The Best Research Ever: Pie

While I was pregnant, my focus and attention span shrunk to the size of a walnut, and it seemed the only thing I was able to write about was food.  I wrote long descriptive passages about smell and texture, flaky baked goods and tender meats and tart cherries and salted butter.  An emphasis on food made its way into the firebird story, and for the first draft depictions of smells and taste and color worked fine.  But now in the second draft, I'm shifting toward how it feels to prepare the food: the texture of pie filling before it sets and the strain in your shoulders as you roll out dough.  I didn't know about these things first hand.

That meant it was time for The Best Research Ever.

I started making pie from scratch.

Apple Pie July 13th	Cherry Pie July 23rd
Strawberry Rhubarb August 25th	Mixed Berry September 1st

This is the fruit pie phase of my research, where I learned to make pie dough, tried a couple of different top crusts, and learned about fruit filling.

Making and rolling out pie dough was not that bad once I knew what I was doing.  You can make dough with lots of different kinds of fat: butter, shortening, straight up lard, or a combination of those.  Butter is delicious, but shortening makes the dough easier to work with, so people usually go for a combination of the two.  However, I don't know where they keep the shortening at the grocery store, so I just used two sticks of butter.  The first attempt (the apple pie) was a mess of trying to roll it out, starting over and pressing it back into a ball, trying to roll it out, and starting over and pressing it back into a ball, but when I finally got it, it was amazing.  Oh my God!  I can make pie crust and it's really good!

The second attempt (the cherry pie) I got on the first try.

• The King Arthur Flour cookbook (which is great) told me that I needed to roll the dough out, rolling "in the same direction," so as not to confuse the yeast...WHAT DOES THAT MEAN???  How do you get a circle rolling all in one direction?  How does yeast get confused?  I figured out that it meant not to roll back and forth (roll it one direction, pick up the rolling pin and put it back at the start and roll again), and it's okay to roll up, then roll to the left, then roll down, then roll to the right to get a circle.  But I still don't know what they're talking about with the yeast.
• "Lightly flour" is bullshit.  I also think the concept of putting just enough water into the dough so it's almost falling apart is bullshit.  I'm doing it wrong and grandmothers everywhere are waving rolling pins at me.  But, these two changes to the instructions work together, because the massive amount of flour I dump everywhere probably evens out the extra tablespoon of water I put in.
• The King Arthur Flour cookbook also says to fold your pie crust into quarters, for easier transfer from the kitchen counter where you rolled it out, to the pie tin.  That sounded like a great idea, but it went horribly wrong.  There were big creases in my dough and then a quarter of it fell off and I had to patch it back together.  Instead, if I roll the pie crust around the rolling pin, I can roll it out straight into the pie tin without threatening the crust's structural integrity.

Then there's the filling

• The worst part of making apple pie is peeling the apples.  I used the biggest knife I could find to make myself feel better.
• When the instructions say to spoon the filling into the pie, they know what they're talking about.  I just poured the cherry filling into the pie tin, and all the juice and sauce escaped down the sides and made a huge mess.
• If you don't know what a rhubarb is, it's tart so the strawberry and the ice cream we added mellow it out.  It looks like celery except it's red and you even cut it an peel it the same way.  It's available frozen at most grocery stores.  I didn't know what to do with frozen rhubarb, so I called around to likely places and asked if they had fresh rhubarb.  Those were fun conversations.  Whole Foods had both organic rhubarb and regular rhubarb.  This pie was unanimously voted the best pie.
• I thought I had this down and went to make a mixed berry pie because the baby loves strawberries and I feel the need to mix it up a bit for him instead of giving him an adult sized plate of chopped strawberries for lunch every day.  But then they threw me a curve ball.  For the cherry and the rhubarb pie, you mix the filling and then let it sit for a half hour for to thicken from the presence of the tapioca.  I was expecting the same thing for the berries, but no.  Now I had to simmer the mixture until it thickened even though I'd put the tapioca in.  WTF?  Why is it different?  Aww, Geez, did I do this right?  Ack.

Then there's the top crust.  I didn't get fancy on the first attempt.  I put down a regular old top crust on the apple pie, cutting plain slits in it to vent it.  For the cherry pie, I tried a lattice, which looked wonderful, but was not nearly enough crust for my crust loving family.  So for the strawberry rhubarb pie, I tried a tighter weave, and also tried a plaid design.  For the mixed berry pie, I dove into the realm of cookie cutters.  The top crust is made of a hundred or so stars that I cut out of the dough.

• Beaten egg yolk gets the two crusts to stick together.  I learned that I should brush it on the edge of the bottom crust BEFORE I put down the lattice.  I had to peel up the edges of the lattice and brush underneath and tempt fate that my lattice wouldn't crumble apart.
• Keeping the bars of the lattice even is tricky.  I got out a pizza cutter about half way through the cherry pie top, but my strips ended up thicker on one end than the other.  I saw people on the internet using a ruler and scoffed.  For the strawberry rhubarb, I got out a ruler.
• There's a point after you mix the dough where you pat it into two disks and stick it in the refrigerator for a half hour so that it will stay round when you roll it out.  The book said "at least a half hour" so I figured I could mix the dough during the baby's morning nap, then stick it in the fridge and roll it out during his afternoon nap.  No.  That is not how it works.  It got way too hard and cold in the fridge and it had to thaw for about an hour before I could roll it out, and when I did it had a lot of trouble staying round and kept falling apart.  This was the strawberry rhubarb pie where I attempted a fancy top crust because I'd had such luck with my previous attempts and I was feeling good about myself.  It did not go well.  If that picture looks like a Pintrest Fail, that's because it is!  It still tasted good though, and I totally think I could pull it off next time.
• Apparently, you are supposed to inherit cookie cutters from your grandmother or something, because I looked all over the place for little cookie cutters and couldn't find them.  We had to make a trip to a fancy kitchen store on the north side.  There they told me that pies are an autumn thing, so all the cookie cutters for pies are autumn leaves and pumpkin shaped and and themed for holidays.  I was trying to make a mixed berry pie and looking ahead to the key lime and lemon meringue I want to make later, so this autumn thing didn't make a lot of sense to me.  Oh well, I got some mini cutters that have stars and hearts and moons, and a set of autumn leaves, one of which could pass as a lime leaf, so we're all good.

My endeavors have shed light on what I still need to find out.  I'm making changes to the instructions for what works for me, but what would experienced bakers say about that?  What's the deal with confusing the yeast?  Why did I simmer the berries and not the cherries?  I have a bunch of books coming into the library about the science of baking, but I've realized lately that what I really want to study is the superstitions of baking.  The rituals.  The traditions.  I want to know how a grandma would do it, even the parts that don't have an effect on the outcome of the pie.  Like throwing salt over your shoulder if you spill some, or "clean as you go," or where to leave the pie to cool, or all the other things I don't know about.

More research is necessary.