ost people think of Thanksgiving as Turkey Day. Maybe it's my Midwestern roots, but no matter how succulent the bird, I have room in my heart for only one love on the fourth Thursday in November: pie.
I divide the year into two seasons, pie and no pie, with the pie season running from the first strawberries and rhubarb in the spring through cherries, blueberries and peaches in the summer and finally, to the fall, when the true glories of American baking emerge: apple, pumpkin and pecan. (Many add sweet potato to that list, including my grandmother, with whom I have a long-running dispute over whether I have eaten and enjoyed sweet potato pie, as she insists, or whether, as I contend, she has become a liar in her old age.)
Early in my marriage, I feared I had made a grievous error in wedding a woman who doesn't particularly like pie, but I have subsequently come to appreciate the virtues of her taste; when I do make pie, there's no pressure to share. Except on Thanksgiving. That's the one day of the year when everyone (my wife included) feels the urge for a wedge of pie after dinner, and maybe another for breakfast the next day. Consequently, I tend to go a little overboard on the pie preparation to compensate. On years when I spend Thanksgiving at my dad's house, we're talking four pumpkin, three apple, two chocolate pecan (minimum; my sisters are voracious) and two or three of a personal specialty, cranberry-apricot with walnuts. This is an in-laws year and, they being less numerous, I can get away with four, maybe six pies total.
Even so, this takes a substantial amount of work. Whoever coined the phrase "easy as pie" probably did so while picking up some pre-fab pie shells in the freezer aisle of the supermarket. I have heard that the Pillsbury pre-rolled pie crusts in the refrigerator section of the grocery store aren't horrible, but I have never sought to find out, owing to my desire to remain in my father's will. He, like any pie aficionado, will tell you, pie fillings are well and good, but they're really just an excuse to eat crust. There is nothing inherently complicated about pie crust - one part butter or shortening, two parts flour, some sugar, a little bit of salt and enough water to hold things together - but it is one kitchen activity that definitely rewards experience. To that end, I offer my own, doubtless incomplete and surely debatable, pieces of advice.
• Ingredients: The first choice in piemaking is the kind of fat you cut into the flour to make the basis of the dough. The old-school approach is lard, though this is generally hard for the modern palate to accept. A more conventional option is a mixture of shortening, such as Crisco, and unsalted butter. Crisco gives unparalleled flakiness and tenderness, but it's essentially flavorless. It's also loaded with trans-fats, the bugaboo of modern dietary science, created in the process of taking something liquid (vegetable oil) and turning it into a shelf-stable solid. Butter has the virtues of being a mere one step removed from something that occurs in nature, and it provides flavor to boot. These days, many people (myself included) are moving to all-butter recipes, but if you're inexperienced, the resulting dough can be more difficult to work with, so it might be a good idea to use a two-thirds/one-third butter-to-shortening ratio.
• Fat and flour: There are several different ways to combine the fat and flour, the easiest of which is probably a food processor. If you toss small chunks of shortening and/or butter into a food processor with your flour, sugar and salt, it will do an efficient and even job of producing a mixture that resembles coarse sand with some small pebbles in about 10 1-second pulses. The downsides are that it doesn't work as well for large batches of dough, and, if you're not careful, you can overwork things and overheat the dough, a big no-no. (More on this later.) Option B is to use a pastry blender, the brass knuckles of the kitchen. The cheap kind are like a series of round wires bent in a C-shape and connected to a handle; better are ones in which the metal resembles little flat blades. Either way, you cut through the flour and fat in a rocking motion until you have the same coarse sand consistency. The ultimate throwback is to smoosh the fat into the flour with your fingers. It's the gentlest approach, and the most tactually satisfying, but not good if you have warm hands.
• Liquid: Like so many things in life, the water in pie dough is absolutely crucial and beneficial unless you have too much, in which case it will kill you. Too little, and your dough will be crumbly and impossible to roll out. Too much, and the dough will be tough and chewy, not crisp and flaky. What to do? The fine folks at Cooks Illustrated hit on an unusual solution a couple of years ago: vodka. Seriously. Because much of the liquid in vodka is alcohol, not water, it provides the moisture necessary to hold the dough together when it's cold but evaporates in the oven. It gives you a lot more margin for error on the side of too much liquid. The magazine recommends a 50-50 ratio of water to vodka, and the cheapest rotgut you can find is perfectly fine. Whatever kind of liquid you use, it is imperative that it be ice-cold and that you add it slowly, gently mixing it in with an instrument no more forceful than a rubber scraper, preferably with your hands, until the dough holds together.
• Keep it cold: Nothing brings disaster to pie dough faster than heat, a lesson I learned the hard way when trying to roll some out on the counter directly above a dishwasher in the middle of the dry cycle. Once the butter starts to melt, the dough droops into a soupy mess, and all your efforts are ruined. Julia Child actually went so far as to have a piece of marble cut to the width of her refrigerator, which she kept chilled for use in working with pastry dough. Short of that, make sure all your ingredients are well chilled. It's also a good idea not to roll out the dough directly on the counter but on a pastry cloth or silicone mat that you can pop in the refrigerator or freezer if you get in trouble.
• Let it rest: You may think you're the one working hard here, but think of the poor pie dough. Chopped up in a food processor or smooshed with a pastry blender, doused in freezing water, steamrolled into a flat disc and popped into a hot oven - it's a rough day at the office. Overworking dough can make it tough, and not allowing it sufficient time to relax between steps can spell disaster. Once you've added the liquid, it's absolutely imperative that the mixture rest and chill for at least a half-hour, and longer is better. If you don't, the dough doesn't have time to absorb all the liquid, and it will be impossible to roll out. To do this, divide the dough (if the recipe you're using makes enough for two pie shells, divide into two parts, etc.) and wrap each piece in plastic wrap, forming it into a disc. Wrap that in another layer of plastic wrap, stick the whole thing in a freezer bag and let it rest in the refrigerator. (Why the double wrapping and freezer bag? I don't know, but it seems to work better.) I find the dough is most manageable if you let it rest for a full day. If you're going to make the dough farther in advance than that, chill it for a few hours and then freeze it. Thaw it overnight in the fridge before using it. Frozen pie dough can keep a month or more. It's important to let the dough rest as you prepare the pie, too. Once you've rolled it out and placed it in the pie pan, let it rest in the fridge for at least a half-hour. After you've filled the pie, do it again.
• That's how it rolls: A lot of people get into trouble when trying to roll out pie dough. It sticks, it crumbles, it rips. Many of these problems are alleviated if, as noted above, you keep the dough nice and cold. The traditional way to prevent sticking is to flour the surface you're working on. I find that gently lifting and turning the dough periodically while rolling both helps produce a nice, round shape and also acts as a further hedge against sticking. Flour does present some danger, as too much can lead to toughness. If you're worried, another option is to roll the dough out between two sheets of plastic wrap. This works well in that the dough won't stick to the plastic wrap, and if it gets warm, it's easy to lift the whole mess and put it in the fridge for a while. It isn't perfect, though, since most plastic wrap isn't quite wide enough for the purpose. Some advise using parchment paper, which is wider, but I find that it can create problematic creases in your dough. Another trick: If you develop a tear in the dough, you can patch it with a scrap, using a little bit of water to make a seal. It's not ideal, but it works.
After that, all you have to do is plop the dough into a pie pan, fill it with something delectable, artistically flute the edges and bake.
. Piece of cake.
-Andrew A. Green