Fun Stuff > CHATTER
A Cooking Thread?
Barmymoo:
If you have to use your hands and the pastry starts to get warm and sticky, put it in the freezer for two minutes to cool back down. Works for crumble as well, and it was revelatory to me (I might even have got all excited about it here when I first tried it).
Redball:
--- Quote from: Carl-E on 17 May 2012, 06:12 ---0_o
But...but piecrust is so simple! Flour to fat, 3:1 (my dad uses butter, my wife and I use crisco, both are delicious), cut the fat into the flour thoroughly (we use a pastry cutter, several C shaped parallel wires with a handle, but I know people who use two knives and the like). Add ice cold water by the tablespoon, turning it over and mashing it together by hand until it all holds together in a ball. NO MORE water than that, it gets... gooey.
Then roll it out.
NO mixing - you encourage the formation of long strings of gluten that make the pastry bind up into a hard mass instead of flaking apart like it should. Each flake is a little lump of the flour/fat mixture that got rolled out, they were only held together by the water long enough to bake. You're not making dough!
My work here is done. Carry on, citizens!
--- End quote ---
Good work, both of you! Clara used a pastry cutter. I found it just now; it's not three C-shaped wires as I thought I'd remembered, but more like 3 fairly rigid flat dull "blades" attached to a handle. In the process of overthinking the process and exaggerating the obstacles -- something many of us here do well -- I wish I had a Youtube visual for the manipulation. But your brief description ought to be enough.
I don't have a recipe for her cherry filling, only that she used canned tart cherries, sugar, cornstarch and almond extract. I don't believe she baked the shell ahead of time. She used strips across the top. She could start a pie on the spur of the moment, with company expected any moment. The only thing that sometimes threw her was unexpectedly old flour.
And I think Clara used the freezer trick, too. I know her process depended on temperature and humidity in the kitchen.
Papersatan:
In addition to the gluten thing the reason you shouldn't over mix pie crust is because you want some chunks of fat in there to melt out as it cooks, that is what makes it flaky. If you mix the dough too well then you make a paste and there are no bits left to leave flaky, yummy pockets of awesome. The largest pieces of fat should be about the size of peas when you add the water.
You guys are making me want a pie now.
Redball:
About the fat: I know we didn't keep Crisco in the house for years; I'm not sure if I recall her using butter (salted? unsalted?). Is cooking oil, olive or otherwise, ever used in a flaky pie crust? If sounds like the thicker consistency of butter or shortening would keep globs of oil intact.
pwhodges:
Just Google for instructions; e.g. here's one
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