As Easy As [Pie]
Bad pie makers, have I got a tip for you. Buy this month's Gourmet magazine and follow their technique for making the perfect pie crust. I am a terrible pie maker and I worked up the courage to follow their recipe after too many bad experiences and guess what? This crust was killer. Without any bidding, people who tried this pie commented: "Wow, the crust is awesome. It's so flaky and buttery and great."
Here's a quick visual tour of what you do. You put flour, salt, shortening and butter into a bowl:
You work it together with the tips of your fingers until it resembles coarse meal. Once it does you add 5 Tbs of water (if you're making a double crust) and squeeze a bit in your hand. If it stays together then there's enough water, if it falls apart you need more. This is what it looked like when it had enough water:
Then there's the cool novel part: you dump the dough out on to a board and you separate it into eight pieces. Then you take each piece with the heel of your hand and you shmush it out so you distribute the fat. You press it forward twice and then you scrape it all together and make a big ball. Then you divide that in half, flatten each half into a disc, wrap and refrigerate. Then you see to your pie filling.
On this particular day (it being Thursday) I had blueberries:
I didn't have the other components that the pie recipe called for (tapioca, lemon juice) but I didn't care. Like Eric Cartman, I wanted some pah. So I mixed the blueberries with 1 1/2 cups brown sugar and let them rest and then when I rolled out the pie dough, I placed the pie dough in the glass pie plate and added the blueberries.
Mmm, doesn't that look so homey, homey?
Then I rolled out the other piece so badly that the pie top rejected the notion of pi, refusing to be a circle and deciding to become a clumpy, blumpy mess. I decided to spare you the horror of what it looked like when I plopped it on top. But no matter!
Into the oven it went:
And out it came, a perfect pie:
So the moral of the story is, go buy yourself a Gourmet magazine, read their pie recipe, get yourself some fruit and even if you mess up when you roll it out still bake it anyway and you will be glad. These are the profound directives of a formerly bad pie maker.
