Yes, my friends, it is time for yet another pie-related post, the last I hope for awhile as I have many other things to do and write, including some remedial adventure blogging. However, if either of my siblings happens to be reading this, especially after 8:00 p.m., and is likely to suddenly develop an unwanted craving, well, you've been warned. (As requested, L.)
This post arises because esteemed correspondent Melissa of Sugared Harpy, not just an art history professor but also apparently an enthusiastic pie mistress, mentioned in comments to my geometry post that she had yet to attempt a lattice-top crust. So this post will not only provide an extremely amateur demonstration (for extremely amateur results), but also some tips for working with store-bought crust in case you, like me, just don't have the skills, patience or equipment to make your own. For better advice and more professional results, you will have to visit pie god Shuna at Eggbeater or some equally proficient patissier. People pay her to teach them, and she also makes desserts people pay for. However, if you do not have time to achieve perfection in this arena just at this moment but do feel ready to maybe try stepping up your presentation a notch, please allow me to give you a little hand up.
The first step for working with a prosthetic (store bought) pie crust is to find one you like, and that may be the hardest part of all. The staff of America's Test Kitchen on PBS tried a bunch and liked the Whole Foods store brand offering best. Though it has all natural ingredients and probably won't give you cancer, my true love and I were unimpressed. We also don't like whole-grain pie crust. Not at all. Not for sweet pie. We like pie crust for dessert (yeah, right; dessert) pies to taste buttery, have a flaky texture, not be too salty, not have a chemical "wang" to them, and not be more important than the filling, just a nice frame for it, or when the pies don't come out with any trace of structural integrity, usually because we can't wait to cut into them and tend to start eating them while they are still warm, the crusts must be good enough not to pick around in a big ol' pile of hot, sweetened, baked fruit with gleaming tapioca beads.
Of all the ones we've tried, this is the one we like best so far, the optimistically brand-named "Oronoque Orchards."
It is loaded with preservatives and other questionable, unnatural, possibly carcinogenic and goodness knows what else kind of ingredients, but it tastes really good to us, not as good as homemade but very good, is available at our extremely local (four small blocks away) conventional grocery store open until 10:00 p.m. most nights, and saves me a ton of effort. Interestingly, only the "deep dish" (really not deep dish at all; only ever so slightly larger than their regular size crusts, but sold two to a pack instead of three to a pack for almost the same price) taste good to us. The others, when we tried them, tasted quite disgusting. Since I remember the ingredients as being pretty much the same, I have no explanation for this.
Once you have found your dream or maybe just only tolerable store-bought pie crust, in order to keep the bottom crust from turning into something gluey and repulsive, you must prepare it. First preheat your oven to 425°F. Next, place the pie crust, foil pan and all, into a similarly shaped glass or ceramic pie plate. You won't really notice why now. You will notice when the bottom crust has been filled, covered, and especially when the whole pie has been fully baked. These foil pans, they are flimsy, and liquidy weight such as hot, baked, and potentially extremely messy blueberries does not rest easily within them. I learned early on in my career as a prosthetic crust user not to trust them, never to trust them. They are there to make a shape for the bottom of your pie only.
So now that the crust in flimsy foil is nicely braced by a more solid external pan, take a fork and one of the frozen crusts you have on hand and,
while the crust is still frozen, poke tiny holes in it, lots of them,
in some pattern that pleases you.
Now bake the pierced pie crust, all by itself, for ten minutes. This is what it should look like at the end of that time.
Now cool it slightly, until you can handle the glass or ceramic dish barehanded without hurting yourself. You may wish to refrigerate it for five or ten minutes, but wait a few minutes before you do that so you don't crack the dish.
If you are making a two-crust pie (as opposed to, say, a pumpkin or other custard or pudding filled pie), before you began preparing the bottom crust, you should take another crust out of the freezer, take it out of its foil pan, and place it on a cutting board. Let it sit there and defrost while you do all this other stuff, mix the pie filling, etc. When it is ready to mess with, it will look something like this.
Gently push the crust flat.
