I vowed to make ten pies during my summer in Germany. I made the first yesterday. It would have come out better if I had baked it normally and not in "broil" mode, but I couldn't understand the icons on my damned European oven!
I put into PMC's pie crust (made with butter so it tasted good but was not super flaky) three cups of cut-up rhubarb and one cup of sugar. I put on the top crust, put it in a 200 C (400 F) oven for 20 min and then turned it down to 175 C (350 F) for another hour.
The pie was delicious but as I implied I was a bit disappointed with the crust. PMC, can you make a flaky crust with butter? If so, how? I have an intuition that you might be able to if you rolled it with flour, folded it, rolled it, and repeated many times?
Rhubarb pie...ah, yeah! I've never made a flaky all-butter pie crust. The most I've ever used is half butter and half vegetable shortening (or lard). I was very happy with the results of that test (great taste of butter and still quite flaky; I think it was a peach pie). I do make pâte brisée with all butter, but that's more akin to shortbread and it used to make tarts. The folding and rolling technique you describe is used to make croissant pastry. A big piece of cold butter is wrapped in very elastic dough, rolled out, folded once, rechilled, rolled out again, rotated a quarter turn, folded again, rechilled, etc. This is repeated something like 16 times, so you get something like 2^16 alternating super-thin layers of dough and butter. When you bake it, well, you know what you get; it's flaky and crisp on the outside but chewy and moist on the inside and this isn't what you're after. I don't know exactly why an all butter crust does seem to deliver flakiness, but I suspect it involves rocket science.
ReplyDelete