One of the things that makes homemade dough so much better than the premade pie dough is that it is tender and flaky. The stuff in the freezer case isn’t either, and I’m not sure I fully appreciated that until I started making my own pie dough. As an adherent to the Ina Garten school of “store bought is fine,” I’m not saying no one should ever buy pie dough, but until I started making my own I would have said that homemade isn’t so much better than premade to take the time and effort to make it, but now I know it is (if that’s how one wants to spend their time in the kitchen).
Flakes
What I have learned from Erin McDowell is that it’s possible to get a lot of variation in flakiness depending on how you handle the butter. When I started making pie, I practiced her flaky method, which involved cubing butter and smashing it with your fingers, but not breaking it down much more than that. It bakes up to look like this:
Those are great flakes! They’re gorgeous and tender when you bite into them. But…I was having a terrible time with butter leakage when I used this method.
A little bit isn’t bad, but a) you don’t want a lot, butter is responsible for the flavor and structure of the dough and b) it sucks to spend time incorporating your butter and then to open the oven and find a puddle of butter. Especially if you are a person that occasionally forgets to put your pie tin on a sheet pan.
So, more butter was leaking than I felt was acceptable. I was a little hesitant to break the butter down too much more than I was because I didn’t want to lose the flakiness. And then in March this year, I had a chance to do a private, virtual class with Erin McDowell and obviously this was at the top of my list to ask her about. We talked about it a bit, and her suggestion was to try her extra flaky method. This method is similar to the flaky method, except once the dough is formed, you roll it out a bit, then fold it in quarters, do that one more time and then roll it out to go in the pie plate. She walked me through the method and then a couple of days later, I baked a chocolate silk pie with that dough. These are the results:
It baked up beautifully and no butter leakage.
For the last few months, this has been my go-to pie dough. Here is a coconut cream pie I made for Mother’s Day. It’s tasty and just ridiculously gorgeous:
Stunning flakes!!
So, what’s the problem? Michael mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago that he thought the extra flaky method wasn’t as tender as the flaky method.
[Quick aside: except the pies I’m giving away, Michael has eaten every pie I’ve ever made, and if I bake up some dough scraps, he even tries some of those crusts. He also has a more discerning palate than I do, so while I’m my toughest critic, I trust him to tell me what he thinks about my pies.]
I kind of blew off his comment because, really, unless you eat a lot of crusts (like we do) or try them side by side, I don’t know that the toughness of the extra flaky is discernible. But then, I was thinking about the county fair pies and…that is exactly the case with the judging. The judges are culinary experts. They’ll be eating a lot of pie. I decided I couldn’t use the extra flaky crust method. So a few days later when I decided to make an impromptu pie (more on this in a future post), I decided to try to incorporate the butter more and not do the additional folds. Erin describes this as a mealy dough. The con is that it’s not as pretty as the extra flaky, but that’s about it. It’s tender, and as I contemplated it this morning, I noticed it was flakier than I originally thought.
I’m thinking I may bake a batch of all three and compare side by side before I make my final decision for my show pies, so stay tuned!