Last summer I decided to try and teach myself to make pie crust. I’ve mentioned this before, I think. I spent a while reading recipes in all of my go-to cookbooks, spent a while reading around on the inernet, tried to figure out what advice to take and what advice to ignore, that kind of thing. I came up with a workable plan, and the first time I made pie crust, it was awesome. It also took all day–I think I spent two hours just working the butter into the flour. The next two times I made pie crust were equally time-consuming, but totally failed to produce excellent pie. (One just didn’t make workable crust at all, and the other tasted sad and boring.) So I kind of gave up on making pie crust, at least until I had time to figure out what I was doing wrong.
This weekend, I took a pie-making class at the Brooklyn Kitchen Labs. It was a three-hour “pie intensive” workshop, and it was -fabulous-. Millicent Souris, who taught the class, was fun and funny and super-knowledgable. We made blueberry pie, blueberry galettes, two different types of crusts, and learned a lot about troubleshooting. (And I finally learned what leaf lard is! Hint: no leaves are involved.)
I also learned what I was doing wrong before. I was overthinking -everything-. Like, really, everything. I think this is not my fault, because when you read about pie-making, it’s a long series of warnings. The butter absolutely has to be cold, and you can’t touch it too much, and you shouldn’t touch the dough too much, and if you squeeze the dough or press the dough or squish the dough more than absolutely necessary you’re going to ruin the whole thing. If you make it too thick, the pie won’t cook right, but if you make it too thin it will tear when you roll it, and if it tears you’re going to ruin the whole thing because you can’t smoothly patch it and if you re-roll it it’s going to be tough and ruin everything. On top of that, there’s the idea I picked up somewhere when I was younger, that cooking is easy because you can be flexible and improvise, but baking is hard because everything has to be really precise or (you guessed it) you’ll ruin everything.
The best part of the pie workshop was learning that you don’t have to think that hard. I spent so long incorporating the butter into the flour because I kept trying to use teeny-tiny pieces and snap them into the flour so thoroughly that they basically disappeared. The crust we made at the workshop, the butter was chopped into quarter-inch or half-inch cubes, and they need to be squished in pretty well, but the crust she rolled out had visible streaks of butter and it still tasted wonderful. She also kept emphasizing that you can tweak things, if it’s too dry add more water, if it’s too wet add more flour, whatever. It’s just pie, it’s not magic. If you need to patch the bottom crust, who cares, no one’s going to see it anyway. If the top is lumpy or patchy, or if your lattice is uneven, who cares? People are going to tear it apart with a fork anyway. It’s important to keep things cold, but all that means is that you should throw it back in the refrigerator if it starts to stick when you’re working with it.
So I’m making a pie. I’ve got about sixteen other things I need to be doing today, many of which are a little urgent, and instead I’m making a pie. Well. At the moment, I’m watching the most recent episode of Leverage while the crust sits in the fridge waiting to be rolled out. But Leverage is just about over, and now I get to go test out this new zen “stop thinking so much” attitude on the way to making peach-blackberry pie.
Posted Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 9:40 am. Filed under: personal.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Did you make pies as a kid? I wonder if pie-zen comes from the ritual of actually making pies with your mom or grandmom or a Millicent Souris, and watching them patch and dab and -oh-a-bit-more-water- their way through it. –though I did learn from Alton Brown that if I wanted to work with butter instead of lard, I needed to leave visible chunks and avoid overworking it.
(Two kinds of crust! Two! What were they? TELL US YOUR SECRETS.)
I don’t think we ever made pie when I was a kid. My mom did a lot of cooking, but fairly little baking. (I don’t want to imply that she never baked, it just wasn’t a regular thing. But it does remind me that at some point I should tell the coconut cake story again, because I really enjoy that one.) This all might be why I’m super-comfortable just tossing stuff around and improvising and not measuring when I’m cooking, but I’m still a little tense about baking.
This particular pie turned out awesome, although not perfect–the bottom crust did tear, and was also apparently just too thin in places, because the pie filling was all over the place in the bottom of the pie dish. It all still tastes pretty effing good, though.