Formulating Pi(e)

Professional bakers often refer to their recipes as ratios or formulas. Expressing ingredients as 1 part flour, 1 part butter, 1 part sugar, 1 part egg works if you are making a cake a cup or a pound in size. Working with base numbers makes it is easy to scale up to feed 400 people or working in oz, pounds or cups. The mathematical rigor of baking ratios reinforces the understanding that baking is about precision: Baking is a Supreme Court appeal, stovetop cooking is Boston Legal with William Shatner.

There are all sorts of different pastries that can be used for making desserts - puff, pâte sucrée, straight-up shortbread, cream cheese crust, sour cream pastry, cheese crust – all have their place in pie plates and tart pans but for most of my pie baking I use my own formula; based on .5 and 1; it is easy to remember and makes for hearty, flaky, crusty crust. It is good for 1 – 9 inch pie.

1.5 Cups flour
1 stick butter
1 Tablespoon sugar
.5 teaspoon salt
1.5 Ounces of Ice Water

Cut butter into 8 pieces and freeze for 5 to 15 minutes. Remove butter from freezer, place in a food processor with flour, sugar & salt. Pulse 5 to 10 times until butter looks like flour coated peas or currants. Uniformity is unnecessary.

Transfer to a mixing bowl and add water an ounce at a time, mixing only until the dough forms a ball. Cover pastry ball I plastic and place it the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven when you remove the dough to roll out. 425-450ºf.

This resting period allows what little gluten has formed to relax and more importantly, allows the butter to rechill – remember hot oven, cold pastry. The dough will be hard to work with when it is removed from the cold but the pastry will become more malleable and easier to work as it is rolled out. Turn the ball of dough out on a lightly floured surface, working with a rolling pin, roll center out towards the edges, give the pastry a ¼ turn every four rolls. After working around the clock once so with 4 turns, fold the edges of the dough towards the middle and reform the pastry into a ball. Flip it over and roll out – again working from the center towards the edges, turning the dough ¼ rotation . The pastry should be about 1/8 of an inch thick when complete. Truthfully, I have never measured the thickness of a pastry…

Instead, the dough will roll out to be roughly round, about 12 inches in diameter, big enough to fit comfortably inside of a 9-inch pie plate. Line the pie plate with the dough and place it in the fridge for 20 to 30 minutes. This is a good time to work on the filling. How you fill the pie is a personal choice, how you top your pie is the subject of the next Saucyman.