Then slice it into sort of even strips about ½" or ¾" wide.
Better cooks than I will all tell you that The Secret to good pie crust -- even prosthetic pie crust -- is keeping it cold, very cold, while you work it. So after you have made these nice strips, place them on plates and put them in the fridge.
Do not stress out if some or even all of the strips break while you are handling them, and don't bother trying to repair them. It won't matter in the end, I promise.
When both crusts have cooled, the bottom crust sufficiently for touching with your bare hands and the top crust strips until at least moderately stiff (about ten minutes in all, during which time you will either have been doing some other part of your weekly cooking, watching TV, loading the dishwasher, playing with the cat(s)/dog(s)/child(ren)/gerbil(s), sorting laundry, or just staring into space, whatever will make you happiest), fill your bottom crust with luscious fruit filling.
Now it is time to begin latticing. First, grab one of the end pieces and lay it on top of one side of the edge of your pie. Push its round edge into the hard edge of the pre-toasted bottom crust to form a sort of seal. Then begin laying other strips across.
Do not worry about whether the strips break. You are actually going to break them on purpose anyway for at least half of the pie. Also -- and remember, I'm not a math genius so please cut me some slack if I don't explain this clearly -- you are going to end up using less pie crust than you have. I know it's hard to believe, but it's true. You started with enough top crust to more than cover the filled bottom crust. You are going to make a pattern with the top crust that will leave copious small gaps throughout. You will have pie crust left over. Really.
This is because you are going to employ a technique beloved of painters, gravestone carvers and other artists everywhere: trompe l'oeil. You are not going to actually weave the strands of crust; you are only going to make it look like you have. If you actually wove the crust, you would end up with areas where the crust was unpleasantly thick, lots of them; one would happen everywhere the crust strips crossed. You would also have to be way more careful than we amateur schlubs have time to be. This way you will end up spending very little effort to make a very pretty, very delicious pie that will impress your friends and family. (And if it doesn't, I have advice for dealing with that at the end of this post.)
Remember, this exercise is completely optional. In my experience as a shameless glutton, I have been reminded over and over again that tasty pie which does not have a latticed top is every bit as delicious as tasty pie which does. You are here following my instructions, not a professional baker's, because you think this might be fun, not because you are trying to get onto Top Chef -- which I stopped watching, incidentally, because when it aired immediately after my brain surgery the first episode of the most recent season gave me highly detailed, all-too-plausible nightmares of which I won't tell you any specifics because I don't want to give the producers ideas. But I digress.
You and I are not doing this for world acclaim. You, just as I am, are doing it to achieve this result.
Or this one.
So, back to the faux weaving. Once you have placed strips across the top of the pie going in one direction -- and don't worry if you use more than half of your total crust volume doing this; you will still end up with extra, honest --
-- break off a little piece of one of the strips. Eyeball the length to equate to the distance between two strips already placed across the pie + the width of one of these strips + the distance between it and the next. Lay it across the strip in question. Break off another piece the same size. Lay it across not the next strip, but the one after that.
Do you see how this works? I know this is a really bad photo, but what you are trying to do is make it look (very, very roughly) as though you have woven crust behind every other strip (or across every other strip, depending on how you see), but you are not actually doing so.
It doesn't matter if the short "woven" strips aren't long enough or are too long when you first lay them over the pie. You can add and subtract at will. It will not look perfect. It will not matter. Your next step, you see, will be to sprinkle sugar -- preferably turbinado sugar for its pretty, pretty sparkliness and lovely mild flavor -- over the whole thing, mostly on the strips of crust because the filling doesn't really need more sweetening, though it's okay if some sugar falls into the gaps.
Now you bake it, et voilà.
Yes, it is "flawed," not rigidly orthogonal or perfectly evenly spaced. But it's what I call perfectly imperfect. Tell me you wouldn't eat this or that any of your family or friends are going to refuse it or criticize you for any visual "flaws." If they do, IMO, you must school the former and/or drop the latter, because they are ungrateful wretches. Oh, and you should eat the whole thing yourself, too, just to drive home the point.
Recent Comments