of the varieties, the hard wheats make up about three quarters of the annual harvest in the US, soft wheats about 20%, and oddballs like Club Wheat and Durum (both of which are different species of wheat, and are used for cake flour and pasta respectively) make up the rest.

"Red" wheats are so named because of the reddish-brown color of the bran that surrounds the endosperm and germ. "White" wheats, by comparison, have a pale tan seed coat (and since they don't require the same bleaching as red wheats, are typically more expensive). "Spring" wheats are so named because they're planted in the spring and harvested in the fall. "Winter" wheats because they are planted in the late fall and harvested in the summer.

The ground seed of wheat grass. How complicated can it be? In fact flour is a much more complicated subject than most people think. Far from being a simple white powder we buy in five pound bags, flours come in a bewildering variety of types and styles. High gluten and low gluten, high extraction and low extraction, bleached and unbleached, finely ground and coarsely ground, foreign and domestic. Understandably, I get quite a few questions about it. This week I hope to sift through (no pun intended) a lot of the questions I've received over the past several months in the interest of creating a permanent resource that will answer basic flour questions. Let's start with the standard flours available at the supermarket.

I refer you to Mexico Bob's masterful post on the subject, here.

This week I'm going to deliver on a promise that I've made to several readers over the past six months or so, and put up some posts — some "crib notes", shall we say — on different types of flour. The content will be used to make up a new category under Joe's Baking Basics that everybody will be able to refer to in the future. But, since it's no fun going through a whole week with nothing but technical information to read, I'm also going to do some cobbler as well. I've talked about cobbler in the past, but never put up a recipe. The Pastry family will be heading off to do our annual blueberry pick this week, so I'll have some good fresh filling for it.

Readers Ellen and Linda both pointed out last week that part of the reason lard fell into disrepute in the middle of the last century was because of its association with poverty. I think that's at least partly true. If you look around at all the places where lard has been popular (the American south, rural Mexico, Hungary, Italy, France, the list goes on...), one thing that's common to them all, at least historically, is poverty. As I wrote last week, pigs are terrific poor peoples' food. They're easy to take care of, they grow quickly, breed prolifically and eat just about anything.

Of course, these days poor peoples' food is all the rage (except of course among the poor). However in the past one of the ways people of wealth distinguished themselves from poor people was by avoiding the things they wore, ate and drank. It's been observed that haute cuisine contains very few pork dishes relative to other meats. I've never thought about that particular point, but on the face of it, it rings true.

I think if most of us (at least here in America) are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that one of the first associations most of us have with the word "lard" is poor southern and/or hillbilly folk. Does that make us all closet "lardists" in some way? I think it does, and suggest that, as penance, we all eat more lard.

Last week's posts really brought the crackling lovers out of the woodwork! I received all sorts of great stories and literally scores of recipes. Here's one from reader Brigitta:

Your blog post brought up old memories for me! My mother was Hungarian, and she would occasionally render her own lard. She did it on the stove top, in a wide stew pot, but otherwise she did it the same way as you describe: dicing up the leaf lard and starting it off with water in the pot. The best part of the process is what she would make with the cracklings. She made a yeast biscuit with cracklings which we would immediately scarf up. They wouldn't last even half a day. Crackling biscuits are a VERY traditional and ubiquitous Hungarian ...er...dish, I guess. Hungarians eat them with tea, or coffee, or with beer, or with wine, or with brandy, or with pretty much everything.

Brigitta sent in a variety of recipe links including this one and this one. Don Cuevas from My Mexican Kitchen wrote:

Funny, I was just thinking a little about cracklings. Here in central western Mexico, we have access to a good supply of cracklings, in the form of the asientos derived from cooking carnitas. There's als lots of chicharrón about, which might lend itself to some cracklin' cornbread; or better, hot water corn cakes with cracklin'.

Distantly related, from Ashkenazic Jewish cuisine, is a salad of coarsely grated black radish, chopped hard cooked egg, chopped onion, a little salt, and a light dressing of melted chicken schmaltz plus some grebenes. The latter are the cracklings from rendering chicken fat with the nearly ubiquitous onions to an almost burnt state. I suggest a nice slice of rye bread to go with the black radish salad.

I also learned that cracklings are called scratchings in Britain, grillons in France, and that variations of cracking bread and buns are enjoyed in places as disparate as Germany, Italy, Greece, Afghanistan and Iran (though in the Middle East their cracklings are made from lamb fat, and in Argentina, they're made from beef).

Quite a few lard lovers also checked in, as you might imagine, talking about all the ways lard is enjoyed around the world. A story from an Australian world traveler reminded me of a beer hall I once went to in Prague, some 25 years ago now, where I was served slices of lard with slivered onions and paprika. Who needs dinner with pub grub like that?

It's darn good to know that there are so many crackling and lard lovers out there. In fact it feels like a subculture. Maybe we need to start our own pan-national society. Could cracklings bring peace to the world? I wonder...

Like all truly great things to eat, this is extremely simple. Start by preheating your oven to 450, and measuring out your (room temperature) ingredients. Add a tablespoon or so of bacon drippings or lard or butter to a 10-inch cast iron skillet:

Put the pan in the oven to heat while you make up your batter (you only want it there for a couple of minutes, so the fat doesn't burn). Whisk together the dry ingredients:

Next, whisk together the wet ingredients:

Combine the two...

...and whisk until incorporated.

