Those are pie weights, not mini marshmallows!

This year Gary and I decided to politely turn down any Thanksgiving day invites and just do our own thing. Though I had wanted to have my Thanksgiving feast at a fine but unpretentious local restaurant, I quickly warmed to Gary’s suggestion of cooking up our own festive dinner.

We discussed entrée and side-dish options, and for desserts we concluded we would each make (or at least choose) a favorite or promising dessert, and there was no question that his was going to be of the pomaceous persuasion and mine was going to be pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin. I was eager to make a perfectly pumpkin something — though something other than my usual goof-proof cookies, breads, and muffins — and do it right this time.

My last attempt at pumpkin pie required a phalanx of floor fans assembled inside and outside my galley kitchen to contain the smoke emanating from the oven from after I spilled most of the pie’s raw contents onto the preheated oven floor. I don’t recall actually producing a pie that day.

For this Thanksgiving, I had decided I would enthusiastically (and carefully) reattempt pumpkin pie.

That is, until I watched Secrets of a Restaurant Chef’s “Secrets to Seared Skate” episode in August. Anne Burrell whipped up what looked to be an easy and scrumptious Pumpkin Ginger Bread Pudding. Her recipe featured fresh pumpkin (kabocha squash, specifically), heavy cream, and chunks of brioche. (See the video clip here.) It sounded amazing. Screw the pumpkin pie! This year it’s pumpkin bread pudding! I printed out the recipe and kept it in a safe but visible place, eagerly anticipating making and eating it.

That is, until two months later, when Gary and I, seeking T-day turkey pointers, watched America’s Test Kitchen’s “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving” episode. In this episode, the test-kitchen folk demonstrated a slow-roasted turkey and their latest pumpkin pie. (The video of this pie demo is at http://www.cooksillustrated.com/video/default.asp?newVideo=y&docid=17766 and the recipe is at http://www.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/login.asp?docid=17662, though you might have to register online to see either of them. Alternatively, you can track down the November/December 2008 issue of Cook’s Illustrated to get the recipe.) As America’s Test Kitchen so often does, they made their recipe, techniques, and method not only look practical, easy, and delicious, but also mandatory for achieving a successful result. They convinced me their pumpkin pie would be a winner.

Alton Brown (top) and America's Test Kitchen (middle, bottom) promise pleasing pumpkin pies

And so I was back to making pie. I bought all the ingredients for the test-kitchen recipe, including canned pumpkin purée (“We did test [between] fresh and canned pumpkin; no one could tell the difference, and canned saves you so much time,” said Julia Collin Davison), fresh ginger, heavy cream, shortening, and a can of candied yams — something I wouldn’t normally consider purchasing.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Alton Brown’s Good Eats’ “American Classic IX: Pumpkin Pie” episode aired. Along with his latest pumpkin pie recipe, Brown demonstrated how easy it was to make fresh sugar-pumpkin purée (save having to use a cleaver to whack one open). He also implied that NOT making your own purée was insanity. Said he, “Pumpkin puree is tasty and versatile stuff. Since it’s stupid-simple to fabricate, and it freezes well, there’s no excuse not to keep it on hand at all times.”

I started to feel very, very guilty about planning to use canned pumpkin in my holiday pie.

I searched my small cooking library for further guidance, thinking I would go with the first pumpkin-puree opinion I could find to break the test kitchen-Alton Brown pumpkin-purée stalemate. The tiebreaker: Alice Waters. In her book The Art of Simple Food she claims that “It’s easy to make your own pumpkin or squash purée and it makes the best-tasting pie.”

I mused about trying the test kitchen recipe with both fresh and canned pumpkin; that is, make two test-kitchen pies — one with fresh pumpkin, one with canned.

Early the next morning I lay awake in bed, obsessed with thoughts of “with the maple syrup and the candied yams potentially masking any true pumpkin flavor in the test-kitchen pie, is it really fair or feasible to use that particular recipe to compare fresh and canned pumpkin?” Before long, I jolted out of bed and searched online for the Alton Brown pumpkin pie recipe. It too called for assertive flavors that may overpower the relatively gentle pumpkin taste, namely dark brown sugar and a rather gingery crust (ginger snaps plus ground ginger.)

I decided to try both recipes as written to see which one I like better and compare the fresh and canned pumpkin along the way.

Yummy pumpkin purée

Pumpkin prep

Preparing and puréeing a sugar pumpkin might be easy, but it ain’t quick. I casually tracked my time:

• Removing stems, sawing in half (I did okay with just a chef’s knife, though my halves were not quite even), removing seeds and strings, and picking escapee seeds off the floor: 30 minutes
• Baking: 40 minutes
• Cooling: 50 minutes
• Scooping cooked pumpkin from skins and pureeing: 20 minutes
• Eating purposefully leftover puree straight from food processor bowl: 5 minutes
• Cleaning and drying food processor: 7 minutes

So that’s two and a half hours necessary to bake and purée a small sugar pumpkin or two — not including time required to clean and roast the squash seeds if you so desire. If you just count the active time, yes, it’s more like only an hour, but this is certainly something you might not want to do the same day you make the pie. Thank goodness I did this Tuesday evening for the Wednesday baking day.

Alton Brown’s pumpkin pie

Some of the early reviewers of the Brown pumpkin pie recipe stated that it did not yield enough crumb matter for adequate pie-plate coverage. So I one-and-a-halfed the crust part of the recipe. My first attempt at loading the crumby crust into the pan (after following directions to the letter) resulted in more or less a bunch of crumbs piled along the sides of the pan. There were too many crumbs and they did not have much binding them together, resulting in a house-of-cards situation — will it hold, or will it fall if I look at it the wrong way?  I added more melted butter in 1-tablespoon increments, ultimately adding a total of 3 tablespoons extra butter before I was satisfied with its crust-building properties. As instructed, I baked the crust for 12 or so minutes in a 350-degree oven. I trusted the recipe’s crust baking time, perhaps to my own disservice, as I discovered later . . .

From the top: Alton Brown's Pumpkin Pie, 2010

(Note: Missing from the Alton Brown recipe I found online was the tip, conveyed in the broadcast episode, to transfer the pumpkin mixture to a pitcher and then pour the mixture directly into crust, which would already be on a half-sheet pan already on a partially pulled-out oven rack in the preheated oven. Also missing from the online recipe was the note that there may be leftover filling, and the internal temperature at which the pie filling can be considered done (195 degrees in the center, 205 degrees at the edges).

The gingersnap crust did burn around edges towards end of the cooking time. And as the pie cooled it sank and cracked a bit. Neither event contributed to a pretty pie!

When serving the pie, I had trouble removing pieces from the pan with the “crust” intact; I tried various tools to no avail. The “crust” was a soft, buttery cookie goo. Maybe I had added too much extra butter after all.

And perhaps there was too much “crust” overall — the side view of a slice revealed a relatively narrow (three- or four-to-one) filling-to-bottom ratio.

America’s Test Kitchen’s pie

The making and rolling of the test-kitchen “vodka crust” pie dough went very well. My new tapered-end rolling pin worked beautifully. I didn’t center the crust perfectly in the pan, but I wasn’t too concerned at the time since it looked OK to me. What was unclear was whether or not one package of pie weights (about a cup?) was enough, or if I should use a whole quart of weights, as they did in the test-kitchen demo.

To blind-bake this crust, I was instructed to line it with foil, fill with the weights, and bake on a rimmed baking sheet for 15 minutes, remove foil and weights and bake 5 to 10 minutes more.

Once my crust was in the pie plate, and the overhang pinched and fluted to the best of my ability, I found it difficult to transfer the empty unbaked crust pie plate to hot baking sheet — how do you do that without burning hand or jeopardizing the edges of the crust with bulky oven mitts? And then the pie plate went swoosh swoosh across the smooth pan — how could I add friction, I wondered. By lining the pan with crumpled-up aluminum foil?

Puffy pie crust!

From the top: Pumpkin pie via America's Test Kitchen recipe (after I gingerly removed plastic wrap that had "kissed" the top)

In addition to the pie plate sliding across the hot sheet pan, the entire crust shifted inside the plate while baking, yielding a crustless pie-plate rim on one side and overly overhung crust on the other.

When I removed foil, the crust was still the color of uncooked pie. While it baked the 5 to 10 minutes longer without foil or weights, it got extra puffy. Should I have poked holes in the crust to avoid this? Or baked it longer while it still had pie weights and foil? Did I not use enough pie weights to begin with? And the most pressing question concerning the over-puffed crust: would all the filling fit? (The answer: no! There was two small ramekin’s worth of filling left over.)

