The right fat
When I tell people I grew up in a family of pie bakers, it’s easy to imagine I’m bragging. My mother’s pies are legendary — rich, velvety custard fillings or mounded fruit pies, each cradled in an ornately decorated crust, golden and with the most delicate layers. And don’t get me started on my grandmother; in her day, she was known as the “Pie Baker of Villa Park,” a small suburb west of Chicago.
When I went to start baking my own pies, I didn’t think much about it. Pie-making was something my family took for granted. But then I sliced into that first homemade pie — it was pumpkin, brought to a work potluck — and found to my horror not a perfect takefor-granted pie but a bubble of raw dough beneath the layer of filling. There are some mistakes not even a truckload of whipped cream can cover.
A dozen or so years, a career change, several restaurant and catering jobs, and a few hundred pies later, my skills have improved — though they still don’t quite match those of my mother or grandmother. But I’ve learned a lot and continue to pick up tips. Recently, I spoke with some experts and tested more than a dozen combinations of fats, flours and tricks. Here are my results.
Passionate pie bakers tend to have a religious zeal about what type of fat goes into their crusts, and not without good reason.
“Fats and shortenings are absolutely critical to pies,” says Ernest Miller, research and development chef at Coast Packing Co., a major supplier of animal fats and shortenings for cooking, baking and frying based in Vernon, Calif.
The type of fat determines flavor and can influence the final texture and color of the crust. Bakers tend to use one of three kinds — butter, shortening or lard — or a combination. But which, and why?
Lard is among the most traditional of kitchen fats. “In certain points in our history, lard was actually more expensive than pork,” Miller says. Never mind the cost of butter. “You wouldn’t be using butter for baking unless you were wealthy.”
Miller notes that shortening, with the introduction of Crisco in 1911, was created to mimic the effects of lard, but at a fraction of the price. “An allCrisco crust will give you the best border,” notes Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of “The Pie and Pastry Bible,” “but I don’t use shortening because there’s no flavor.”
As people began shunning shortening for its trans fats, bakers looked for alternatives such as butter, even oil. Over the years, I’ve taken to making my crust using a ratio of twothirds butter to one-third shortening. I’ve found, particularly when I keep the fats cold until the crust goes in the oven, I get some of the benefits of shortening in my detailed borders, along with the flavor of butter.
When it comes to flour, some experts swear by allpurpose, others by lowerprotein pastry flour and still others by a host of custom blends, all for a tender but flaky crust.
If she’s using all-purpose flour, Beranbaum finds that adding a touch of sugar works to tenderize the dough, mimicking the results of using pastry flour.
Rucker also uses the sugar trick in her dough, though she goes an extra step by dissolving the sugar in water before she adds it, ensuring that it’s evenly absorbed by the flour and making for a uniformly tender crust.
Another trick is adding apple cider vinegar, which also helps to tenderize or “shorten” the crust.