Easiest Crust Ever (Apple Pie)

The apple pie I made for Thanksgiving dinner has been staring at me.

I've made apple pies before, but this one was different. You see, I used a different crust. We had a friend coming to dinner that couldn't have any dairy. My first instinct was to use the pie recipe I use for pumpkin pies, you know, this one.

But then I remembered a pie crust from Roland Messnier that didn't use any dairy, only shortening for the fat. When I mixed up the pie crust, I was amazed that it didn't like to be worked by hand, it was so sticky it could only be worked by my mixer. Because I'm neurotic and a little OCD, I've been working at making pie crusts by hand. I just didn't believe that a great crust could come from a mixer. This will be the pie crust I use when I open my pie shop.

The pie was wonderful. Nice tart apples, enough moist filling to carry flavor, but not enough to be a soupy mess, beautiful brown crust surrounding the whole thing. And through the whole experience, I kept thinking:

"I wish I could write about this."

A Little Bit of Improvisation

When people talk about cooking (savory, not in an oven,) and baking (sweet, in an oven,) they often talk about improvising in the kitchen. To them, people who like to bake like to have things done precisely, with temperatures and measurements and timings clearly laid out. And on the other hand, people who like to cook can just free-wheel through the kitchen, making things up as they go. It's like the baker is the control freak aunt who has to have everything just so and keeps plastic on the furniture so it never, ever gets dirty. The cook is the fun uncle who never shows up on time and is always fun when he does show up.

Do you see why I take exception with this characterization?

Something a little, well, different.

If you think about it, you've probably eaten no more than a dozen pies in your life. Seriously, after the big names that everyone knows, the pickings get a little slim. You've most likely eaten:

Apple

Pumpkin

LMP

Pecan

Banana Cream

Coconut Cream

Chocolate Cream

Peanut Butter

Berry (a catch all covering all summer berry pies)

Peach

And, um, yeah...that's probably about it. Sure, anyone who reads this list will be able to think of a couple more, but the common variations get narrow really fast. 

I remember complaining, as a kid, about a culinary experiment my mother put in front of me: "Why can't you just make the food that you know we like?" (As an adult, I'm already annoyed with my nine-year-old self. "Just eat it, kid, you might like it." But that's beside the point.)

Buttermilk Preserves Pie

Occasionally, people ask me what draws me to cooking, or ask me how I starting cooking. I generally hem and haw, try to come up with something that sounds reasonable or logical. Like, "It's cheaper than eating out." Or, "It's a really useful hobby. I mean, you gotta eat, right?" All true. Also incomplete. There's a lot more to the story than just not wasting my time. After all, it is faster and cheaper to change your own oil in your car, and I don't do that.

An Elegant Dessert

Let's face it: pie is homey. It's comfort food, something that your grandmother could whip up and serve after a family dinner. Pie in our culture shows up on the "family" holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and 4th of July.

There are problems with elevating pie into a finer dessert. Presentation is so vitally important for high-end desserts. Cupcakes are easy to present with flair, with their ever present buttercream that is so simple to pipe attractively, and the ease of adding color and accents to the top of the cupcake. Pie, on the other hand, tends to be always presented in one way: in a wedge. It has very natural colors, which are beautiful, in a homey sort of way.

"When there are no words..."

Where I'm from, people respond to tragedy with food. There are those times in life when there's nothing you can say, nothing you can do to take the pain away from people around you. There are natural disasters, illnesses and deaths that can't be made to hurt less, that can't be explained away. You can't say, "It'll get better," because it won't. Some people respond with prayer, by sending cards, by expressing condolences, but I generally bring a pie.

About a year ago I found out that one of my co-workers was in the hospital. There were dark whispers that it was serious, maybe even life threatening. He had the best in medical care, his community rallied around him and his family. Like many of the people I work with, I did what I could to help. I brought a pie. But, pie or not, brain cancer gets most people in the end.  