Lack of vigilance led me to remove the pie from the oven when the temperature reading in center was five degrees higher than the amount specified in recipe (which was 175 degrees).

Some moisture had accumulated on the top of the pie as it cooled. I tried to carefully blot it away with a paper towel, but that was marring the beautifully smooth surface so I quickly aborted that operation. Another conundrum was how to protect the pie while in the fridge — plastic wrap turned out to be a bad idea, as the plastic stuck to the filling, further marring its silky surface.

Serving and tasting

The Alton Brown pie was slightly denser, deeper spice, definite pumpkin flavor. The crust was a failure, though.

It was not easy to  to lift slices from the Alton pie with all that ginger mush at the bottom. (It was slightly easier to remove slices the next morning with the pie straight from the fridge, and, yes, that does mean I had pumpkin pie for breakfast that day.)

When it came time to serve the America’s Test Kitchen pie, I had a hard time getting the crust off the edge of the pie plate. I had to apply the culinary eqivalents of sawing and chiseling! The test-kitchen pie had a sweeter, less spicy flavor profile than the Brown pie. I got a fresh, clean flavor from the filling and crust, though the candied yam seemed to upstage the pumpkin. (Perhaps this was a symptom of knowing there were yams in the filling in the first place — neither Gary nor my mom could taste the yams.) But both crust and filling had luxurious textures, though I’d prefer something slightly more fork- and knife-sturdy for the filling. I didn’t like having to wipe filling off the pie server after each cut.

Conclusion

Pumpkin pie via recipes from America's Test Kitchen and Alton Brown

The test-kitchen pie offered a better presentation by far — it was much nicer to look at, even with its lopsided crust. And that crust really liked to scoot around the pie plate; but that did made it easier to pick up half the pie at once and transfer to the other pie plate after half of each had been eaten.

For both pies, there was the dilemma how to neatly add the liquid filling to the pies with the pie plate, half-sheet pan, and oven rack pulled out of oven. This was an important step to me after my burned-filling-on-oven-floor mishap. The pulled-out oven rack was always at a slight angle toward me, enough to affect the level of the pie filling so it was hard to judge if I had poured in the right amount of filling.

And what about the pumpkin purée? The homemade purée was lovely to behold with its healthy orange color, delicious without any embellishment, and worth the effort for minimally produced savories and sweets. And as I mentioned earlier, though it is not too hard to make, you definitely want to allow yourself two or three hours extra time. Compared to purée straight from the can (for this taste test, I used One Pie pumpkin), the fresh purée had fresher taste and appearance, though the canned version tasted better than I had expected it would.

If I could only have one more piece of either pie, I’d probably go for the test-kitchen pie, but it’s close. I guess the textures of filling and crust win me over. Gary, however, preferred Alton Brown’s pie.

Next year I’m going to make that bread pudding. . . !

Oh, how quickly a bunch of perfectly just-a-hair-underripe bananas, purchased with the best of healthy-and-light-eating intentions, can go from fit for snacking or slicing into a bowl of Kashi Crunch to must-freeze-for-pops-and-smoothies to oh-dear-its-time-for-banana-bread. The inevitability of an upcoming banana-bread episode fills me with both glee and guilt—glee because I have an excuse to bake one of my all-time favorite snacks breakfasts nibbles splurges, guilt because most quick breads and muffins—no matter how much good-for-you lowfat yogurt, whole-wheat flour, or unprocessed wheat bran goes in them—are sweet, calorie-dense temptations. You think I’m going to have just one slice? I don’t think so . . .

Two simple criteria make a recipe splurgeworthy. First, the taste, texture, and overall delight must be worth the time and trouble to make it. Second, the experience has to be enjoyable enough to justify the overabundance of fat, sugar, and calories I will end up consuming. Of course, finding splurgeworthy recipes takes considerable trial and error.

→ Click here to go directly to the discussion of the Cook’s Illustrated recipe.

Banana breads I’ve known and sometimes loved

From As You Like It

The shortest and easiest recipe for banana bread I’ve used boasts preparation instructions of no more than thirty-eight words, several of which are superfluous. Here it is, actress Linda Purl’s submission to a fundraising cookbook from the Williamstown Theatre Festival Guild:

BANANA BREAD
(from As You Like It, Williamstown Theatre Festival Guild, 1993. Reprinted with permission.)

