I have been kvetching a lot lately on this blog about my inadequacies with pastry and sweets of all kinds. Normally I have the same trouble with pie crust. My mother has the magic hands, and can just chuck ingredients in and make beautiful crusts by feel. Her mother was even more brilliant. I however generally get floury or oily crapola.
Tonight was different. Tonight was a good crust day. I found a recipe online and just went for it. 2 cups flour, 12 tbsp cold butter cut into chunks, a sprinkle of salt. Cut the works with a pastry cutter (I am finding smearing motions along with cutting motions work well) until finely combined but not completely without chunks. 6 tablespoons cold water (plus more if needed, this time i think i used 7), stir with fork until it starts coming together in parts, then use hands to knead and squeeze gently together until it's not got any flour left. It barely held together, there were lots of cracks, but I could *feel* the beautiful soft elasticity in the dough. Normally it doesn't feel anything like that, so I don't know what I was doing right this time. I squished it together, worrying I was overworking the dough, and rolled it out on a floured marble board. No holes, no insurmountable cracking. I didn't chill the dough before rolling as most recipes have you do -- i just went straight from bowl to roll, and then once the bottom crust was in the pan, i stuck the whole pan in the fridge. Then the top crust went outside into the 40F night, still on the board. Filled crust right from fridge and then straight into the 400F oven.
It came out flaky, crisp and super-buttery (it was an all-butter crust, it oughta be). Imagine that. Yay!
Posted by foodnerd at March 12, 2005 12:25 AM