The Life of Pie

Saucyman, Even though you wouldn’t put blueberries in it, how do you make piecrust?

There are only elements essential to a good piecrust:

1) Hot Oven
2) Cold Pastry

A piecrust is a matrix of fat and flour. A baker creates this matrix by mixing a very simple list of ingredients together – Flour, hopefully butter, sugar, water and salt. Sugar and salt have some superhero/magical/predicable scientific reactions in cooking but not so much at the low levels they appear in piecrust; the salt seasons and the sugar aids in browning the pastry. As we have mentioned in previous Saucymans, water and flour together form the elastic gluten, but in a piecrust, gluten is not as important as the interaction between the fat and flour.

In a piecrust, flour coats the outside of the fat: Placed in the oven, the fat melts, carrying the flour with it – think of slow moving lava depositing sediment – this action forms little pastry strata throughout the piecrust. The water; present in both the moisture in the butter and the addition of ice water, turns to steam in the oven separating the fat and flour into individual layers.

As a fat, butter is particularly troublesome, if it gets too warm during mixing or your oven isn’t hot enough, the butter melts, soaking into the flour, resulting in a paste; instead of the elegant layers of a flaky, crunchy piecrust. Crisco or vegetable shortening is far more forgiving than butter - Butter melts at around 85º f, a temp that will literally melt inside your mouth, but it will also actually melt in the kitchen on a summer day, if the oven is on. Vegetable shortening remains consistently soft through a wide range of temperatures – In a piecrust, shortening may produce a more pliable pastry (all the better for rolling) but it melts at a higher temperature, later in the baking process so shortening doesn’t have the lift and separate action of butter.

The best way to keep the butter cold is by slicing it and putting in the freezer for 5 to 15 minutes. Take it our and mix quickly. (Normally, I recommend, learning to do something by hand before graduating to a machine, so you get a feel of how a recipe comes together. Since temperature is a key factor in piecrust, 10 pulses in a Cuisinart, will yield more success, more often than laboriously mixing by hand.) Let the dough rest in a refrigerator for 30 minutes before rolling. After rolling out, line the pastry in the pie pan and place in the freezer for 5 minutes or the fridge for at least 20.

That keeps the cold side cold, the best way to keep the oven hot is to preheat the oven to 425º- 450º f. Opening the oven door to put the pie in is going to let out 25 – 50 degrees of hot air. The single most important time the piecrust is in the oven is the first 10 minutes, crank it up: A hot temperature sets the shape of the crust and helps the fat melt quickly and evenly.

Despite what you heard on the street, and maybe even experienced, piecrust, good piecrust is easy. Before delving into the how to make a crust it is important to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. The next post will give directions and a formula for a totally basic pastry dough.