The Pie Crust Experiment

        Talking with my sister-in-law one day, she told me how my mom was trying to teach her how to make pie crusts. My mom is 79 years old and lives oceans away from me. I have never learned to cook from either my mom or my dad who are revered culinary geniuses in my hometown. I remember the competition in my family about who could cook better. When your parents ask you point blank:

“Who’s {insert food here} tastes better?”

…  You just have to be diplomatic; I recall with nostalgia the funny bickering that would ensue in our household. (Actually, I think my dad was better at traditional Cantonese cooking and American Food while my mom was better at Filipino cuisine and baking). My dad had since passed away and with him he took those precious recipes of strip steak, pork ribs, roast duck and the best roast turkey ever. My mom, in her twilight years could still throw a party for a hundred (literally). She could still walk to the open market herself to pick out the freshest ingredients. I remember when “Hungry” hubby and I went home for a visit to the Philippines, my mom had roasted lamb, ox tongue with mushrooms, roast chicken, her famous spaghetti and other delectable dishes all in one banquet.  Of course she had other prep cooks under her but she does the marinade, proportions and final cooking herself.

Which brings us back to the funny point of this post.

You know how you were always taught in baking that ingredients should be measured precisely? Well according to my sister-in-law, during this pie crust lesson my mom used her hand to scoop the flour out while saying you take “some of this and a little of that mix together quickly …don’t mix too much or it becomes tough …and that’s how you make the crust”. No rolling pin, she just shaped the dough out with her hand and patted it into the pie plate. And guess what, the crust was very tender and flaky.

Yes, that sure is my mom. From the childhood recesses of my mind, when we first opened the restaurant bakeshop and had no trained bakers yet, I remember standing next to her on top of a chair – late into the night she would bake the pies and cakes to be sold the next day. Unfortunately, I was not interested in the making of it, just the eating of it.

Wasted opportunities come back to haunt us later in life, but it is never too late to start learning.

          And since I couldn’t make that trip home yet I decided to do some research into flaky pie crusts and have narrowed the field down to the following recipes.

            A pie crust is basically flour; some form of fat and some liquid.  There are endless recipes, one promising to be the flakiest or the more tender than the next so I had to pick and choose which ones to include in this test batch or I would be experimenting till the next Presidential Elections.

            Here are the contenders and I have put the measurements in table form as well as by weight when possible. I had to bump the version from Tartine for Kate Zuckerman’s because of the wonderful step-by-step tutorial Kate had here. Cook's Illustrated(Nov/Dec 2007) had a recipe that called for vodka, Rose Levy Beranbaum in her book Pie and Pastry Bible uses cream cheese and now recommends substituting heavy cream for the water on her blog. And of course, Sherry Yard, the lady who opened my eyes to baking through her wonderful book, Secrets of Baking - I cannot NOT include her version.

	Rose Levy Beranbaum	Kate Zuckerman	Sherry Yard	Cook’s Illustrated
* Flour	10 oz (284g)	12 oz (327g)	12.5 oz	12.5 oz
Butter	6 oz (170g)	7 oz (198g)	8 oz	6 oz.
Cream Cheese	4.5 oz (128g)	*	*	*
Ice Water	1 oz (28g)	3 oz (84g)	4 oz (112g)	2 oz. (56g)
Shortening	*	*		4 oz
Salt	¼ tsp	½ tsp	1 tsp	1 tsp.
Vinegar	.5 oz (14g)		½ tsp
Baking Powder	¼ tsp
Vodka	*	*	*	2 oz.
Sugar	*	1 tsp	2 tbs	2 tbs.

* RLB uses pastry flour, the rest were All-Purpose Flour

Before you can make a good pie crust, you need to understand your ingredients and how they interact with each other. Below is a distillation of what I have learned by experimentation and by reading Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Pie and Pastry Bible – a must have for any serious pie maker.

The balance between tender and flaky is a real challenge in making this pastry.

Flakiness comes from large sheets of cold fat in between gluten structures that when subjected to heat, the moisture in the fat produces steam and leavens your layers.

Flour -Tenderness is governed by the amount of protein in your flour. A higher protein flour forms gluten more readily and makes your dough hard to roll out. Low protein flour like cake flour makes for a dough that is too delicate it breaks readily when transferring. Pastry flour is ideal.

Fat – is what creates the flaky layers. Shortening is often used because it does not melt readily at room temperature but has little taste. Butter has great flavor and cream cheese? The best! But I am getting ahead of myself here.

Liquid – water is added to start gluten formation. It helps the dough stick together but you must be careful not to add too much or your resulting crust becomes tough. Vinegar adds acidity that interferes with gluten formation just enough to roll it out. Vodka was chosen by Cooks Illustrated version because ethanol that makes up 40 % of it does not affect gluten the way water does and adds enough moisture. It is tasteless and the alcohol evaporates in the oven. Your liquid must be kept ice cold so when it is added it keeps the fat from melting as you work the dough.

