I love making pies. I perfected my current pie-making technique when I was a graduate student in Southampton. I was in a rented house with four other students, and the house had a splendid apple tree in the back garden. I could not bear to see them all go to waste when it was in full crop. So I made apple pies. Lots of them.
A crucial part of the process of making a good pie is the making of the pastry that will constitute the crust. Very important indeed, unless you are cheating and buying a ready-made crust, in which case you are not making a pie any more – the actual work has been done for you. (Ok, sure, go ahead – shout at me…)
Well, I don’t need to do one of my long cooking posts about this just yet, since the Lab Lemming is concerned about these issues too, I noticed, and has gone to the trouble of preparing what looks like a careful study of the process (including the pitfalls) just in time for the beginning of the primary pie-making season (Thanksgiving, etc…). Here’s a phase diagram from that discussion, which made me laugh quite a bit:
Here’s a bit of the discussions below it, to whet your appetite…
As anyone with baking experience knows, the stability region for pie crust is a relatively small area on the wet side of the two phase flour + dough field. This field is generally approached by adding water to a flour/butter mixture, as is shown below.
… and I’ll leave it to you to pop over there for more about the processes involved in moving around this all important phase diagram!
-cvj
It’s a pie chart! get it? A pie chart? Ok…
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Mmmmm… custard!
I just came back from South Africa, where you can buy pre-made custard (made with UHT milk) in 1-litre Tetra Pak boxes. In the supermarket on the shelf right next to the 1-litre Tetra Paks of UHT milk. It doesn’t say “Bird’s” but it tastes just like it.
Thanks!
Scary….! 🙂
-cvj
I have made this several times (usually at Christmas, when all excess is excused) and it works a treat. A little care keeps the curdling at bay, and the outcome – which is closer to the traditional English Egg Custard than it is to birds’ divine confection – is quite delicious, especially with poached peaches or something similar.. If you fancy giving it a go, make reference to one of the Nigella Lawson books – How to Eat, Domestics goddess etc. – she includes detailed instructions (which more or less coincide with the above) and emergency actions to be taken should lumpiness overtake you.
That’s quite lovely, and rather fancy indeed… I worry though:- Being quite so splendid, and without the cornflour, it risks not being the custard that most English people will remember growing up with. Have you made this recipe? How close is it to that which people would recognize as the custard from grandma’s, or school dinners?
I shall have to try this some time… Thanks!
-cvj
2 whole eggs
4 egg yolks
75g caster sugar
350ml whipping cream
180ml Sauternes or dessert wine
1 vanilla pod
Preheat the oven to gas mark 2/150O C. Fill up the kettle and put it on. Whisk the eggs, egg yolks and sugar in a large bowl, and put the cream and vanilla pod and the Sauternes (or whatever) into two separate pans. Bring the cream with the vanilla pod to just below boiling point and then remove from heat, cover and allow to infuse for twenty minutes or so. Then, at around this time, bring the Sauternes to just below boiling point. When the twenty minutes are done, pluck the vanilla pod from the cream
Start beating the egg and sugar mixture again. Pour the wine over it and continue to beat while you pour in the cream. Don’t go mad with the whisking. If you beat too much air in, the custard will go frothy and you will have a layer of bubbles on top . Strain the mixture and pour into a dish (this should remove any offensive froth that might have come into being). Put the dish into a baking pan and pour the recently boiled (but not boiling) water from the kettle into the baking pan, to come about halfway up the sides of the dish. Cover loosely with baking parchment or waxed paper.
This will take 1 hour to cook.
Now that’s what I call custard, gentlemen. Nigella Lawson, who should know about these things, likens its consistency to that of a courtesan’s thigh.
The NY Times weighs in on pie crust:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/dining/15crus.html
“Carefully confected with part butter and part freshly rendered lard, this pie pastry was everything baking-book authors and bloggers wax poetic about: a golden-brown-around-the-edges epiphany richly flavored and just salty enough to contrast with the sweet apple filling, the texture as flaky as a croissant but still crisp. It shattered when you bit it, then melted instantly on the tongue.
The only problem with my masterpiece, I told my guests as they licked the crumbs off their plates, was that I was never, ever going to make it again.
Because what they didn’t see was the outsize effort that went into acquiring and preparing the not-so-secret ingredient: leaf lard, the creamy white fat that surrounds a hog’s kidneys. The veritable ne plus ultra of pig fat, it’s far superior to supermarket lard, which is heavily processed stuff that can have an off taste….”
It all should be kept cool… in my way of doing things anyway.. you don’t want a grease ball from melted butter… Cold butter makes for a nice crumbly powder when mixed with the flour (blend with a fork, a pair of knives, etc)… then sprinkle iced water bit by bit and lightly mix it in to make the right consistency….. in the fridge for an hour or so in ball shape… ready to roll out. No automatic mixers needed (ahem …. Moshe? ..ahem… 🙂 )
So I would say that the entire phase diagram is meant to be at low temperature…. well below the melting point of butter.