Pulling Out All the Stops - Not Your Grandma's Banana Pudding Pie

"Pulling out all the stops," is a musical term. A "stop" is a piece on an organ that stops the flow of air from the bellows to the pipes. Now, the organ is, in some ways, a rather crude instrument. The ability to regulate dynamics was a function of how many pipes were sounding at any given time, because you couldn't regulate the velocity of air from the bellows. So when an organist wanted to really crank the instrument up and let 'er rip, they pulled out all the stops, allowing the air flow to reach every pipe, generating a lot of noise. Hopefully the organist's skill matched his enthusiasm.

On this pie, you are truly pulling out all the stops. Believe it or not, there are times when I look at a recipe and think, "I could use 1% milk here rather than whole," or "I could make do with vanilla extract, not waste time and money on a vanilla bean." And yeah, for a pie at a pot-luck, for everyday pie, you can get away with a couple of cost or fat saving techniques. But not this pie, not today.

Don't fear the crust

Since writing about pie, I've heard that many people are intimidated by pie crust. There have been quite a few people that point out that you can buy pie crust in the freezer section now. And it's not bad. In a pinch, it would probably do just fine. But really, are you ever "in a pinch" when it comes to pie crust? It's not like it goes out of season.

I like a crisp, flaky crust. I've found that I generally like to blind bake my crust in advance. Blind baking is baking the crust prior to putting in the filling. It's not always possible, such as with double crust pies. But when it's possible, I think it makes a better crust.

One common problem with blind baking is the pie crust sliding down the side of the pan. This is especially true of crusts that have a high butter content, as the fat melts prior to the structure of the crust setting. One solution, my favorite solution, is to bake the crust upside down. You read that correctly.

This is a great crust to put something sweet and soft in, like maybe chocolate pudding, or chocolate mousse. Yum.

Here are ten steps to making a fine (and not difficult) crust. And you get to bake it upside down.

1 C. flour

¼ C. Wondra

½ tsp. salt 

6 Tbsp. butter, cut into 1/2 tablespoon sections, kept cold

½ C. sour cream

You will also need two identical pie pans (like the cheap metal ones,) and parchment paper.

#10 Get fresh ingredients. If you can't remember when you bought that butter sitting in your fridge, it's most likely not fresh. Unless you're like me, and you go through so much butter in your life that buying it is nearly a weekly activity.

Maple Walnut Pie - Who Knew Syrup Was For More Than Pancakes?

Guest Written by the Pie Guy’s Wife

When my husband came up with the idea of a pie blog I was, to say the least, skeptical about the possibility of it coming into fruition. Then the planner part of me started in and helped sketch out a whole year of pies so if we decided to do this we were completely read to dive in for 52 weeks of a different pie each week. Yes, the Pie Guy will tell you I have a problem. I think he has actually, at least once.

When we started filling in the months after choosing some seasonal favorites I looked up National Holidays to tie into. In December I found National Syrup Day celebrated December 17^th. The Pie Guy has a bit of an obsession with maple syrup. He stops at a specific restaurant on our trips to his parents’ house to pick up“local” syrup that he hasn’t found an equivalent to local to our home. He also had a friend who swears by Grade B syrup, which we finally located in time to make this week’s pie.

A Tale of Two LMPs

On a business trip recently, a quick Yelp search yielded a result that sounded promising. A local diner, more than one person gushed about their desserts. Specifically, they gushed about their pie. Including this teaser:

"The pies...you must try coconut creme or lemon meringue."

So, of course, I went.

Look, Ma! No Pan!

Your average pumpkin or apple pie at Thanksgiving looks good. It looks like some effort has gone into the crust, maybe a top crust, possibly some artistically piped whipped cream. It's charming, in it's own way. It looks like the boy or girl next door, plenty attractive, but not likely to star in a movie. And really, we like them (both the pie, and the neighbor,) just the way they are.

There are pies that are all dolled up. They sport carefully cut out top crusts in the shape of autumn leaves, perfect lattice tops, delicately brushed with milk and sprinkled with glistening sugar, and they stand out among the plainer specimens around them. They're the prom queens and kings of pie. They might be made by pastry chefs or the neurotic woman that goes to your church. Carefully coiffed, every meringue wisp artistically draped and singed, just enough of the filling showing to show what they got. They look great, and they look like a lot of work.

