Text 13160, 114 rader
Skriven 2011-07-08 21:54:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: As easy as pie 1
========================
I have always had difficulty with pie crust and therefore make pies
infrequently. I am hoping this article ehlps me and thought i would
share it.

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     Title: The Science Of Pie Part 1
Categories: Pies, Pastry, Info
  Servings: 4

           pie crust

If there's one thing that instills fear into the hearts and minds of
American cooks, it's pie crust. I know. At one time, I was one of
those people. What makes them flaky? What makes them tender? And
most importantly, how come mine used to come out like pliant pieces
of leather instead of buttery and delicious?

Turns out that the science of pie crust is really not all that
complex, and once you get a grasp of what's really going on in
between those flaky layers, then making a perfect crust becomes a
matter of smarts, not luck. 

On paper, a classic American pie crust is a mind-bogglingly simple
recipe. Combine flour with a bit of salt and sugar, cut in some
butter and/or shortening, then add just enough cold water to get it
to come together into a disk. Roll it out, and bake. That's it.

Perfectly incorporated butter: The underlying difficulty in the
technique comes during the first stage of cutting the butter into
the flour. It's simply impossible to accurately cut butter into
flour to the same degree on a consistent basis. Don't cut it in
quite enough, and you need to add extra water to absorb the excess
dry flour, resulting in the over-formation of gluten, and a tough,
leathery crust. On the other hand, cut it just bit too far, and you
end up with way too little dry flour. Rather than having
well-structured flaky layers, you end up with a crust that crumbles
into sandy pieces.

Overly-incorporated flour leads to a crust that's short and crumbly:
This is the reason why you sometimes need to add a couple
tablespoons of water and other times up to twice as much to get the
dough to come together—it's got nothing to do with the relative
humidity of the air as many books will have you believe. Indeed, in
the short time that it takes to make a pie crust, flour will absorb
approximately 0.1 percent of its weight in water, even in the most
humid of environments. That's a small enough amount to effectively
be zero.

So how does the simple action of cutting butter into flour result in
layers and layers of flaky pastry? It's all got to do with the
balanced interaction of gluten and fat.

Old school pastry books will tell you that when you cut butter or
some other solid fat (like shortening or lard) into flour, what's
happening is that you are encasing pockets of flour inside a shell
of fat. Add water, and the flour is moistened, whereupon gluten—the
network of proteins that lend structure to baked goods—is formed.
When you subsequently roll this dough out, these pockets of fat
stretch and stretch, eventually forming sheet of fat that separate
sheets of gluten-enforced flour. Then, as the pastry bakes, the
fatty layers melt, allowing the floury layers to separate from each
other, solidify, and form the layers you see in a great pie crust.

It makes sense. Sort of. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly
accurate picture of what's going on. For starters, how could the
action of cutting a solid fat into a relatively fluid mass of flour
possibly cause it to coat pockets of flour in distinct bubbles? And
even more importantly, if the fat is really coating these pockets of
dry flour, then how would they get moist when you add water to the
mix? Wouldn't the fat prevent any water from reaching the flour?

How Pie Crust Really Works: Let me digress for a moment. A few years
ago, I developed a pie dough recipe while working at Cook's
Illustrated. The one trick that got majorly hyped up about it was
the inclusion of vodka in place of some of the water in the recipe.
It was a pretty neat trick, if I do say so myself, and it solved one
of the major problems people have with pie crust. But there's a good
chunk of that article that seemed to have gotten glossed over by
pretty much everyone, and I believe that it's a far cooler part than
the headline-friendly vodka trick, and it has to do with the basic
structure of dough.

You see, it turns out that when it comes to pie dough, our existing
model has it wrong. In fact, it's not the fat that's coating pockets
of dry flour. It's the reverse. It's the flour that's coating
pockets of pure fat. With this model, things make much more sense.
You can easily and intuitively see how fat gets coated with flour
(think about dropping a pat of butter into a pile of flour, but on a
much smaller scale), and with this model, when you add water, you
are indeed moistening dry flour so that it can form sheets of
gluten.

But there's a third element at play here that's been ignored: the
fat/flour paste that forms at the interface between the pure fat and
the dry flour. With this paste, what you're getting is essentially
single particles of flour that are completely coated in fat. Since
they can't absorb any water, they end up behaving in much the same
way as pure fat.

  From: Serious Eats                    
 
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Cheers

YK Jim


... "Art for art's sake" is the philosophy of the well-fed

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