Baking powder- prevents dough from shrinking and tenderizes it.

So 7 apple pies and two weeks later…

The first recipes I tried were Rose Levy Beranbaum’s (RLB) Deluxe Flaky Pie crust (recipe not included here) and her Cream Cheese Pie crust - I was convinced that I have found the ultimate recipe. It was relatively easy to make, she suggested the manual method first so you develop a feel for the dough. The resulting pastry was breeze to roll out.

My pet peeve with any pastry dough that had been refrigerated overnight was that you have to remember to take it out ahead of time so it can soften enough to roll out. This can take anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes and can be quite annoying. Both of RLB’s recipes were ready in 15 minutes.

And what was my biggest fear whenever I made a pie? That the crust would break as I rolled it out thinly and I would end up with filling with no crust to put it in. This did not happen with any of the recipes I tried and believe me that speaks well of the recipes I had chosen because I’m the most clueless girl with a rolling pin which was why I made it my goal to at least be acceptably passable in this skill before the end of the year (yep this year – 2007).

Next one I tried was Cook’s Illustrated vodka version and Sherry Yard’s. The CI version uses the food processor but had the interesting method of adding the flour in two additions. Sherry Yard uses the Kitchen Aid mixer’s paddle attachment to beat the butter into the flour until they become walnut size chunks.

Another offshoot of this pie crust experiment was the mission to eliminate the soggy bottom crust of a two-crust pie that had a fruit filling. This led to the purchase of this perfect pie plate designed by RLB and let me tell you - perfect is an understatement.  I simply adore this pie plate. It gives you perfect borders, it is easy to clean and it conducts heat very well. But back to the subject of soggy crust- one solution to this was to add graham cracker crumbs to the bottom of the plate but I do not like the taste of this in my pie – so what to do?

A technique I learned from RLB’s All American Apple Pie, is to let the apples macerate and boil down the resulting liquid with your butter.

With this new method and pie plate I used Sherry Yard’s crust. I was making a special pie for the “Hungry” Hubby who was complaining of the sweetness of the apple pies produced thus far, he wanted the sugar cut to ¼ cup. Of course I wanted to hit him with the rolling pin ,but being a married couple you must exercise restraint and compromise. We finally settled on 1/3-cup sugar. I was not sure if it was the apples or the amount of sugar but the apples released very little liquid. And then I’m not sure if it was the apples, the amount of sugar, the pie plate or the crust recipe but I had a very crispy bottom crust! I was happy with the result but I did not know what made it that way. Argh!

Okay, I decided since it was RLB’s pie plate I needed to make one of her pie crust with it. I also decided to try Kate Zuckerman’s recipe to make two mini pies with the Norpro metal plates I had. So I decided to mix up a batch and a half of my apple pie recipe. It would have worked fine if I had calculated the ratios properly but I soon realized after I added the sugar and cinnamon that I doubled the sugar and cinnamon instead of multiplying it by 1.5 so I tried wiping sugar off not certain whether I have wiped off too much. My apples produced more than a cup of liquid after an hour and a half – uh oh. It took a while to reduce that liquid which was not typical from my previous two experiments.

So the cream cheese crust + RLB’s pie plate produced a nice flaky top crust, the bottom crust was not crisp but was not soggy either. RLB on her blog said that it was impossible to get a crisp crust on most fruit filled pies. I’m so tempted to say that it was Sherry Yard’s recipe that produced the crisp bottom crust but the recipe was not exactly the same and I blame the “Hungry” Hubby for convincing me to muck around with the sugar proportions. What happened to controlled testing?!

The final verdict:

For a flaky, tender, tasty pie crust and extreme ease with rolling out the dough, Rose Levy Beranbaum’s recipe is the clear winner. It was the amount of vinegar in her crust that allowed the rolling of it a dream.

Sherry Yard’s version is a close runner up because it was pretty tasty but not as tender or flaky and was a bit tougher to roll out.  If I did not have cream cheese on hand and I was pressed for time I would surely use her recipe in a heartbeat.

            The Cook’s Illustrated version was not very tasty probably because of the shortening and I think the vodka made the dough pretty limp and easier to tear.

            Kate Zuckerman’s dough took forever to soften after taking it out from the refrigerator. It was not easy to roll out either so I was glad I was making minis with her version because I was not sure if I had a usable portion for an entire pie. The taste was okay but clearly not as good as the top two.

            Clearly more experiments need to be done. I really wanted to duplicate the success of that crisp bottom crust. But for now, I must declare that Veronica’s Test Kitchen is Apple Pied-Out.  I also need to give HH a break from skinning and slicing the apples even if he was the main benefactor. Besides, I think my thighs will thank me for giving them a break too.

Directions after the jump.