GASTRONORMOUS

We threw out the rest of the  last apple pie I reported on, due to a weird and unpleasant mushroomy/bacony (depending on who you ask) flavor we suspected might have been caused by an off apple. I now fully comprehend the adage about that one bad apple… Anyway, I was determined to make another one, this one with better apples, and a homemade crust, which I didn’t have time for last time.

All the pie crust recipes from Joy of Cooking, my go-to source for basic recipes, used a combination of butter and vegetable shortening, the latter of which I resist in both practice and concept. But one can’t just substitute all butter in such a recipe because it has a different weight, and more water content, than shortening, and an off-balance water-fat proportion can totally derail a good pie dough. So I turned to my recipe box, which happened to contain a long-forgotten recipe for an all-butter pie dough from my sister-in-law’s grandmother, Maxine. Here’s the rather concise recipe:

Maxine’s Pie Dough

2 c all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
2/3 cup butter
3 T ice water

Sift flour and salt. Add butter and mix. Add ice water, 1 tablespoon at a time. Mix until dough forms. Roll out as desired.

The recipe actually calls for softened butter, but I used cold butter as that is the norm for pie dough, no offense to Maxine. Otherwise, I followed the recipe exactly. Well, eventually….

I elaborate here as there isn’t much to the instructions portion of the recipe—Maxine came from a generation in which pie-dough-making was such a basic part of female existence, that it must have been a scandal not to know how to make it.

I don’ t have a pastry blender, so I used two table knives to cut the dough (see action shot, left). It takes a lot longer, but gets the job done eventually. I needed more ice water than 3 T to get the dough to hold together. I also don’t have a rolling pin, so I used a wine bottle which I had soaked to get the label off and cleaned and dried thoroughly. (A wine bottle works like a charm, and actually, if you ask me, better than a wooden rolling pin.) I had to use a ton of flour to get the dough to roll out, and even still, it didn’t hold together, and half of the recipe hardly covered the bottom of the pie pan. Plus, there were all sorts of holes in it, it looked like a nightmare in swiss cheese. I started rolling out the second half, and it was just an equal if not worse disaster. I realized I had to start over again.

That is the point at which I realized that I had mistaken the half-cup measure for the one-cup measure. I had put only one cup of flour into a recipe that calls for two! Ay ay ay. The second time around, the pie dough was a rousing success! I haven’t made pie dough in a long time, so it was a little rougher looking than the Pillsbury ready-made-pie-dough-pie I made, but a 100 times more delicious!

I used 6 apples (2 golden delicious, 2 pippin, 2 jona gold), which were piled really high in the pie pan when raw, but really baked down a lot (you can cook the apples first if you want to bypass that phenomenon, but I find that makes the apples too soft once the pie is baked). I tossed the raw apples with 3 T flour, juice of half a small lemon, 3/4 c sugar, and spices (1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 each of powdered ginger, nutmeg, and cloves). It was just the perfect amount of spice–it added some zip without overpowering the flavor of the apples. Just before putting the pie dough top on, I arraned a few little pieces of butter on the top of the pile of spiced apples.

I baked the pie at 425 degrees for 30 minutes, then put it on a cookie sheet and turned the temp down to 350, for about 30 more minutes, per the JOC instructions. I wish that aromanet existed, because I would love for you to have smelled this pie as it was baking. I guess you will just have to try it yourself at home! Happy baking!