I never buy pie crust--if you really don't want to fuss with it, I vote for
making an impromptu strudel out of frozen puff pastry sheets or phyllo, which
are really quite decent. Sadly, the same cannot be said of store bought pie
crust. If you're afraid to make one, the important thing to remember is this:
your first pie crust is going to be awful. It will fail to hold together, be too
thick or too thin, and almost certainly not resemble anything like the perfect
circle so lovingly pictured in your cookbook. That's all right. It will still
taste better than your store bought pie crust. And four or five crusts later,
you'll have gotten the knack of it, and friends will be swooning over your
homemade pies.
This is a little thing, but I don't understand why she doesn't explain pie crust, if she goes to so much trouble to say how hard it is. It's a recipe, give instructions dammit. If you want pie crust that holds together and is easy to roll, use cold shortening and enough ice water to hold it together to make the dough. Then let it rest for at least half an hour in the refrigerator so the flour can absorb the liquid. Rolling out isn't difficult, just use even pressure, start in the middle, and work your way outwards in a circle. Sprinkle with flour as needed to keep the surfaces from sticking.
Was that so hard?/crabby
6 comments:
You've got to love how Megan writes like she's talking to a classroom full of 4th graders who've yet to discover baking. My first pie crust turned out just fine, mostly because I had my grandmother explain to me how important it is to follow the directions to a tee. As in, the necessity of using iced water as opposed to room temperature; it makes a big difference. Besides, actually, store bought pie crusts aren't bad. I've used them on occasion when I needed to cut corners for the sake of time.
But Megan's first pie crust didn't turn out well and she doesn't like the store bought kind, so the same goes for everyone else in the world.
I can't picture Megan making pies at all. Or friends swooning over them. Oh well, who knows? Maybe she has a ton of cooking skill that she's bashfully hiding under a barrel, for fear of seeming immodest.
I like how she never tells you to put the fucking piece of shit pie in the oven and bake it. No temperature setting, no telling you how long to cook it, no telling you when it's done. Just telling you that no one, except for Megan, is smart enough to make a pie crust---which of course takes much, much more skill than workit a day care center.
Megan, if you're going to write recipes, youhave to tell people what to do with the food between (a) the time it's assembled, and (b) the time it's consumed. In America we call that "cooking." Aparently you're not aware of this--maybe they never taught you at girly summer camp.
Gee, I think I will put some frozen berries in a pie crust and eat it, DUH----I stupid.
Also, my guess is that these special berries Megan makes a big deal about are nothing more than some humdrum variety of blueberries that the locals mark up about ten times what they're worth and sell to the city folk, telling them, "You can't find berries this good in the big city, Drrrrrrrrrr."
I'll bet you they laugh when snobs like Megan and her mother actually buy these things.
Why is it that Megan is completely incapable of actually informing her reading audience of anything--whether it be pie recipes, economics, government, etc.?
Ans: She is a fucking idiot.
We assume Megan's there to explain/discuss economics. I just took a wider loook at the Atlantic, and it seems they are there to tell each other how smart they are. Sullivan, Douthat, Loh, the lot of them.
She's always like that with recipes - she likes to pretend she's this high falutin' foodie, when every post she has about food is either one like this or some boring, bland, easier-than-the-first-day-of-home economics recipe that's usually incomplete to boot. Remember her potato leek soup recipe? "Add vegetable stock." How much vegetable stock, moron? Since I actually AM a foodie, I know the amount would be about six cups, but if you're going to recommend recipes, you should include that information. You don't just say "put some potatoes and carrots with some stock in a pot and cook them."
Bobby P, I guess you never used one of those fancy French cookbooks like my mother used to use. A half-page disquisition on fat to sugar ratios in whatever was being made, followed by instructions to cook the item until it was done.
Anyway, you cook pie until it's done. Everyone knows that. Some signs of being done are: you can smell the filling, the fruit juice is bubbling up through the vent holes in the top crust, the crust is getting browner than you want, it's been about an hour, etc.
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