Next week, cookbook author and television cooking teacher Nathalie Dupree will be in our kitchen for a sold-out class, doing what she does best: charm everyone’s socks off, cook wonderful food, make an absolute mess, and, most important of all, take the fear and trepidation out of those kitchen jobs that hold so many of us back.
One of those jobs is the pastry for the Thanksgiving pie. As she likes to point out, it’s just a few cents worth of butter, flour, salt, and a little ice water, but nothing else seems to strike fear in the heart of cooks like a lump of pastry dough. It’s as if there were some mysterious alchemy involved in turning those simple ingredients into the perfection of a golden, flaky, tender, casing for sweet treats and gussied up leftovers.
Even professionals fall victim to this fear: last week master Chef Chris Chalmers admitted, while whipping up a perfect simple butter pastry for his stellar goat cheese and potato tart, that as a young cook pastry-making really intimidated him.
Well, here’s the big secret: there isn’t one. There’s no alchemy or mystery involved in producing great pastry. This stuff has been made for thousands of years by thousands of very simple people. If it were really all that hard, pies would not have become America’s favored treat, but would’ve ceased to exist long before refrigerated pie dough showed up in the grocery store.
That said, perfect pastry isn’t something you just slap together on your first try: like any skill, it takes practice. But—get this through your head—it doesn’t really take all that much, especially not if you own a good hand-held pastry blender or basic food processor.
Look at it this way: a crust for a nine-inch pie is less that a dollar’s worth of raw material and involves an active time investment of less than half an hour. If the first try isn’t perfect, so what? You really don’t have your whole existence invested in it: just get out another dollar’s worth of butter and flour and try again.
Start with flour that will work with you rather than against you—that is, one with a moderately low gluten content. Glutens are the proteins that lock themselves together in strong chains, trapping the gas bubbles produced by yeast so that bread dough rises and becomes light and delicate. But what is good for yeast dough is not good for pastry. If the glutens are activated in a pastry, it will not be light and delicate, but heavy and tough.
All wheat flour has gluten in it, but pastry flour, made from soft winter wheat, has much less gluten than any other variety. Unhappily, we have trouble getting good pastry flour locally, so it is good to know that all-purpose flours are a blend of both low and high gluten flours, and will make a reasonably good pastry.
Beyond that, there are only two things you need to worry about: making sure that the fat and water are cold and that you don’t put a lot of work into the pastry. That’s right: the less work you put into it, the better it will be, because overworking the dough will excite those little glutens, making them lock together and toughen the end result.
You want to keep the fat cold so that it cuts cleanly into the flour and produces a flaky and tender crust. If the shortening gets warm and oily, the pastry will be greasy and hard. Using ice water to bind the dough further insures that the fat will remain cold.
To make two 9-inch pie shells or a single pie with a top crust, you’ll need 10 ounces (about two cups) pastry or all-purpose flour, half a teaspoon of salt, four ounces (eight tablespoons, or one stick) of unsalted butter, cut into small chunks and thoroughly chilled, an ounce (two tablespoons) of lard or shortening, cut into small chunks. If you don’t keep chilled water in the fridge, you’ll also need to have ready half a cup of ice water.
To make it by hand, put the flour and salt in cold bowl and whisk it to sift. Add the chilled fat and, using a good pastry blender, cut the fat into the flour until it looks like coarse meal with random bits no larger than small peas.
Pour in about a quarter of a cup of ice water and stir it in with a fork. Keep adding water by spoonfuls until the dough is just beginning to clump together. You don’t want it to be wet, so a little dry and crumbly is good. Gather it into a ball and put it on a floured work surface. With the heel of your hand, gently push the dough away from you, smearing it, then fold it back and repeat this about four times. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap, press it into a disk and let it rest in the refrigerator for half an hour, to even out the moisture distribution and relax any glutens that got excited in the mixing.
If you’re still intimidated by that, you might want to use the food processor. Chill the metal blade in the freezer for a few minutes. Fit it into the work bowl and add the flour and salt. Pulse to mix it and then add the chilled fat. Pulse until the mixture resembles coarse meal—again with larger bits no bigger than small peas. Add a quarter of a cup of ice water and pulse to mix it in. Keep pulsing in additional water by spoonfuls until the dough just begins clumping together. Finish it by hand on a floured board, then wrap and chill it.
The only other thing to do is when you are rolling the dough remember that you are pressing and not stretching it flat. Use light pressure and don’t pull it: if you stretch it, when it starts baking it will draw back up again and you’ll end up with an uneven piecrust.
That’s a lot of words to describe something that’s really simple, so arm yourself with flour, fat, and courage, and get into the kitchen and practice. By Thanksgiving, you’ll be producing perfect pastry without the Pillsbury Dough Boy.