-cvj
Hey Clifford,
where is the temperature dependence in the phase diagram? I’ve always been told the butter needs to be cold, but if the butter is too cold one misinterprets the dough’s consistency easily, and when you bake it, it will end up either loosing shape or burning?
– B.
And Robert, the powder he is talking about is almost certainly the favouirite Bird’s custard powder. Don’t get the “instant” variety, but the sort you need to cook for a few minutes.
If you can’t get it, make it from scratch. It is just finely powdered cornstarch and some flavourings. With the posible addition of eggs. So make some in the same way I described above our of cornstarch or refined cornflour, and stir in some vanilla, almond, or other extracts (and sugar of course) for nice flavourings… and or grate some cinnamon and/or nutmeg at the end.
A way of controlling the mixing process described above is to make a separate paste and pour it in. in other words, mix the powder slowly with a little of the warm milk in a separate cup and stir stir stir it into a paste…. then when the bulk of the milk is in a pan on the fire, pour in the paste while stirring slowy to makethe custard, eventually bringing to a boil to cook.
If making from scratch, then you’ll be mixing cornstarch into a large beaten egg yolk or two instead, making a paste… and then adding that in the way I mentioned. Flavourings, etc coming later.
You’re not using a lot of cornstarch compared to the milk. We’re talking 2 large egg yolks (alwasy fun to separate egg yolks from the white, if you’ve never done it – use the shell method) and at most between two teaspoons to a level tablespoon full of cornflour to make the paste, to be added to a pint of milk.
Have fun!
-cvj
A blender? Good Lord no! Make it properly the first time and you don’t need to ruin it all with a blender. Stir it into the *cold* (or warm at most) milk very slowly, sprinkling a little at a time, until all mixed in, and then it is never going to get lumpy. This is the same principle for making anything that involves adding a fine starchy powder to a liquid such as milk, that will eventually be cooked to hot. Patience is the key. This is not fast food… patience and love goes into it… excellent flavour and texture results.
-cvj
Robert,
If using custard powder, add milk and sugar, then mix well in a blender to get rid of any lumps!!! Maybe you got to know a different custard in England than I did. At school we were served up, with every dessert, a horrendously lumpy porridge-like, mashed-potato-tasting nightmare that wasn’t even mildly sweet or creamy, and that often looked and smelled like the potato/maize starch powder and water from which it was manufactured.
I’ve since had some very good custard, but more often ice cream is the best bet with apple pie. The only dessert you really need custard with is hot jam/treacle sponge pudding, which is the only item from school dinners which brings back good memories. 🙂
For something more constructive: How do you prepare the custard? I have not been able to reproduce what I got to know in England with vanilla sauce/pudding ingredients they sell here in Germany.
As for most bakery, the problem is that the state one would like to have for the final product is not in thermal equilibrium especially since most people like crusty outside and more watery inside. Thus diffusion is bound to kick in and strictly speaking concepts like phase diagrams from equilibrium physics do not apply.
SCNR.
Moshe…vents help…. a bit. But I don’t usually mind a lot of tasty fruit liquid, so I don’t consider it a problem. Mine usually end up with some liquid, but not to the detriment of the entire operation. I’m not sure how I mange it. Maybe something about the cooking time? Not so long that the apples disintegrate? I’m not explored the pie-baking phase diagram enough to appreciate all the pitfalls, I imagine. I must have found a good path through it and stuck close to it. Sorry i can’t help more.
-cvj
Hmmm, I shall have to see….. not a huge amount of time…. and don’t like to give out recipes I have not tested.
-cvj
So you must be pulling my leg… right? 🙂
Of course i was, and only in the best spirit of jocularity too. I do love and appreciate the pastry phase diagram. We need much more of that in our cookbooks. And as much as i love Yorkshire pudding, i can’t make it worth my own eating it. Maybe a holiday seasonal recipe for us on this side of the Pond???
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos. (Opening line of episode 9.)
I assume you’re engaging in humour here. My saying that I like to make pies is no more remarkable than if someone who’d never been out of China said that same thing. My liking making them is not intended to have anything to do with the “Mom and Apple pie” mythoiogy of America. If an American friend of mine was to say “I like making Yorkshire puddings”, I would not interpret that as anything more than them saying that they like making Yorkshire puddings….
I’m sure you know and appreciate that. So you must be pulling my leg… right? 🙂
-cvj
There something odd about an Englishman suggesting to the colonists that he knows how to make apple pies. I could see mincemeats or steak & kidney recipes, and even a hearty yorkshire pudding suggestion or two, but we here in the land of plenty have had more than our share of apple pie meddling. And yes i am aware of Thomas Knight and even the relavance to gravity legend, but it was the vast open vistas of these fruited plains in which the diversity of so many apple hybrids provided the whimsy and nuance for our excellence at apple pie production.
It looks like you are looking for the right consistency? 🙂
Unrelated question: after you perfected the crust (which I find easy since I have a mixer), how do you prevent the flooding of the pie once the fruit cooks? that has always been my problem, I set out to bake a pie, end up with some other type of delicious thing (which was never given a name, though it should).
Maybe that is one point where my no-recipe approach to cooking should be somewhat compromised…