The Pie That Loved Me

Thus far, my blogs have been mainly about my opinions regarding food. I’ve talked about what I like in products, how I like to prepare things, and what I love to loathe about restaurants. Today however, I would like to take a slightly different approach. I want to give you a puzzle, a culinary puzzle that is still hurting my head a little. I’ll describe the problem and give you some of my ideas on the issue and then leave it up to you. The most important thing to take away here, however, is that I don’t know everything. It might be difficult to believe, but that is unfortunately the nature of things.

There are two things that have always given me problems in the kitchen. The first, and one that I seemingly have managed to recently (as in this weekend) conquer, is coffee. Until now, I have always made horrible coffee. It’s sad really. I can make a lot of fairly complicated things, like crème caramel and chocolate mousse, but I couldn’t seem to make a decent pot of Joe. However, the streak is apparently broken, and time will tell if I’ve managed to get that particular monkey off my back.

The second, and the one that brings me the greatest shame, is my inability to make pie pastry with any consistency. Usually too dry, my crust, although usually very tasty, was a complete pain to work with. I’ve looked into the science and read countless methods claiming to be foolproof (even one by my revered “Cook’s Illustrated”, based completely on science and countless tests) and none of them worked.

Then it happened. I broke down and asked Karen (Jenn’s Mom) to show me how she makes her pastry. Hers is always great and she always insisted, after hearing me go on about my “new” method, that hers was super simple. The mystery lies here. Her method flouts pretty much every rule I’ve ever read. How it turns out is a mystery to me.

Here’s how she does it, along with some commentary.

She starts, for a single crust 9” pie crust, with two cups of flour to one cup of lard (her brand of choice is “Tenderflake”, and she warned me that she never substitutes). The fat to flour ratio here is pretty much the standard “half fat to flour” that I’ve read before, but what gets me is the 100% lard. Usually, in order to make a crust tender and flaky, and to ensure that it has that delicious flavour we all love, the fat is roughly split between butter and lard/shortening. Not Karen though. Rules? Meet window. But the mystery deepens…

The room temperature lard (most recipes call for chilled fat, to reduce melting during handling and thereby making the crust flakier) is cut into the flour, with a little bit of added salt (nothing new there), with a pastry blender (that little half-circle tool with 4-5 blades). This is a pretty standard method, although most modern recipes call for the food processor. I tend to side with Karen on this one though, as the food processor, while not only being a pain to clean after being used for pastry, creates heat through the motor as well as the friction of the blade against the dough. While my hands are pretty hot, if I’m using a pastry blender I think the net heat transfer to the dough will be minimal as compared to the food processor.

Once the mixture looks like sand with small pea-stones in it (typical), it’s time to add and integrate the water. This is the biggest deviation. She uses cool tap water and adds between 6-10 tbsp! According to what I knew, water should be ice cold and kept to 5 tbsp. max. The problem is that water, with the addition of the mixing action, will form gluten. Gluten is the elastic protein formed when wheat protein is agitated in the presence of water. Although it’s great in bread and pizza dough, it’s not something you want in your pastry. I thought for sure that her method would result in shoe-leather crust. She assured me that this was normal operating procedure for her and that everything would be all right, and we continued.

We mixed the dough until all the flour was well integrated and the water evenly distributed. Again, this was way off spec, as that amount of agitation surely created a mess of gluten. My nerves completely fried at this point, we continued…

With that amount of water, it was not unexpected that the crust rolled out smoothly with neither excessive sticking nor tearing. The one trick she had to add here, is that the crust was first placed on a little mound of flour on the rolling surface. This insured an absence of sticking and that the pastry took up the right amount of flour during rolling. After a trying instruction on how to make the crusts fit into muffin pans for tarts (it took like five demonstrations for me to catch on) we filled and baked them.

As you might have guessed by this point, they came out great: tender and flaky and delicious. Damn. Karen 1, Science 0.

Since this humbling and infuriating experience, I’ve had some time to think about it a bit. I’ve come up with two possible explanations for some of the mysteries, but I’m afraid I don’t think they cover the whole story.

First off, let’s consider the absence of butter. I think that the fact that lard is used exclusively is the key. Whereas vegetable shortening, like Crisco, would have very little flavour, lard is made from animal (pig) fat, and hence contains some saturated fat that gives the crust more of the flavour you’d expect from butter.

Oddly enough, lard is the center of the second explanation as well. I was baffled by the un-leatheryness of Karen’s crust. The only explanation I can come up with is that since the fat was at approximately room temperature, some of it melted to coat the flour granules. This impeded the formation of gluten during the “vigorous” mixing. A clever solution, one that is not unknown. When making sauces, a roux is usually made but mixing flour with a fat to coat the flour and cook away some of the raw cereal. This coating prevents clumping when the liquid is then added.

So there you have it. Alex doesn’t know everything. But at least now I can make a crust. And if there were any doubters, I made it all by myself two weekends ago, and it turned out great.