The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [213]
One, from the Bakers Digest in 1967, demonstrated that a flaky crust is produced by a three-way sandwich between layers of flattened lumps of fat that act as spacers, layers of unprotected flour mixed with water to produce gluten, and layers of fat rubbed into flour for tenderness. Plastic (pliable) shortening—such as room-temperature Crisco and slightly chilled lard—is a mixture of solid fat and liquid fat. The liquid part coats the flour; the solid part separates layers!!
The second paper, in the journal Cereal Chemistry in 1943, was a corollary of the first. It showed that when you use chilled shortening, the amount of water you add and the way you mix it are critical; but with room-temperature shortening, the kind Marion uses, these factors matter very little! So much for compulsive dough chillers.
This led me to formulate my own recipe by fiddling around with Marion’s ingredients in four ways. First, I increased the proportion of shortening so that an amateur baker like me does not have to get things exactly right. With more shortening, you can be sure that enough fat will be rubbed into the flour (for tenderness) while leaving enough over for those all-important, large, irregular lumps. And with the flour well waterproofed, the quantity of water you add becomes less critical. A technical article in the Bakers Digest in 1970 showed that raising the proportion of shortening—up to 80 percent of the weight of the flour—increased tenderness without decreasing flakiness at all!
This is a tactic designed for housewives who want a tender piecrust but lack the skill, sneered a male pie expert in a 1952 address to the American Society of Baking Engineers. Being accused of resembling a clumsy housewife does not bother me—I have recently discovered recipes by two very fine pie bakers who use lots of shortening. But when I get better at pie, I may reduce the fat by two tablespoons or so.
Second, I increased everything in Marion’s recipe by a third. Most recipes, especially those written by nimble-fingered women, make just enough dough to form a pie if you are perfectly proficient at rolling dough into a very thin, perfect circle. I find this extremely sexist and discriminatory against clumsier males whose cooking genius lies elsewhere. The larger volume I use makes up for messy and irregular rolling and leaves lots of dough at the edges without the need to patch.
Third, I added a little sugar, which many other recipes also include. Marion has no objection to this. My experiments showed that a little sugar in the dough helps the crust brown and adds flavor to counteract the neutral or even slightly bitter taste of Crisco, but that too much sugar gives the crust a sandy texture (like French sablé pastry or cookie dough), diminishes flakiness, and is cloyingly sweet.
Fourth, I changed to unbleached all-purpose flour, which, because it is higher in protein, is thought to produce a tougher crust. Unbleached flour has a better color and tastes nuttier; with all the shortening I added, the protein was so well coated that toughness was never much of a problem.
My adventures in pie research continued as I tested almost every subsidiary technique recommended by one pie expert or another over the past seventy-three years. In no time at all, every piece of furniture within thirty feet of my oven had been turned into a pie stand. The results:
• Brushing the bottom crust with eggs, yolks, or whites to waterproof it from a liquid filling seems to have no effect.
• Brushing milk over the top crust just before a pie goes into the oven is great for browning.
• Sprinkling sugar over the milk makes for a nice, sweet crunch.
• Greasing the pie plate helps brown the bottom crust and makes it easier to remove pieces of pie.
• Chilling a dough made entirely of Crisco produces an inferior crust with a tight structure compared with