A Pie Primer

Today the kids made a pie - see, pie really is an easy thing! They had help of course, they're just 6 and almost 4. Let's start with the dough. The recipe I used came from the people at America's Test Kitchen (the tv show on PBS) and they also publish Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country magazines, as well as cookbooks. I find them kind of sanctimonious, and it seems like a lot of the time their recipes have a million steps and have you using every casserole, pot, pan, mixing bowl you own, and then once you've used all of them, you find yourself mixing ingredients in a mop bucket or something. But I digress. The recipe:

Basic Pie Dough

makes enough for 1 double crust 9" pie

2 1/2 c. unbleached All-Purpose flour

1 tsp salt

2 Tb sugar

1/2 c. vegetable shortening (note: use lard if you can get your hands on the fresh stuff, it's way better than shortening and it's not a hydrogenated fat, even if it is lard).

12 Tb (1 1/2 c.) unsalted butter

6-8 Tb ice water

1. Cut up your butter and shortening or lard into about 1" sized pieces and immediately stick that in the freezer or the fridge. You want your fat to be cold when you mix it into your flour.

2. In a mixing bowl, or should you have one, the bowl of a food processor, mix together your flour, salt and sugar. Just use your hands to lightly combine those things, or pulse it a few times with your FP. You can start adding in your fat bit by bit now. I use a pastry blender (see above, I can't get it here in the post, which is where I'd like it to be) as opposed to a food processor, but if you've got the FP, by all means use it. You'll want to just pulse maybe two or three times after each addition of fat. Do not dump all your fat in at once, I really stress that you take your time with this and you'll be rewarded with a tender and flaky crust. Your dough is ready for water when the fat is in little clumps throughout the flour.

3. Once all your fat has been incorporated, you'll want to mix in your water. How much water you're going to need to add is going to vary greatly on the humidity in your locale, as well as what your flour is like. Start with the 6 TB and if it looks dry, you can add more bit by bit. It's better to not have enough, as you can always add more, but you can't take it out if you add too much. Not to worry, it won't be a loss and you won't make the same mistake twice. :-) I personally undermix things, and then turn it out onto my work surface to finish incorporating the dough, I love touching things however, and at this point in my life I've just learned to go by feel. You'll want to strive for a dough that is not homogenous, those bits of unmixed-in fat will leave lovely air pockets in your baked crust - a trait that is desired, I promise.

4. Divide your dough into two nearly as even sized pieces as possible and wrap with plastic wrap and chill for a few hours in the fridge.

So once your dough has chilled you can dust your work surface with flour and roll out one disc of pie dough so that it is about 1/4" thick or so. There are a couple of ways to transfer rolled out dough into a pie dish. You can gently roll the dough onto your rolling pin, and just unroll it over the pie dish, or you can gently fold the dough in half and then in half again (so, in quarters) and then unfold it into your dish. Either way is equally good, I prefer the rolling pin method. Once you've got the bottom part of your crust into the dish you can put your filling in. Ideally, you've already planned out your filling, today we've opted to cheat and use canned pie filling since it's March here on the East coast and there's not much available in terms of fresh fruit, aside from apple. I love to use fresh fruit and make a pie filling from that, and there are tons of recipes all over the internet and certainly in cookbooks. As an aside, the Lucky Leaf brand of pie filling makes a "premium" variety made with sugar instead of evil, evil, evil HFCS, so we used that. I've found that straining canned pie filling through a fine mesh colander helps eliminate a good portion of the goopy stuff that the fruit is suspended in, giving you mostly fruit with just a bit of goop. You'll want to buy a touch more than you think you'll need should you decide to strain though, so keep that in mind.

Next step is to roll out your top crust, the kids decided they wanted to cut heart shapes out of the top crust, which is dual purpose since it also vents the pie. If you don't want to cut out shapes of your top crust, you'll want to make a few slits with a knife to allow steam to escape. Transfer the top crust to your pie dish and pinch the edges together, the kids used a fork for this purpose. Then we brushed the top crust with milk to help with browning. You could use slightly beaten egg, beaten egg yolk with milk or cream added to it or a beaten egg white - all will help with browning. Garrett has an egg allergy, hence our choice of plain milk. Bake your pie, at 375* for about 25-30 minutes or until golden brown and the filling just bubbles up a bit. So that you don't end up with a righteous mess in your oven, bake your pie on a cookie sheet. Do not be a risk taker and decide that baking a pie on a cookie sheet is for squares! I can almost guarantee you that you'll be spending your evening with a can of Easy Off while your family, neighbors, husband, or whoever will be greedily finishing off the pie you've worked so hard to make.

Happy Baking!