3 ripe or as-close-to-rotten bananas as you dare
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup raisins or dried currants
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
4 tablespoons melted butter

Mash the peeled bananas by hand, and then mix in all the remaining ingredients, in the order listed above. Pour the batter into a buttered loaf pan, and bake in a 325 degree F. oven for one hour. Serves 6 (one loaf)

As easy as one-bowl brownies! I did make this bread recently, but I don’t remember what I thought of it. But I do remember when I tried it years ago and it was indeed my first loaf for which I “dared” wait until my bananas got really dark. But I already had a go-to banana-bread recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, The Book of Bread.

From The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones

Though the Book of Bread recipe also made just one loaf, if offered more to love that the Purl bread: more sugar, more egg, more flour, more leavening, more stir-ins, and more moisture (here, in the form of yogurt). It was the first of many “yogurt-enriched” banana breads I would try. I assume the recipe requests plain yogurt of some kind, but according to my in-cookbook notation of December 13, 1992, I payed that detail no mind. I noted, “Very Good (baked with extra banana, low-fat vanilla yogurt, and hazelnuts instead of pecans).”

For at least 18 years I’ve sought a banana bread with more banana flavor than the average recipe offered.

From Eating Well

Despite the success of the Book of Bread recipe, in recent years I’ve embraced lower-fat, lower-calorie, or just healthier banana breads. In retrospect, the two recipes I’ve already mentioned don’t have all that much fat to begin with; their main evils are the sugars and white flour. Bread is bread, after all, and any serving of any bread that’s greater than a modest slice can really ratchet up the calorie count, with our without added sugar. But it doesn’t hurt to add some fiber, in theory, so I’ve most recently relied on a great banana-muffin recipe from the Winter 2004 Eating Well; I’ve made them at least three times just in the past year.

The Eating Well Banana-Bran Muffins recipe calls for more sugar and less banana than the others, but adds buttermilk, wheat bran, canola oil, and optional chocolate chips and walnuts. I always add the chips and walnuts, so we go from low-fat to not-so-low-fat in no time. Still, it’s an easy and healthy recipe (remember, boys and girls, walnuts in moderation are a good thing!), and nicely portion-controlled because they’re muffins. Anyway, the preparation is just as easy as the others (and unprocessed wheat bran can be had super-cheap from the Whole Foods bulk bins). If you add the optional chocolate chips and walnuts, a delicious muffin results, but I cannot pass fair judgment on the banana flavor because the chocolate and walnut might be upstaging it and I haven’t yet tried this recipe without the optional accessories.

From Bon Appétit

Photo: Editor At Large at wikicommons.org

My “healthy” banana-bread choices may reek of hypocrisy — but sometimes I throw the “healthy” criterion out the window altogether. Just last month I was seeking an ultra-yummy banana bread, healthfulness be damned. I took to Epicurious.com, relying on reader comments to find a popular and well-recommended bread. The winner: Banana Bread With Chocolate Chips and Walnuts from Bon Appétit.

Now we’re in really high-fat territory, with a whole stick of butter — twice as much pure fat as the other recipes in this collection — before you add larger amounts of chocolate chips and toasted walnuts than the Eating Well recipe required. Nevertheless, I wanted a treat. And this recipe had easy preparation instructions, as do the others, except that the chips and nuts aren’t folded in as a final step as in other quick-bread recipes. Instead, you initially “combine chocolate chips and walnuts in a small bowl; add 1 tablespoon flour mixture and toss to coat.” Then, when the batter is ready:

Spoon 1/3 of batter into prepared pan. Sprinkle with half of nut mixture. Spoon 1/3 of batter over. [sic!] Sprinkle with remaining nut mixture. Cover with remaining batter. Run knife through batter in zigzag pattern.

So, the chocolate chips and walnuts form a streusel. Cool. I couldn’t wait to see that zigzag pattern in action.

