Text 13161, 69 rader
Skriven 2011-07-08 21:55:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Pie 2
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     Title: The Science Of Pie Part 2
Categories: Pies, Pastry, Info
  Servings: 4

           pie crust                                

To summarize, here's what we've got as we're forming a pie dough:
Dry flour, completely uncoated by fat, that absorbs water when you
add it, forming gluten that then gets stretched out into wide
layers. Pure pockets of fat that will flatten out into long, wide,
thin sheets as you roll out your dough, separating the layers of
gluten-enforced flour from each other so that rather than forming a
solid, leathery mass, they separate and gently puff as they bake. A
flour/fat paste that functions much in the same way as pure fat
does. As it bakes, the fat melts and a tiny amount of individually
separated flour bits will deposit themselves and become incorporated
into the gluten-enforced layers. And if this flour/fat paste
functions similarly to pure fat, doesn't that imply that we can
completely replace the pure fat with this paste? Indeed, we can.

But there's got to be some trick going on. Simply bake that dough
above, and you end up with a short, sandy, crumbly cookie-like
crust. Not the beautiful flaky layers you see here. In order to get
this crust, all I had to do was add some extra plain dry flour to
the fat/flour paste I'd formed, pulse it a couple times in the food
processor just to distribute it evenly, then proceed just like an
normal pie crust: I added water, chilled it, rolled it, and baked
it.

Any baker would have taken a look at the finished dough and declare
it a failure without even bothering to bake it. After all, how could
a crust come out flaky if there aren't even visible bits of fat left
in it? By classical pie crust definitions, it can't. Yet we've just
proven here that it can indeed, and when physical evidence indicates
that an existing model is wrong, it's time to modify that model.

Why Do I Care? First off, it completely removes the variability of a
traditional pie crust recipe. By measuring out a given amount of
flour and fat and combining them together until they form a near
homogeneous paste and then adding the remaining dry flour to that
paste, you are very strictly defining exactly how much flour is used
for gluten formation and how much ends up coated with fat. No more
trying to visually judge whether your fat is properly cut. No more
adding ice water a drop at a time until a dough is formed. The dough
comes out the same, every single time.

The other key advantage is that your dough becomes much more
pliable. The fat/flour paste formed at the beginning is much softer
and more malleable than pure butter is, which means that your final
dough rolls out smoothly and easily with little to no risk of
cracking like a traditional pie crust, even without the vodka.


  From: Serious Eats                    
 
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Cheers

YK Jim


... "Fish and Brus" = Newfie Soul Food

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