Lastly, whisk in the cracklings.

Remove the pan from the oven and pour in the batter. It will sizzle a bit. Turn down the heat to 350 and bake for 25 minutes until golden. Flip the bread out of the pan so the crispy side is up. Slice into wedges and serve.

What's a great use for cracklings? Brothers and sisters, here's one of the best: cracklin' corn bread. Talk about a definitively southern bread, this one has it all: lard, corn, buttermilk. Pleasantly coarse and rustic, you'd have found southerners eating something almost exactly like this 150 years ago. To give it that extra country flare, make it in a 9- or 10-inch cast iron skillet.

9 ounces (2 cups) yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1 large egg
1 cup cracklings
1 tablespoon lard, butter or bacon drippings

Preheat your oven to 450°F. Once the oven is hot, put the tablespoon of fat into the skillet and put the skillet in the oven to heat. Meanwhile, mix up your batter. Whisk the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl. Whisk the buttermilk and egg together in another bowl, then combine the wet and dry ingredients, whisking just until combined. Lastly, whisk in the cracklings. Remove the pan from the oven and pour in the batter, it will sizzle appealingly. Turn the heat down to 350 and return the pan to the oven. Bake until golden, about 25 minutes. When baked, flip the bread out of the pan so the crispy crust faces up. Slice into wedges and serve, with a drizzle of honey if desired.

Because big, greedy mega-corporations forced us to! That, at least, is the pat answer you'll find (expressed either implicitly or explicitly) in most major-media pieces on the subject. It's an answer that belies a shocking ignorance of our food history (as well as basic economic principles like supply and demand).

Flash back about 125 years in America and you'd find a nation of cooks who, just like today, wanted/needed fats for various purposes: baking, cooking, frying, spreading on toast, that sort of thing. In those days, different fats were favored in different regions of the country according to price and local availability. In the wealthier north and northeast, where dairying was common, people used a lot of butter. In southern states, which were far poorer, people used a lot of lard.

Liquid oils were largely unheard of then, because extracting oils from seeds was a laborious, and therefore very expensive, process. Solid fats were the order of the day. The problem was that they were often quite expensive. Butter prices fluctuated even more wildly then than they do now. As for lard, it wasn't uncommon, depending on market conditions, for the fat on a pig to be worth more than the meat. Rancidity was also a big problem for both types of fats, which prevented them from being kept very long, or being shipped very far.

Things began to change when technology made it possible to start extracting large amounts of edible oils from the germs of seeds (notably cotton seeds). However the end product was a liquid oil that most Americans were ambivalent about, in part because they had very little flavor, but mostly because they weren't as versatile as solid fats. That changed with the invention of hydrogenation. Crisco (crystallized cottonseed oil) was invented by Proctor & Gamble in 1911, and was considered something of a miracle at the time. It was not only solid, it was cheap and kept at room temperature for up to two years.

So, it wasn't very long before shortening began to cut severely into lard sales. Soybeans were introduced to the U.S. in the 30's, introducing another abundant source of vegetable oil into the market. And then of course, in the 50's and early 60's, medical studies linking animal fats with cholesterol and cholesterol with heart disease, began to be published. It was the death knell for lard in most of the first world, and not coincidentally, the time when ad campaigns like the one I put up two weeks ago were launched by desperate meat packers. All was for naught, however, as lard quickly faded to semi-obscurity. Shortening and margarine (the hydrogenated alternative to animal-based butter) were ascendant.

Which pretty much brings us up to where we are now — with lard, perhaps, poised for a reversal of fortune. Of course it's doubtful that it'll ever return to its former prominence, liquid oils being so prevalent now. But who knows? We may be entering the new Great Age of the Pig.

There's good news and bad news here, though overall it seems the scales tip in lard's direction. Calorie-wise, lard has more of them, about 15% more, which makes a lot of sense when you consider that butter is about 15% water. Compositionally, though, there are certain factors that make lard more desirable, at least based on the (ehem) current thinking of many researchers and nutritionists.

Fat, you see, is not a uniform substance. It's made up of lipid molecules of many different configurations. As I've mentioned many times before, lipids are basically "E"-shaped molecules, consisting of a "backbone" of glycerol and three fatty acids. The fatty acids on the backbone are all different from one another, and more than that, vary from molecule to molecule. Where molecules in a fat have similar structures, they will often form solid crystals. Others won't. It's this mixture of solids and liquids that gives fats like butter and lard their semi-solid consistency.

As I mentioned in my posts on trans fats, fats that are saturated tend to be firm at room temperature, those that are unsaturated tend to be liquid (for a helpful metaphor on that subject, see this post on shortening and oil). Unsaturated fats, it's thought, are better for you, said to have the effect of raising the so-called "good cholesterol" in the body.

Butter has unsaturated fats in its lipid mix, but it has more saturated fats. Lard is just the reverse, more unsaturated fats than saturated fats, which makes it a "better fat" as the present-day thinking goes. It's even said that the saturated fats that are present in lard have a neutral effect on the "bad" cholesterol in the body. I don't know about that. Come to think of it, I don't know about any of it, for according to the results of the Women's Health Initiative study, none of it really matters to your health anyway. But what are you gonna do?

Personally, I don't think it really matters which fat is "better for you" and which fat is "worse". Splitting hairs over it, to me, makes no sense whatsoever. Eat happily but moderately, and exercise, and I can't see how a body can go wrong.