Hallelujah, I made a pie crust!
Image Via GraphJam.comI have long sworn by those grocery store pie crusts. You know the ones I mean - you buy them in the dairy case near the Pillsbury products. They come rolled up into a tube, two to a box, and you might a well save a dollar and buy the store brand.
Honestly, these pre-made pie crusts work pretty darned well. Most of the attention should be focused on what you put IN the pie crust, you know? I make a pretty delicious apple pie, and as far as crust goes, I'm mostly looking for something that will contain my apple pie.
(Here's my apple pie recipe, as long as it's come up in conversation: 6 cups sliced apples, ½ cup white sugar, 1 tablespoon butter, 1 teaspoon cinnamon or apple pie spice. I believe in Keeping Things Simple.)
Anyway, pie season is upon us (here in the Pacific Northwest, and according to the apple trees in my yard, anyway) and I thought this year I might try AGAIN to make my own pie crust. Everyone says "Oh it's so easy," "Oh a homemade pie crust is so much better than store bought," "Oh why wouldn't you make your own crust?" Well I'll tell you why: because I didn't really know how, and this had led to many failures in the past.
I did some research and found that all of my problems boiled down to one thing. (Well okay, two things, the first being that I had never had a proper rolling pin at my disposal. It SEEMS like you should be able to roll out bread dough with a straight sided water glass, but this is not actually the case.)
You have to be careful not to cream the butter into the flour. All this time I had been mixing the butter and flour like the dickens, as if I were making cookies. Which of course was twice as hard because the butter was ice cold. The instructions always say "be sure butter is refrigerator cold," but they never really say why.
When you make pie crust, what you're trying to do is evenly distribute small globs of butter within the flour. Without actually MIXING it. It's these little globs of butter which will make the flaky crust magic. This is why it's important to use cold butter - because warm butter tends to cream itself into the flour much more quickly.
My next failure point was a lack of patience for picking off teeny bits of butter and dropping them into the bowl. I would start out by pinching off teeny bits, but by the time I was halfway through the stick, those bits were getting pretty big!
This is where the universe delivered me a cooking tip at exactly the right time to make a difference. Don't you love it when that happens? The tip is: use a cheese grater to grate the butter into the flour. Genius! It makes a buttery mess of your cheese grater, but it delivers perfectly sized bits of butter into the flour, and right quickly.