But, alas, with added complexity comes added opportunity for mishaps, even if you’ve read the recipe ahead of time. I had waited until I started assembling ingredients to toast the walnuts in a small skillet. As soon as the nuts started toasting, they quickly browned and continued to darken even after I took the pan off the heat. To prevent them from burning, I dumped them into the bowl of chocolate chips and started to stir — melting the chocolate chips! Panicked, I threw the bowl into the fridge — what would you do? Ten minutes later, I retrieved what was now a giant chocolate-nut cluster. Was it a huge, tasty chunk of candy? Yes. Was it streusel? No. I let it rest on the counter a bit before trying to break it into as many little pieces as possible with a knife, then proceeded with the recipe. My little chocolate pieces were too big to distribute as a streusel—no way could I cover two layers of batter with these chunks—so one-third of the way up, I got a thick chocolate-nut layer.

The resultant loaf was satisfyingly moist and sweet—but the chocolate layer, though isolated, carried most of the flavor. Not necessarily a bad thing, but banana breads should taste like banana.

The Cook’s Illustrated recipe

Since my latest banana-bread event was so devilish, I had given myself an edict of no more baking for the rest of the summer. Pumpkin breads and apple muffins can wait until fall!

That edict stood until the Friday I spotted the cover line “Extreme Banana Bread: SIx Bananas in One Loaf” on the latest issue of Cook’s Illustrated (August 2010). Whoa! Six bananas!!!!!! I bought the issue without even looking inside, except to quickly check the ingredient list. Indeed — six bananas!!!!!! I hightailed it to Whole Foods and bought a bunch of seven large bananas, figuring the bananas should be bread-ready by the following weekend.

Only after committing some precious weekend time and a large bunch of bananas did I read the accompanying article, by Andrea Geary. In sum:

The goal: “Figure out how to cram as many bananas as possible into the loaf without sinking its cake-like texture” or “turning the loaf into pudding.”

The challenge: Adding extra banana oomph without weighing the bread down or jeopardizing the texture with extra moisture

The alleged solution: Banana juice, extracted from the bananas then reduced to about half

Full disclosure: I started preparations (that is, began assembling the mise en place) Saturday night at 9:00, though recent experience had prompted me to toast the walnuts ahead of time. Another disclosure: I find nothing wrong with banana bread with a pudding-like texture, especially when the bread is frozen.)

Step 1. Standard: prepare loaf pan, whisk together dry ingredients.

Step 2. Here’s where complexity starts to breed mishaps. To prepare the bananas for the extraction of their juices via the microwave, I placed the bananas in large bowl, sealed the bowl with plastic wrap, and vented the plastic with paring knife — all as instructed. Then I was to microwave the bananas for five minutes “until bananas are soft and have released liquid.” After three minutes I had detected very little liquid, so I set the oven for two minutes more and walked away. Back at 1:45 into this round, I noticed ballooning plastic wrap that might soon pop, despite the paring-knife vents. “This can’t be good,” I thought. Sure enough, puddles of banana juice had formed on the plate and floor of the oven.

Banana-juice puddles

The bananas gave off a nice aroma with their juice, but what a mess! I quickly removed the sticky bowl, peeled off the plastic, and dumped its contents into a strainer already waiting over another bowl.

There was no easy way to determine how much juice was lost, so I nuked the sixth of my seven bananas. More concerned about the potential loss of banana flavor than the possibility of adding too much moisture, I threw the entire replacement banana, guts and juice, into the strainer with the other five.

The bananas should drain for fifteen minutes; I hadn’t accounted for that much extra time (I’m often guilty of not reading recipes closely ahead of time). Well, at least I can clean out the microwave while the bananas drain. The result: just under a cup of juice.

Juice from five to six bananas.

According to step 3, reducing the juice to one-quarter cup should take about five minutes if cooked over medium-high heat. Impatience set in after ten minutes of pot watching with no noticeable reduction. I shut off the heat and decided to use whatever was in the pan after the bubbling died down. Instead of the prescribed quarter-cup of reduction, I had—and used—a scant half-cup of who-knows-how-reduced-it-really-is juice. This step also required that I “stir liquid into bananas, and mash with potato masher until fairly smooth.” This baffled me for two reasons: I thought it would make more sense to do any banana mashing before the addition of liquid, and the occasional stirring of the bananas and pressing them against the strainer while they were draining (as instructed in step 2) gave me a smooth enough mash that the use of my Oxo Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher had no effect.