Chocolate Pecan Pie

It’s not about what I know, it’s about what I don’t know.

When we started this blog, my wife sat down and wrote out a schedule of pies to make. I brainstormed 52 topics, she typed them up and fit them into a calendar that would make sense from a seasonal standpoint.  That way, I wasn't making Strawberry Pie in December and Apple Pie in June. And this week’s topic was Chocolate Pecan Pie.

It starts with a completely pre-baked crust. I wanted to try out a new crust, so I made it up, carefully followed the finicky directions about temperature and cooling the ingredients and letting the crust rest. I rolled it out, fit it into the pie pan, docked the crust, let it cool more in the fridge, and put it into a hot oven to bake.  Then I sat down to write a blog post about how much stuff I knew about pie crust. It was going to be great.

After ten minutes, I looked in the oven to find disaster. Despite the docking, the crust had inflated in the middle and slipped down the sides of the pan. This wouldn't do, this wouldn't do at all. I tried to poke holes in the middle and maybe stretch it back, but I've been down this road before and knew that it was over before I started.

It’s not about what I know, it’s about what I don’t know.

Pumpkin Pie

Every year at this time, some people ask me if I roast my own pumpkins for my pumpkin pie. Then they look at me like they expect me to say something half-crazy.

In their minds, roasting your own pumpkin is close to killing your own chickens, curing your own corned beef, or canning your own applesauce. They think it's too much work, they invariably mention that you can buy these items in the store, carefully sanitized and wrapped in plastic.

I haven't killed my own chickens, yet. I've never made my own corned beef, but I have made my own applesauce.  And I can tell you that homemade applesauce is hands-down better than anything I can buy in the store.  And yes, I do roast my own pumpkins.

Lori's Apple-Cranberry Pie

In the list of human failings, soggy pie crust is probably not the worst. Compared to child exploitation, nuclear proliferation, or suicide terrorism, it doesn't really rate. It’s totally a first-world problem.

But soggy pie crust is its own horror. One of the great characteristics of pie is that the crust has the potential to introduce texture into a dessert.

Texture isn't talked about much with desserts, but it’s very important. While you can make a pretty great dessert with only one texture, such as chocolate pudding, different textures elevate dessert to the sublime, the wonderful, maybe even artistic. I think that one of the driving factors behind the cupcake craze of the last decade has been the ease that cupcakes introduce texture to dessert. Beyond the cake, there was always a frosting (another texture,) often a topping (another texture,) and sometimes a filling (you get my point, right?)  Pie has similar possibilities: a well executed pie already has different textures built in.

Thus, my revulsion with soggy pie crust. When given the opportunity to create texture in an otherwise fine dessert, the creator of the pie instead chose a path that resulted in a crust that absorbed moisture and slowly became one with the filling. Where the filling ends and the crust begins is hard to determine. Furthermore, pie can be wonderful finger food, just pick up a piece and carry it back to the football game if your wife isn't watching. But you can’t do that with soggy crust.

Election Special - Hypocrite Pie

It began with an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. I invited my future wife to join my family at the day-after-Thanksgiving meal and euchre tournament that has been held at my cousin’s house for as long as anyone can remember. I probably said something along the lines of: “We ought to make something to take along, huh?”

We were young. I was twenty-three and she was twenty-two. We hadn't lived a lot of life yet, hadn't had a ton of time to learn to cook. I had just graduated from college and was just starting to find my way into the kitchen. We had no clue, on so many levels.

My future wife being the woman that she is, she went to Borders and bought the biggest dessert cookbook she could find, “Classic Home Desserts,” by Richard Sax. We made the apple pie recipe as a test, called it good (it still is) and made it to take with us to this family gathering. The cookbook went back on the shelf.  We had no idea how much of an influence that book would have on the rest of our lives.