The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [211]
It was awful, hard and compact but crumbly when it broke, spotted with black dots, greasy tasting. There wasn’t a flake in the entire thing. I had never been further from a perfect piecrust.
When I recovered from my disappointment and panic—Marion would arrive in only two days—I figured out what had gone wrong. By processing half the fat so thoroughly, I had indeed waterproofed all the flour particles and no gluten at all had developed. And as a result, there were no flaky layers for the chunky fat to separate. In furious experimentation over the next forty-eight hours, I realized that the Nasty Gluten Theory pie experts were wrong. You cannot produce a flaky piecrust without gluten! The real objective is not to eliminate gluten entirely but to get the right amount distributed in exactly the right way.
I had figured out nearly everything except how to bake a flaky, tender, and crisp piecrust. In fact, I had proved that a perfect piecrust is theoretically impossible.
I wondered if America’s giant food companies had solved the problem. I went out and bought every packaged piecrust I could find: mixes in boxes; frozen pie shells; a refrigerated, prerolled double crust; and several frozen pies. The only nearly acceptable product was the Betty Crocker mix, easy to roll out and yielding a light though mealy crust with inconsequential flakes. But using a mix saves only the three minutes you would spend assembling and measuring the ingredients—you still have to mix and roll out the dough yourself. Pillsbury’s refrigerated crust was somewhat tender and flaky, though soft and white instead of crisp and brown, and it had the repulsive, fermented taste of cheap cheese, maybe the fault of sloppy supermarket storage, maybe Pillsbury’s fault.
Then Marion Cunningham arrived, at nine o’clock on a sunny Saturday morning, in time for coffee. A gentlewoman even under stress, she tried to seem fascinated with everything I had discovered about gluten and sympathetic to my idea that all these opposing forces make the perfect pie theoretically impossible.
Then she smiled and said, “Let’s bake a pie.” We walked a few blocks to the Union Square Greenmarket, bought three quarts of bright red sour pie cherries, returned home, and stemmed and pitted them all and prepared a delicious filling. Now for the crust.
Marion measured out two and a quarter cups of bleached, all-purpose flour (Gold Medal or Pillsbury) into a large bowl. She used a metal cup measure, scooped the flour right out of the bag, and with her free hand pressed it lightly into the cup and brushed off the excess. (Why would I mention this? Because cups of flour can range in weight from four to five ounces, depending on how you fill the cup. Measured in Marion’s way a cup weighs precisely five ounces, more than most cups of flour do but just what Marion lists on the endpapers of her Fannie Farmer Baking Book. It is amazing how many other pie writers warn you to measure your ingredients precisely—a teaspoon of water either way, they say, can ruin your piecrust—but then fail to tell you how they measure their cup of flour or what it should weigh. American home bakers don’t weigh their flour; Europeans do. It is a stupendous irony that twelve editions ago the original Fannie Farmer, who aimed at putting home cooking on a scientific basis, was famous for urging the American housewife to measure her flour with level cups and calibrated spoons.)
With her fingers, Marion mixed in a half teaspoon of salt, then measured out three-quarters of a cup of room-temperature Crisco and plopped it onto the flour. She tossed the shortening in the flour, breaking it up into pieces the size of walnuts. All the while