Easiest Crust Ever (Apple Pie)

The apple pie I made for Thanksgiving dinner has been staring at me.

I've made apple pies before, but this one was different. You see, I used a different crust. We had a friend coming to dinner that couldn't have any dairy. My first instinct was to use the pie recipe I use for pumpkin pies, you know, this one.

But then I remembered a pie crust from Roland Messnier that didn't use any dairy, only shortening for the fat. When I mixed up the pie crust, I was amazed that it didn't like to be worked by hand, it was so sticky it could only be worked by my mixer. Because I'm neurotic and a little OCD, I've been working at making pie crusts by hand. I just didn't believe that a great crust could come from a mixer. This will be the pie crust I use when I open my pie shop.

The pie was wonderful. Nice tart apples, enough moist filling to carry flavor, but not enough to be a soupy mess, beautiful brown crust surrounding the whole thing. And through the whole experience, I kept thinking:

"I wish I could write about this."

A Little Bit of Improvisation

When people talk about cooking (savory, not in an oven,) and baking (sweet, in an oven,) they often talk about improvising in the kitchen. To them, people who like to bake like to have things done precisely, with temperatures and measurements and timings clearly laid out. And on the other hand, people who like to cook can just free-wheel through the kitchen, making things up as they go. It's like the baker is the control freak aunt who has to have everything just so and keeps plastic on the furniture so it never, ever gets dirty. The cook is the fun uncle who never shows up on time and is always fun when he does show up.

Do you see why I take exception with this characterization?

Something a little, well, different.

If you think about it, you've probably eaten no more than a dozen pies in your life. Seriously, after the big names that everyone knows, the pickings get a little slim. You've most likely eaten:

Apple

Pumpkin

LMP

Pecan

Banana Cream

Coconut Cream

Chocolate Cream

Peanut Butter

Berry (a catch all covering all summer berry pies)

Peach

And, um, yeah...that's probably about it. Sure, anyone who reads this list will be able to think of a couple more, but the common variations get narrow really fast. 

I remember complaining, as a kid, about a culinary experiment my mother put in front of me: "Why can't you just make the food that you know we like?" (As an adult, I'm already annoyed with my nine-year-old self. "Just eat it, kid, you might like it." But that's beside the point.)

Buttermilk Preserves Pie

Occasionally, people ask me what draws me to cooking, or ask me how I starting cooking. I generally hem and haw, try to come up with something that sounds reasonable or logical. Like, "It's cheaper than eating out." Or, "It's a really useful hobby. I mean, you gotta eat, right?" All true. Also incomplete. There's a lot more to the story than just not wasting my time. After all, it is faster and cheaper to change your own oil in your car, and I don't do that.

An Elegant Dessert

Let's face it: pie is homey. It's comfort food, something that your grandmother could whip up and serve after a family dinner. Pie in our culture shows up on the "family" holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and 4th of July.

There are problems with elevating pie into a finer dessert. Presentation is so vitally important for high-end desserts. Cupcakes are easy to present with flair, with their ever present buttercream that is so simple to pipe attractively, and the ease of adding color and accents to the top of the cupcake. Pie, on the other hand, tends to be always presented in one way: in a wedge. It has very natural colors, which are beautiful, in a homey sort of way.

"When there are no words..."

Where I'm from, people respond to tragedy with food. There are those times in life when there's nothing you can say, nothing you can do to take the pain away from people around you. There are natural disasters, illnesses and deaths that can't be made to hurt less, that can't be explained away. You can't say, "It'll get better," because it won't. Some people respond with prayer, by sending cards, by expressing condolences, but I generally bring a pie.

About a year ago I found out that one of my co-workers was in the hospital. There were dark whispers that it was serious, maybe even life threatening. He had the best in medical care, his community rallied around him and his family. Like many of the people I work with, I did what I could to help. I brought a pie. But, pie or not, brain cancer gets most people in the end.  

Pulling Out All the Stops - Not Your Grandma's Banana Pudding Pie

"Pulling out all the stops," is a musical term. A "stop" is a piece on an organ that stops the flow of air from the bellows to the pipes. Now, the organ is, in some ways, a rather crude instrument. The ability to regulate dynamics was a function of how many pipes were sounding at any given time, because you couldn't regulate the velocity of air from the bellows. So when an organist wanted to really crank the instrument up and let 'er rip, they pulled out all the stops, allowing the air flow to reach every pipe, generating a lot of noise. Hopefully the organist's skill matched his enthusiasm.

On this pie, you are truly pulling out all the stops. Believe it or not, there are times when I look at a recipe and think, "I could use 1% milk here rather than whole," or "I could make do with vanilla extract, not waste time and money on a vanilla bean." And yeah, for a pie at a pot-luck, for everyday pie, you can get away with a couple of cost or fat saving techniques. But not this pie, not today.