Pies Please

My friend Christine is an avid home baker. We met a few years ago when her husband and I were working at the same firm. His desk was next to mine, and he would regularly rave about her cakes, shortbread, and pies - particularly her peach pie. She recently confided in me that she used Crisco (*yikes*) to make her pie crusts, and didn't like the idea of using hydrogenated oil, so she wanted me to show her what fraisage was all about and how to use it to make all-butter pie crust.  Since we hadn't seen each other in months, we made plans yesterday to have lunch and make pies together.

I had picked up some beautiful zucchini earlier this week, so I decided to make a Vegetable Torte.  Christine settled on making her almost-famous Peach Pie.  So after some lunch and much needed coffee, we put on some serious chick music  a la Carol King, Juice Newton (Oh yeah, because Angel of the Morning is a classic thank you very much), Christina Aguilera, Etta James, etc.. and got to work.

Christine's delectable Peach Pie

Now, I've made butter pie crust a million times.  I've never actually even tried any other types of fat (though I might try lard the next time I make a meat pie). I'd been using fraisage ever since I read about it in the July 2004 issue of Cooks Illustrated.  Thing is, I've never taught anyone to do it, and as I discovered, that's a totally different thing.

First I pulled out two cutting boards, two knives, two of everything so that Christine and I could work alongside each other.  Then we diced up our butter and put it in the freezer to get nice and chilled.  That went smoothly, and while we waited, we logged onto the internet to see what the latest cover of US Weekly was all about.  After spotting it in the checkout line, we just had to know what was going on with Jessica Simpson's weight.

Butter chilled, we set up to cut it into the flour.  Because Christine doesn't have a food processor, we decided to do everything by hand so it would be as close as possible to the way she would make the recipe at home.  Now here is where we hit a little snag.  Christine was using my wire pastry cutter and I was using a plastic bench scraper.  The wires of the pastry cutter weren't doing a very good job of cutting through the cold hard butter.  So I finished cutting my flour and butter, then handed Christine the bench scraper so she could cut hers.  In the meantime the butter in both our bowls were approaching room temperature.  When we added the water, it didn't seem to be getting absorbed by the flour and was difficult to tell how much water we needed.  I thought that if we continued with the fraisage, it would help to blend the water into the dough.  So I quickly fraisaged my dough then helped Christine with hers.  All the while, both our doughs were sitting out at room temperature getting warmer and warmer.  They seemed crumbly and dry so we tried to incorporate more water into them, but they still didn't seem to absorb anything.  By the time we were gathering the doughs into discs, mine had started sticking to the table, and Christine's was so dry it was crumbling apart.   I knew things didn't feel or look right, but we stuck them in the fridge and hoped for the best.  Meanwhile we both prepared our fillings, and did a little Facebook-ing.

When it came time to roll the doughs out, I was embarrassed to find that it was a little disastrous.  Sure, we managed to get the crusts into the pie pans, and the pies both actually turned out delicious, but the road getting there was not exactly the smoothest, and the crusts probably were not as flaky as they could have been.  Both our doughs were crumbly and had no elasticity.  There just didn't seem to be enough moisture even though we had kept adding water.  My dough only began to take shape once the butter started to melt.  Then it was greasy and started to stick to the table, but I couldn't move it dust underneath with flour because it was so brittle.  Christine had similar problems with hers.  Even though the pies turned out, I was disappointed because I was afraid that Christine went home with the impression that what we did was more complicated and difficult than it actually was.

Vegetable Torta (click to go to recipe page)

So what went wrong?  More importantly, how could I have fixed it?  Today I was determined to figure it out.  So alone I went about making butter pie crust again - this time, paying extra attention to how the dough felt and looked at each step (and taking photos!).  First, I realized teaching someone to do something always takes longer than simply doing it yourself.  Obvious, I know.  It also occured to me that rule number one of making butter pie crust is to keep the butter COLD, and even at the first step of cutting the flour and butter together, we took so long that the butter had come to almost to room temperature.  Today after cutting my butter and flour together, I put the mixture in the freezer for a few minutes just as a precautionary measure, but I might have saved us some grief if I had done this yesterday when I realized the butter was getting too warm.  The second mistake was in the way I demonstrated the fraisage. The butter already approaching room temperature, we should have tried an alternative method using a bench scraper or rubber spatula.  Instead, we used our hands, which just caused the butter to melt further.  The fraisage just worked the melted butter into the flour more, and inhibited its ability to absorb moisture.  By this point there was not much that could have been done to save the dough.

So using what I learned from yesterday's mishaps, making pie crust today went as smoothly as can be (Whew!).  I ended up using it to make a deep dish Cardamom Pumpkin Tart, which I can say with absolute certainty (and Boyfriend will back me up on this...) had the flakiest crust I'd ever made. It would have been even better with fresh pumpkin, but it I really needed to use up a can of pumpkin puree which I had sitting around since Thanksgiving 2007.

Cardamom Pumpkin Tart (click to go to recipe page)

So the next time I have someone over for a workshop day, I think I'll take a cue from the way they taught us in culinary school.  Instead of working on our doughs at the same time, I should have demonstrated the recipe for Christine first, then helped her with her dough.  This way she could have seen the whole process first, then I would have been able to pay more attention to what I was doing during the demonstration, and to what she was doing when it was her turn. Oh well, live and learn...Now all I have to figure out is do I want Peach Pie or Cardamom Pumpkin Tart with my coffee?

The Recipes:

All Butter Pie Crust

Torta Salata

Cardamom Pumpkin Tart