Step 4 instructs to slice the sixth (now my seventh) banana and shingle the slices on both long sides of the loaf before baking. I was concerned I would run out of slices halfway down the second side, so I alternated sides while applying slices. That worked well; there were enough banana slices as long as there was not too much overlap. After successfully shingling the slices, I was so excited to be finally putting the batter in the oven (as it was, the bread would not be out of the oven until after midnight), I forgot to sprinkle some sugar on top, which Geary says would have helped “the buttery slices caramelize” and given the loaf “an enticingly crisp, crunchy top.”  How disappointing. I do love enticingly crisp, crunchy tops.

After 65 minutes, a toothpick came out clean and the top was quite brown, so I removed the loaf and let it rest. After the 15-minute in-pan cooling, I was ready to flip it onto a wire rack to cool further. I’ve done this with breads a gazillion times, but this evening (or was it morning already?) I was stymied. Normally I’d put my hand or a dishcloth over the top of the bread to catch the loaf in my palm before inverting the loaf onto the rack. But this bread, though gorgeous, was moist and a little sticky on top, with two fragile rows of banana shingles down each side.

Lookin' good, but how shall I invert this moist, fragile loaf onto the rack?

Without further thought, I quickly but gently released the loaf upside-down onto the rack then coaxed it onto its bottom before the top had time to settle on the rack. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice until it was too late that one of the rungs had snagged the edges of one row of banana shingles, dislodging most of them as I turned the bread. Bleary-eyed, I slapped the shingles back onto their side of the loaf without rotating the loaf to see what I was doing. The result was not pretty, but there wasn’t much else I thought I could do. Oddly enough, the edges of all the shingles had turned purple.

Overall, though, a good-looking loaf with a beautiful crust, though the top and especially the sides might have been wetter than Geary would have desired. The bread didn’t look wet, but you could tell just by skimming a fingertip along the sides that the cake was very moist.

Gary’s verdict of the freshly baked loaf: “Light and fluffy texture, not dense and heavy. Tender. Very strong banana flavor. Bready-to-cakey fluffiness.” He said that he was perfectly happy with other banana breads, but that this was a nice change. But did he tag on that last bit because I was the creator of those “other” breads? Hmm.

I thought the bread had a nice banana flavor, but I couldn’t help wanting even more. The texture was nice and moist. Not dry. Not wet. Nice and moist. After sitting overnight, the texture seemed creamier yet firmer. The walnuts were a nice touch, as they usually are, and I did not miss the chocolate chips of my other recipes.

Though the bananas along the sides did add extra bursts of banana flavor, that advantage was short-lived: As I sliced the loaf further, the shingles slipped off both sides. Instead of trying to reattach them, some for a second time, I… er… took care of them.

The bread toasted well. In a few days, I will determine how well it freezes as individually wrapped slices.

General comments and afterthoughts

♦ I was disappointed that the sixth banana called for didn’t actually make it into the loaf.

♦ Extra flour might have compensated for the extra banana liquid, but texture wasn’t an issue for me — it was all about flavor, flavor, flavor. Though I do wish I had remembered to sprinkle that sugar on top.

♦ Parchment paper might have helped with the loaf inversion, either as a sling added before the batter, or as the barrier between palm and bread during inversion.

♦ There was a slight color variation in the loaf: darker on top, lighter on the bottom (see photo, right). I wonder if this means I should have baked it longer to get more color, or just the opposite.

♦ Would dipping the banana shingles in lemon juice have prevented the baked banana edges from turning purple?

♦ Were my bananas dark enough to begin with (see lead photo)?

Recipe ratings

Source: Cook’s Illustrated, August 2010
Ingredients: A-. All ingredients are easy to find and store, but bananas have to be purchased at least a week ahead. And buy an extra banana, just in case.
Overall time estimate (with all ingredients at the ready): 2½ hours
Taste: A-. There is always room for more banana flavor.
Presentation: A-. Be aware of those fragile, colorful shingles.
Healthfulness: C. (Per 1/12 loaf: 284 calories, 11g fat, 163mg sodium, 44g total carbs, 3g dietary fiber, 4g protein. Percent daily values: 6% vitamin A, 10% vitamin C, 3% calcium, 7% iron. Nutritional data via nutritiondata.com.)
Practicality (via No-whining Dining’s current food and cooking philosophies): B
Splurgeworthy? Hm. Not sure. I’ll give it another try before deciding.
Overall grade: B+