I make about half a dozen fruit pies a year–not enough to have expertise, but enough to have a pattern. Part of my pattern goes like this:
-Make my awesome pie crust.
-Fill it with sugared/tapioca’ed/etc. fruit.
-Put the top crust on.
-Slice vents into the top crust.
-Swear profusely.
-Carefully try to slip tiny slices of butter through the sliced vents, in order to comply with the recipe’s direction to dot the top of the fruit filling with 1-2 Tbsp butter, which I inevitably forget to do until this point in the recipe.
So my question: what happens if I leave this stage out entirely? Does the pie really suffer?
I say - don’t sweat it!
I’ve made many dozens of pies over the years, and have never dotted the top of the fruit with butter. No complaints, and no leftovers, either!
However, I do use butter (never shortening or lard) as the fat in my crusts, so I imagine they aren’t lacking in buttery goodness.
It sounds like the scientific method might be in order. Make two pies, one with butter, and one without. Have your wife give someone a piece of each, without telling her which one is butterless, but making sure you can tell pie 1 from pie 2.
None of my gramma’s pie recipes call for this. They do, however, call for brushing milk and sugar on the top crust, which forms a sort of caramelized glaze.
Flour, salt, cold fat, mixed poorly, and enough cold water sprinkled on to allow you to roll out a pie crust. Same recipe I’ve seen in cook books for 250 years.
Er, the cook books. One can catch up on pie crusts much faster than that. But for hundreds of years America ran on pies for two to five meals a day.
Yeah, five. Farming can burn 7000 calories a day, and three meals might not be enough.
Not knocking grandma, but the older origin of this is brushing with sweet, butterfatted all to hell, cream, and a coarse, almost demerara sugar for the carameliztion and crucnch. Why go half the way, if you are going to go all out? Balls to the wall man.
Eh, you think a light coating of sweet cream and sugar to a thin crisco crusted apple pie is living dangerously dietarily? That’s what I can’t stand about the leftists… Their unsubstantiated dietary fascism. Kinda like the vampires in Santa Carla. To quote Wilfred, “My Body, My Choice.”
Um, what? There may be a few “leftists” that are “dietary fascists,” but that’s hardly indicative of the left as whole. Why inject politics into a thread about food?
Because I didn’t inject any politics into this thread. Dropzone suggests arbitrarily and without any proof of my dietary habits that I am going to “die” from having a piece of gramma’s apple pie. You can;t get more political than that, disturbing the All- American apple pie and suggesting that we are going to omigods die from that … that isn’t science… that’s learned, and biased " media study" political fascism with propaganda.
I thought my suggestion was that I would die from it or something very much like it. Which is obvious to anybody who has met me. I’m sorry if something political was made of it. In my case it was something personal, but tasty.
Okay, I’m gonna stop worrying about dotting with butter. Thanks!
As for my recipe, I use a standard Joy of Cooking recipe, only I use all-butter instead of using any lard or Crisco. And I make it in a food processor. The crust doesn’t come out flaky at all, but it’s beautifully crispy and tender and buttery.
Look, I am not coming down on you dropzone, but I am beyond tired of the fascist leanings of the American Foodnazis that haveb inculcated popular belief.
It is simply propaganda, and has nothing to do in bits and bytes and broken down out of context to do with whole health. As a warring, conservative, fascist society which even inculcates our native left, every societal ill or taboo is seen as a war and having monetary consequences. The war against drugs, the war against terrorism, the war against obesity… fighting this war we have turned food into the enemy and it has seeped into our subconscious. This is a very harmful and dangerous societal tact to view sustenance as something that will kill us. Until American society realizes that food is our ally, and what kills today will sustain tommorow and continues to take everything everything as fad, media, and soundbite I will go French Resistance (Guerilla) against your food nazi, ass. Until we live as whole people I will kill fascist ideas.
