A few months ago Michael and I were listening to an episode of the podcast, Judge John Hodgman. This is a podcast where actor and humorist John Hodgeman adjudicates petty disputes between friends or family members. In this particular episode, “Crust-ody Hearing,” a brother and sister were arguing about how cold you need to keep your ingredients to make good pie dough. The sister insisted everything needed to go in the freezer while the brother insisted the refrigerator was fine. I yelled at the podcast a lot during this episode, because I VERY STRONGLY believe that you do not need to freeze your ingredients (or equipment) to make excellent pie dough.
The Case for Not Freezing
There are things that are inherently fussy about making pie dough. The size of your butter chunks matters, how mixed into the flour your butter is matters, how hydrated your dough is matters a lot. Rolling the dough out can be tricky, and sufficiently chilling the dough along the way is definitely important. But, most of us don’t have extra room in our freezers, and maybe I’m only speaking for myself here, but I certainly don’t always remember to plan so far in advance that I would even remember in time to throw my flour, butter and water in the freezer far enough in advance to chill my ingredients beyond what the refrigerator would do.
I hope that if you love to bake, you will try to make your own pie dough. I don’t want people put off by thinking that if they don’t have the space and foresight to freeze their ingredients they shouldn’t bother.
As I thought about why the advice to freeze everything really bothers me, I started to wonder about the history of pie. Pie goes back a long time, certainly before reliable home freezers. But, there are also other types of crust, like hot water crust and I wondered if maybe that was more common before reliable home refrigerators and freezers. In looking into it, I found this great blog post at the Library of Congress Blogs. Inside Adams: Science, Technology & Business. The post, Pie•ology: A Full Filling Story, digs into the history of pie, and as luck would have it, had links to some cookbooks from the late 19th century. The two cookbooks are Good Cheer Cook Book (Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, 1899) and The 76: A Cook Book, ed. by the ladies of Plymouth church, Des Moines, Iowa (1876).1 In both cookbooks, pie dough, which is called pie paste, call out the need to use ice water. In The 76: A Cook Book, the top of the pie section states, “In making paste, use ice water. Have the lard and butter cold and hard.” (page 113) In the Good Cheer Cook Book, each individual recipe states that ice water should be used. (page 145) While these are only two cookbooks, I do think it’s an indication that women 130 years ago were making a similar pie dough to what we make today. Of course, this makes perfect sense because cold is important to making a flaky crust. But, like the ladies of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin and Des Moines, Iowa, we can just use ice water and refrigerator cold butter! No need to go to drastic measures to freeze everything.
Hand Pies
To close out my treatise on how we can chill out about chilling, I made these hand pies in April. It was one of the few warm days we have had this year in southern California. I used my usual method. Ice water, butter straight out of the fridge, everything else room temperature. They did get a little warm at points, but our fridge was packed, so I just worked quickly. And they turned out great! The worst part was dealing with runny egg wash.
I think I need to try to bake out of these books. Stay tuned!