kitchen grumbles
(ETA: I corrected the amount of butter below! If you printed this off or something, check for the correction!!)
Making the pies for the family dinner. One will be a Pumpkin pie (laced with Scotch) and the other will be a Kahlua Chocolate Pecan pie. My mom swears she wasn't going for the booze theme when she picked these out :-)
So last night I made pie dough, rolled it out, got it in the pans and since it was really rather late, chilled them overnight to bake the shells this morning. One of them is absolutely drop dead perfect. The other... well I didn't roll it out quite the right size, so it cracked along one side. Which means if I try to bake anything in it, it will bubble and congeal and pour thru that crack to become a sticky mess on the pie pan itself.
So. Guess I'm making another one tonight. Maybe I can bake it tonight before bed, since I'll have an earlier start to it. It doesn't take that long to make the dough, but it needs an hour chilling after makign the dough, then once you roll it out and put it in the pan, that needs to chill an hour before baking.
The perfect one is...perfect, though. Flaky and everything. Wow.
Oh well, heh :-)
Pie Dough:
1 1/4 c flour
1/2 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
10 tbs (1 1/4 stick) chilled butter, cubed
ice water as needed
In a cold glass bowl, combine flour, sugar, salt. Then dump the butter in. I actually mix this up by hand, I don't know what the tool is called. It looks like a handle, with four or five sturdy wires in a c shape from one edge of the handle to another. These cut the butter up so that it mixes with the dough. My grandma used a pair of plain butter knives, but I never really mastered that. Anyway, cut the butter into the flour -- it will be dry for a while, that's fine -- keep cutting the butter into it until it's very crumbly and just starts to look wet. If it will ball up at this point, then roll it all up into a ball (at which point it looks like proper dough, not dry). Wrap and chill for an hour. Roll out (using flour but minimally so) to about 12-13" diameter, and plop this on a 9" pie pan. Fuss with the edges, get all the excess piled up along the edge of the pan, then pinch it around for a fluted edge. You must have plenty of dough that wants to sit on the edge, don't pull any up (sigh) and if there's any cracks that go down the side, take the extra time and trouble to seal them back together. Cover and chill this for an hour. Now line it with aluminum foil, especially around and over the edges. If you have beans or pie beads, weigh the foil down with that (I had neither and that worked fine too). Bake in preheated oven 350°F for 20 minutes, remove foil (and beans/beads) and cook another 10-15 minutes till the crust is golden. Cool completely. If you do this just right, the shell can be popped out ever so slightly so it's not adhering to the pie pan. Then when you cook the goodies into it, it cuts up to serve beautifully without sticking.
Anyway, the point is to keep the butter chilled as you're mixing in it. That's what gives pie crust its flakiness: as you bake this dough, those little bits of butter melt into the pastry creating the layers (and flavor)...
ETA: It's a pastry blender and looks like this:
Making the pies for the family dinner. One will be a Pumpkin pie (laced with Scotch) and the other will be a Kahlua Chocolate Pecan pie. My mom swears she wasn't going for the booze theme when she picked these out :-)
So last night I made pie dough, rolled it out, got it in the pans and since it was really rather late, chilled them overnight to bake the shells this morning. One of them is absolutely drop dead perfect. The other... well I didn't roll it out quite the right size, so it cracked along one side. Which means if I try to bake anything in it, it will bubble and congeal and pour thru that crack to become a sticky mess on the pie pan itself.
So. Guess I'm making another one tonight. Maybe I can bake it tonight before bed, since I'll have an earlier start to it. It doesn't take that long to make the dough, but it needs an hour chilling after makign the dough, then once you roll it out and put it in the pan, that needs to chill an hour before baking.
The perfect one is...perfect, though. Flaky and everything. Wow.
Oh well, heh :-)
Pie Dough:
1 1/4 c flour
1/2 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
10 tbs (1 1/4 stick) chilled butter, cubed
ice water as needed
In a cold glass bowl, combine flour, sugar, salt. Then dump the butter in. I actually mix this up by hand, I don't know what the tool is called. It looks like a handle, with four or five sturdy wires in a c shape from one edge of the handle to another. These cut the butter up so that it mixes with the dough. My grandma used a pair of plain butter knives, but I never really mastered that. Anyway, cut the butter into the flour -- it will be dry for a while, that's fine -- keep cutting the butter into it until it's very crumbly and just starts to look wet. If it will ball up at this point, then roll it all up into a ball (at which point it looks like proper dough, not dry). Wrap and chill for an hour. Roll out (using flour but minimally so) to about 12-13" diameter, and plop this on a 9" pie pan. Fuss with the edges, get all the excess piled up along the edge of the pan, then pinch it around for a fluted edge. You must have plenty of dough that wants to sit on the edge, don't pull any up (sigh) and if there's any cracks that go down the side, take the extra time and trouble to seal them back together. Cover and chill this for an hour. Now line it with aluminum foil, especially around and over the edges. If you have beans or pie beads, weigh the foil down with that (I had neither and that worked fine too). Bake in preheated oven 350°F for 20 minutes, remove foil (and beans/beads) and cook another 10-15 minutes till the crust is golden. Cool completely. If you do this just right, the shell can be popped out ever so slightly so it's not adhering to the pie pan. Then when you cook the goodies into it, it cuts up to serve beautifully without sticking.
Anyway, the point is to keep the butter chilled as you're mixing in it. That's what gives pie crust its flakiness: as you bake this dough, those little bits of butter melt into the pastry creating the layers (and flavor)...
ETA: It's a pastry blender and looks like this: