reboot #1— roll roll roll the dough

As I posted my New Year resolution to reboot my pastry-dough skills, I thought, why wait? So, I got a jump on my resolution. ‘Twas the night before Christmas and I made a long anticipated attempt at the Foolproof Pie Dough from America’s Test Kitchen (ATK). Since M loves pies and especially apples, I thought I would celebrate our quiet holiday at our house with an Apple Cranberry Pie . . . along with Golden Fruitcakes, Five Spice Peanut Brittle, and Walnut Cookies with Chocolate Walnut Filling.

I wanted to make a big leap with my first jump into the New Year’s resolution, so I chose the ATK’s Foolproof recipe. I have seen the episode about this pastry dough at least three times–each one almost driving me running into the kitchen. Somehow, procrastination, timing, or a temporary spell of health consciousness stopped me short of pulling out the butter and flour. The holidays, however are a time to indulge—a short period of dessert transgressions for which New Year’s resolutions—with some luck—help shrink your caloric footprint.

I attacked the recipe a few days ahead of consumption, so I would have one less item to fuss about on Christmas Eve. The Foolproof recipe resolves three essential pastry dough dilemmas:

Butter has the flavor but shortening is better for baking. The recipe calls for both butter and shortening. Butter, provides the flavor, but with its high 20% water content, but by itself it would lead to a leathery crust from the over developed gluten. Shortening, on the other hand, has no water content—and zero flavor. The beauty of shortening is that it melts at a higher temperature than butter, and yields a nice tender texture.

Fat and water don’t mix. The Foolproof mixing method is a scientifically logical solution to combining fat and water. The conventional method wants pockets of fat in the dough to yield flakiness. Not so fast says ATK, it’s also the uncoated flour that mixes with water and forms gluten that yields a flaky crust. The solution is to mix fat with some of the flour till it’s evenly coated. Then the remaining flour is added so there’s a constant amount of uncoated flour to mix with the water.

Rolling the dough with water makes it more workable but tougher. Water makes the dough easy to roll out but toughens the crust. If you add less water, you’ll end up with a short and sandy crust, which is not workable with a rolling pin. ATK’s answer is a liquid that will evaporate faster than water–alcohol. It is also a scientific fact that gluten cannot form in alcohol, therefore gluten can only be developed in the water portion of the liquid, about 60%,  and not the alcohol part.

In the words of ATK’s article, “The resulting dough was smooth as Play-Doh, and I couldn’t have made it crack even if I’d wanted to.”  With all the research and tests done by the good folks at ATK, my pie dough making experience was easy.

Assembling the pie, however, was another story. I realize now that my challenge was less in the making and rolling of the dough but in the crimping of the finish edges ( which may explain why I prefer free-form crust or a crostata).  It’s a challenge for me to make the edges even and beautiful –they’re too thick, and the dough feels a bit too soft for the edges to hold their shape. My instinct tells me to chill the pie for a bit before proceeding with crimping the edges. None of the recipes I have encountered suggested this extra step.

For this particular holiday effort, I resigned myself to a first attempt write-off.  After all, we were spending Christmas in the country, so shouldn’t the pie be rustic looking? As you can see, the pie looked pretty good even with the thicker edges. Making the perfect edge will be added to this year’s resolution.

Although this exercise is about making a great pie crust, this recipe has another treasure bit of insight. ATK included the genius solution of separating the cranberries from the apples–not only does this step makes a nice presentation, but both flavors comes through in harmony.