I've been less and less satisfied with the pie crusts I've been producing. They've been getting more and more complicated to put together. Do I have Crisco? (I never have Crisco, since I only ever buy it once a year.) Wet the flour with vodka...no, not vodka, calvados! With a spray bottle! With ice cubes in it! Dig out the food processor. Pulse process--is the butter pea-sized yet? (You can look back at my
original post for apple pie to see all the steps I'm talking about.) And it would take me forever to roll out the dough, and it was cracking, and it
never seemed flaky. Maybe I just suck at pastry, I thought.
So, I was looking for something else to try. I found Smitten Kitchen's recipe for
all butter, really flaky pie dough. She [Deb Perelman] had been using the same Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen recipe that I had been working with. One by one, she enumerated all the problems she had with what she'd been doing. And she proposed ditching the shortening, the vodka, the food processor...all the things that had made pie crust such a pain. That left just five ingredients--flour, butter, sugar, salt, and water--and minimal equipment. Could it be that easy?
