Building a Better Pie Crust

I am still here in New England, where the berries are many and the pie crusts, shitty. It's just never ending, the amount of ways you can screw up a crust: doughy, hard, pale, mushy, cookie-like, greasy. The only person in my family who makes incredible crust, every time -- EVERY TIME -- is my mother-in-law. It's a family recipe I have tried, and tried, and tried to master. I can't. Her daughter Hillary, who bakes about once a decade, can handily do it, and while he's yet to try, I suspect for Din, too, this crust would be child's play. This is because the recipe suits their approach to life, a way of being excellent at what they do while being easy about it. Sigh.

Instead, I recently turned to pastry mistress Shuna fish Lydon, and wrote about it in Building a Better Pie Crust, which is also my final column over at Pajamas Media.

Comments

[ricki]

Nancy, I have tasted your pecan pie, which need take a back seat to noone's...this from said mother-in-law, who thanks you, by-the-bye, for the kind words and the link to my fledgling web site.

[Lizzy]

Pie crust is hard. I am going to try doing everything cold and from the freezer. Thanks for the great article!

[nancy]

Pie crust is hard. As some readers know, I bake nearly every day, and yet, my crust is... okay. It tastes fine, but it's really got no flake, and once you've had a truly flaky crust, you know it. Making one takes a light, light hand, sort of fairy dancing over the ingredients rather than working them. Making it correctly, of course, takes less time than making it wrong, but you also have to have a feel for it, like writing, I guess, or like anything; kicking a soccer ball. Too much fretting and, kaput.
Good luck, Lizzy!

[Richard Bennett]

Thank you for writing the most useful and informative article ever to appear on the PJ Media web site. I blogged it as I feel, strongly, that much depends on a flaky crust, and Crisco just isn't the right way to go.

[nancy]

Thank you, Richard.
As mentioned, it was my last piece for PJM, should an enterprising website have need of my services.