The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [210]
The rest of the world uses scales to weigh its dry ingredients because scales are vastly more accurate than cups for things like flour, cornstarch, and cocoa. Depending on how densely compacted it is, a pound of flour can fill up as few as three cups or as many as four and a half, which means that Americans almost never bake the same cake twice.
How ever did we get into such a pickle? Sokolov proposes the “Conestoga theory” of cup measurement—that “pioneers and homesteaders heading west did not bother lugging heavy metal scales with their weights.” But early American cookbooks call for flour by weight, at least some of the time, and it was not until Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896, when most Conestoga wagons were rusting in suburban garages, that cup measurement was universally adopted—on the backward notion that it was more scientific. Marion Cunningham’s twelfth edition of Fannie Farmer (1979) gives both cups and grams.
All of this is aimed at achieving a tender piecrust. But what about flakiness? When you roll out pie dough, the flattened particles of shortening separate the dough into layers. The pieces of fat act as spacers. The larger they are, the wider and longer the layers they produce. Depending on how you cut the fat into the flour, the particles can range from the size of a grain of coarse meal to that of a pea or a small olive.
When piecrust is baked, the solid fats melt, leaving a gap between the layers of dough. The water in the dough begins to turn into steam, puffing the layers of dough apart. And when the dough reaches about 160 degrees Fahrenheit, the piecrust begins to set. Crispiness comes about when enough water has been driven from the dough by the heat of baking.
Lard, the rendered body fat of the pig, has a high melting point and coalesces into especially large crystals when it cools to lower temperatures. That’s why lard acts as a terrific spacer between layers of dough. Lard was once widely considered the best fat for making flaky piecrust. Crisco was introduced in 1911 as a lard replacement with a long shelf life. Nowadays, lard has lost some of its popularity because of its pork flavor (which really goes quite well with apples, pears, cherries, and peaches) and widespread nutritional superstitions (even though lard, at 43 percent saturated fat, is less saturated than butter, at 50 percent, and may come out only a little worse than a vegetable shortening like Crisco, which contains 21 percent saturated fat to begin with and 14 percent transfatty acids when it is hydrogenated to make it solid.
Which brings us back to my kitchen. My object was to get around all of this agonizing about gluten and fat, and to eliminate entirely the need for manual skill. Here is how I made the piecrust about to emerge from the oven: I followed the classic three-two-one formula, using Crisco and medium-protein all-purpose flour—totally ordinary, so far. But it was my technique that would soon astound both the baking world and Marion Cunningham. Using a food processor, I added half the shortening to all the flour and processed it like crazy, for five minutes, until it completely disappeared, coating all the little flour particles and immunizing them against what was to come—water and the threat of gluten. This technique would guarantee the tenderest of piecrusts. Next came all the water, processed briefly until everything began to form into clumps of dough. Finally, the rest of the shortening went in, briefly pulsed to leave it in pieces the size of M & M’s. These would form layers when the dough was rolled out. The expected result: perfectly tender, crisp, and flaky pastry.
I turned