I perfected pie by baking 60 a day. You can get it right the first time

Los Angeles Times

6 days ago

Despite being an obsessive baker since I was a little kid, until I was 31 I had never baked a pie from scratch. Meaning: I had never made pie dough. And pie dough scared me.
Cutting butter into flour? What did that mean anyway? A tender (as opposed to tough) crust? Aren't 'tender' and 'tough' personality traits? And what was up with the ice water? I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
At the time, I was writing primarily for women's magazines and taking odd jobs to make ends meet. My criterion for these jobs was that it was something that interested me and wouldn't interfere with my dream of being a writer. Fun, creative, dead-end jobs were my wheelhouse.
So when my editor at Seventeen told me about a job opportunity as a summer pie baker in the most beautiful shop she'd ever seen, in a fishing-village-turned-billionaire-community in the Hamptons, I borrowed a friend's beaten-up Volvo and drove two hours east, to a whitewashed shack nestled in farm fields, and interviewed the German matriarch who owned and ran the place with her daughter. 'You seem like a bright girl,' she said. 'You'll learn.'
If you don't have a German grandmother to teach you how to make pie dough, you should seriously consider finding one. By the end of my first week, I was practically a pro. And by the end of that summer, I knew all of the tricks. I learned that when it comes to pie crust, butter isn't necessarily king. That flour can give a filling that cloudy look. That a white, raw bottom crust was pie 911. And, as Anna says, the way a person crimped the edges of their pie dough was like their signature; no two are the same. I learned that a big ol' sprinkling of sugar on top before baking the pie covered up any imperfections in the crust and that perfection wasn't what we were going for anyway. We were going for homemade with — I hate to sound cliché here — love. And that, for even the novice pie baker, is an attainable goal.
The mother's name was Anna, pronounced 'AHHH-na' not 'Anne-Uh.' On my first day, Anna stood by my elbow and taught me the ins and outs of pie dough. The ingredient list is simple: all-purpose flour, some kind of solid fat (butter, margarine, Crisco, lard or a combination), salt and ice water, which she taught me was to keep the fat cold. By keeping the fat — let's say butter — cold, the butter melts in the oven during the baking process, creating tiny steam pockets, which result in the layers that make the crust flaky.
In baking terms, tough is the opposite of tender. A tough crust — and you've had them — is hard, crunchy and dense. A tender crust, by contrast, is flaky and light. A tender crust is the goal.
To achieve the tender holy grail of crusts, the most important factor is not to overwork the dough. You work it exactly as much as necessary to transform it from a shaggy mess into a homogeneous mass. Working the dough develops the gluten in flour, which makes for a tough pie crust. Resting the dough before rolling it out (also key) relaxes the gluten.
I made 27 pies my first day, and I wasn't any more proud walking across the stage as a graduate at UC Berkeley a decade earlier.
'Why only 27?' Anna asked.
She told me that moving forward, I should aim for 60 pies a day. By day three or four, I was able to make 60, and soon I was hitting that goal with hours to spare, to bake whatever I wanted.
'You have light hands,' Anna said one day, looking over my shoulder. 'You're a good baker.' Some 30 years later, I still feel a big blueberry-colored heart swelling in my chest as I hear those words. (Anna died in 2015 at the age of 81, sadly hit and killed by a car while crossing the street.)
We made the dough in two-pie batches, which is essential to a tender crust (because it's too easy to overmix a larger batch of dough). After making enough dough for 60 pies, which is 120 rounds (top and bottom), or 30 batches of dough, I put those in the walk-in (refrigerator) to chill and rest. Then I moved onto forming the shells from dough that had been resting already. I did those 10 at a time. After I got the pie shells in the fridge, one of the prep cooks would have a bowl as big as half a beach ball full of the correct amount of fruit for filling up to 10 pies.
Sometimes the fruit was fresh, purchased from Pike Farms, which has a stand next to the shop. But very often it was IQF fruit, an industry term for 'individually quick frozen.' This process of rapid-freezing the fruit preserves the flavor and prevents ice crystals from forming and the fruit from sticking together. Many, but not all, commercial frozen fruit is IQF. Premium frozen fruit, picked and frozen at peak ripeness, is often better than fresh fruit.
I carried that giant bowl to my station, mixed it with granulated sugar, cornstarch for thickening (flour can make the filling cloudy), lemon juice to brighten the flavor, and one spice (cinnamon, nutmeg or clove, depending on the fruit), and proceeded to fill and cover my pies with either a second crust or crumble topping kept in a giant vat in the freezer. I made six different types of fruit pies a day, each one identifiable by a different cookie-cutter opening in the center. We froze the pies and pulled them out, brushed the crusts (not the crumble) with cream, sprinkled sugar over the cream and baked them off as needed, so there was always a selection of freshly baked fruit pies.
That's a lot of information, I know, if you don't plan on opening a bakery in the heart of a summer community where you might find yourself in need of 20 to 40 fruit pies to sell in a single day. But I might have taught you a few things in the telling:
The first thing you need when making fruit pie is a good recipe for crust. There are many. The formula we used at that shop was 4 cups of flour to 3 sticks (1½ cups) of whatever fat one might want to use.
This might have been at the time (maybe still!) the most expensive prepared food store on the planet. The pie was the secret 'deal.' It was half the price of a French tart. But the big difference between the two, I soon learned, was that the French tart (which I also made, once I got good) was made with butter and the pie was made with — get ready for it — margarine! 'It makes for a flakier crust,' Anna said, dismissing me when I asked her why, and walked away.
I've used that formula in different combinations until recently. Now I use butter. Per Martha Stewart's ratio of flour and butter, I add a bit more and also the smallest amount of sugar. Per Nancy Silverton's pie dough recipe, I add some cream, which she does to add fat, flavor and color to the dough, along with the ice water, and double up on the salt. It's a good flaky dough, and easy to work with.
The filling for fruit pies can be any ripe (or frozen!) spring or summer fruit, including strawberry rhubarb (yes, I know rhubarb is a vegetable), blueberry, mixed berry, sour cherry, peach, nectarines and plums (Italian prune plums are the best if you can find them), or a combination of any of the above. Anna wasn't big on mixing fruits, except when it came to berries, and I have followed her lead out of respect. But don't let that stop you.
Here are two options for a mixed berry pie: a traditional round pie with a crunchy crumble top, and a slab pie, which is a relatively new invention, made in a sheet pan. It's easy to carry, has less filling for the amount of crust, and you can eat it with your hands. Think of it as a giant Pop-Tart. And who doesn't want to think about a giant Pop-Tart.
For the filling, I cook the sugar first to make a caramel, which adds some depth of flavor, and then add the blackberries; I found that even after over an hour of baking, they didn't break down, and everyone I shared the pie with left whole blackberries on their plate. I add the cornstarch here too, as insurance to make certain the fruit filling sets.
For both pies, I bake them on the lowest rack of the oven on a preheated baking sheet to ensure a browned, crisp bottom crust.
Whatever shape your pie, whatever fruit you use and whether or not your fruit sets perfectly, pie is just good, wholesome deliciousness. Yes, making dough requires a bit of skill (everything you need to know is in these recipes), but the worst thing that can happen, really, is a messy pie that you end up eating from a bowl. And seriously, how bad would that be?