Sure, it is true, I really like pie. Cherry’s my favourite, adopted by blueberry. By no means been a manhattan pie fan. I do love chocolate pie topped with whipped cream.
A pie crust’s ingredient checklist is brief and implies it is easy to make. No, no, no; not true.
An ordinary pie crust is produced from flour, fats (butter, lard or vegetable shortening like Crisco), salt and ice water. That is it. Some of us use a bit of vinegar, and others add a bit of vodka. Vodka?
All-purpose flour incorporates gluten, simply not as a lot as bread flour. Vodka works to get pie dough moist with out triggering the gluten, making it powerful.
Practically 50 years in the past, I started making pies. Over the next years, my pie crusts hardly ever met my expectations. After baking, I even had a pie that ended up with a principally uncooked backside.
It took me a very long time to good blind baking a pie crust. Blind baking means baking the crust with out a filling after which filling the baked crust with a filling that is not going to be baked, corresponding to a chocolate cream pie.
Pie crust and pie baking should not be that arduous.
Here is a contemporary, out-of-the-oven gluten-free cherry pie with a home made pie crust.
– Courtesy of Don Mauer
Final yr, since I am doing my greatest to keep away from wheat flour, I made a pie with a frozen, premade, gluten-free crust, utilizing it to make a cherry pie. My greatest problem: a satan of a time getting the highest crust to launch from the pie pan during which it got here.
This yr I learn a recipe from Nicki Sizemore’s web site, fromscratchfast.com, for making a gluten-free pie from scratch. Sizemore is bought on Cup 4 Cup Gluten-Free Flour. I discovered a supply for that flour and, following Sizemore’s recipe, made a gluten-free crust.
Sizemore makes use of high-quality components for her crust, and I adopted swimsuit. Plus, I used a couple of methods I discovered from The Nice British Baking Present, like refrigerating the bowl and blade for my meals processor and holding the diced butter in my fridge till the final minute.
I discovered that to make a flaky crust, the fats within the crust, on this occasion, butter, must be arduous, so it leads to small items. If the butter or the processor are heat, the butter will mix into the dough and never be flaky.
My no-sugar-added tart cherry pie filling is terrific, and I used it for my pie. Granted, the crust just isn’t straightforward to work with; it may well keep on with the rolling pin and the parchment paper.
As soon as I obtained my crust and filling collectively, it baked superbly. My crust was flakier than any wheat flour crust and tasted simply pretty much as good.
Would I make it once more? Perhaps. It’s time-consuming, as are most pie crusts. And, infrequently could also be value it once I’m craving a chunk of gluten-free pie.
Here is my model of Sizemore’s crust recipe.
• Don Mauer welcomes questions, feedback and recipe makeover requests. Write to him at 1leanwizard@gmail.com.
