A helping hand with pie
One of my favorite summer rituals is eating fruit pie for breakfast. In fact, while I never turn down a post-dinner slice, a big part of the reason I bake fruit pies is to have a wedge with coffee the next morning, setting my intentions for the day while I lick sticky cherry, peach or blueberry from the tines of my fork.
I have more than a few friends — friends that cook regularly — who tell me they can’t make pie crust. This is not true. You might not be able to, say, rewire a house. You need specialized skills and training to operate heavy machinery. But pie crust? You’ve got this. The flaky, buttery crust I’m about to teach you comprises three ingredients, four if you include water, five if you include patience, which is probably this pastry’s most vital ingredient. It’s called rough puff pastry, a mock version of the time-consuming, fiddly laminated dough from which croissants are made. And though it be mock, it is mighty: It puffs beautifully, and when you bite into these tender blueberry-filled hand pies, brittle shards of pastry rain down on your shirt.
To make it, combine flour, butter and salt, working the cold cubes of fat into the flour. Add ice water and dump the mixture on a work surface. Oh god, Jessica, you’ll think — because this shaggy, ugly mass looks nothing like pastry. Take a deep breath and do what I instruct, rolling, folding, rolling, chilling. Chilling is key (in pastry and in life). If your dough starts to get sticky, put it in the refrigerator and find something else to do for 10 minutes.
While the dough rests, make the blueberry filling and get that chilling, too. It’s going to look very stiff when it’s cold, but that’s just right: You want a fruit filling that’s firm enough to scoop, otherwise you’ll have an impossible time filling the circles of pastry and shaping them into half moons. Once you’ve made all the hand pies, back into the refrigerator they go. (They can also be transferred to a sheet pan and frozen at this stage. Once completely frozen, transfer to a plastic freezer storage bag. They can be baked from frozen, though they will take a few minutes longer.)
Just before baking, cut vents into the top of each hand pie, brush with egg wash and sprinkle with crystalline sanding sugar. In the oven they puff and bronze, and sometimes they leak a bit too, the fruit bubbling from the vents and seams; that’s OK. Nobody is going to be mad about an oozing fruit-filled flaky hand-held pie, and you can spoon any escaped filling back into an open seam (or, you know, eat it off the sheet pan).
Good for dessert with a scoop of ice cream. Just save a few for breakfast.