Bake-Off finalist got early start in the kitchen.

Byline: Home Cooking by Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

PAT ORNER of Florence considers baking to be her strongest cooking skill, but the recipe she provides today is for barbecued beef brisket that you don't need a barbecue to prepare. The brisket is flavored with liquid smoke and baked in an oven.

The recipe was one she took to a potluck a year ago, "and everybody went crazy for it."

Orner and her husband, Bill, moved to Florence three years ago after living for 25 years in Minnetonka, Minn., near Minneapolis. He retired as an inspector after 30 years with the Federal Aviation Agency and then worked for six years as a flight simulator instructor. She has been a homemaker and office worker, and is the mother of three.

Specialty: "I suppose, baking," she said. "I make everything from scratch - bread and coffee cakes and everything. It just tastes better to me."

"My husband loves desserts, and once I married him I found that he wanted a dessert every night. So I just got started baking. I like to do it. It was challenging and fun, and the more you did it the easier it got."

She doesn't bake as much now that there are no children at home. "I did more when I had a family," she said. "I make all my own bread, so a couple of times a week I'm making bread. Several times a week I'm baking. I never buy sweets or anything out at the store because I just don't like them as well. I figure if I'm going to eat them, I might as well have what tastes really good."

How she began cooking: "When I was about 10 years old, the first thing I ever made was fudge. My girlfriend and I made fudge over at her house. It turned out great.

"And we had a lot of cooking that was required in school in those days. So I got a lot of background in it just at school and I did a lot of baking cookies and different things as a teen-ager in the house. So I already knew quite a bit about cooking when I got married. I got married at 18. So I just went on from there."

Her biggest cooking success: "The high point would have been going to the Pillsbury Bake-Off as one of the finalists. They choose 100 in the country," she said. "That was in February of 1990. It was held that year in Phoenix (Ariz.).

"I hadn't been entering the contest, though I was aware of it through the years," she said. "But in '88, all of a sudden, my younger daughter (Lynette Russell) called me up and said she had entered the Pillsbury Bake-Off and was a finalist. And so she went that year.

"So then the next time they had the contest - it's every two years - I entered. And then I called her up and said I was going. So we both had the experience, and it was a lot of fun."

Orner's recipe was for Stuffed Pizza Florentine. She wasn't one of the cash winners at the end of the contest, so she doesn't know where she ranked among the 100 finalists.

However, as a finalist, she got an all-expense, three-day trip to Phoenix, $100 spending money and "a whole bag full of gifts and things."

Her biggest cooking failure: "I haven't had very many cooking failures," she said. "The one that stays always in my mind - it was so stupid - was back was when I was 18 years old and newly married. I was going to make a pumpkin pie and, for some reason, I didn't have a recipe for pumpkin pie.

"But I had made this crust from scratch and was all proud of this beautiful crust. And then I had bought this big, large can of pumpkin in the supermarket and there was no recipe on the can. I thought there was going to be a recipe.

"So I thought, 'Well, it must be a mix.' So I dumped the can of pumpkin into the pie (shell) and baked it. And, of course, there were no other ingredients with it and we had to throw it out. I was so crushed because my great pie crust was ruined.

"After that, I bought some cookbooks and then, you know, I thought, 'No wonder!' Now I've sort of gotten into collecting cookbooks. I've got about seven shelves full of cookbooks."

Her favorite cookbooks: She brought in a copy of "The Best of Byerly's: A Recipe Collection from the Test Kitchen of Byerly's Home Economists."

"I have so many cookbooks now, and I'm sort of a recipe collector, clipping out of the paper and people's friends' recipes. So I generally use them. But I do have all these cookbooks, and this one sits in my kitchen," she said, describing the cookbook as a comprehensive one published by Byerly's, an upscale supermarket in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

"The main store has a cooking school in it, and I attended several of their cooking classes," she said.

Why this recipe was chosen: "The reason I brought this (recipe) is because I've had it for over 30 years," she said.

"I got it back in the days when we lived in Kansas City and I didn't know what barbecued beef brisket was then. It was really huge in Kansas City."

Orner said she got the barbecue sauce recipe from a neighbor in Kansas City and the recipe for roasting the brisket from a newspaper there. She has tried other barbecue recipes but this combination of cooking method and sauce has always been the best, she said.

Kansas City

Barbecued Beef Brisket

5 to 6 pound beef brisket

1 1/2 ounces liquid smoke

Celery salt 

Onion salt

Garlic salt 

Salt

Pepper

Worcestershire sauce

1/2 cup barbecue sauce, plus additional sauce to spoon onto meat (recipe follows, or use your favorite)

Put brisket in baking dish; sprinkle with liquid smoke and the celery, onion and garlic salts to taste. Set brisket in refrigerator overnight. When ready to bake, sprinkle with salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce to taste. Cover pan tightly with foil.

Set oven to 275 degrees. Bake 5 hours. Uncover and pour approximately 1/2 cup barbecue sauce over meat. Cook without foil another hour. Remove meat to platter and let cool. Slice and serve with additional barbecue sauce.

Note from Pat Orner: I usually do the baking the day before I want to serve it and refrigerate it without slicing. The cold meat slices easily, and I reheat the sliced meat in foil for about an hour in the oven at 300 degrees. Or it can be reheated on the barbecue grill in foil.

Serves 10.

Barbecue Sauce

2 bottles (22-ounce size) ketchup

1/2 box brown sugar (1 pound size box)

1 1/2 ounces liquid smoke

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 1/2 teaspoons celery seed 

Combine ingredients in saucepan and simmer 45 minutes. Makes nearly 1 1/2 quarts.