Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

- Pie dough.

Where do I begin?

I've been fighting this fight for four decades now.

So we're gonna take you into the kitchen and show you how to make the world's best pie dough.

Easy to roll out, easy to work with.

And then we're gonna show you some of the tricks for pre-baking so the crust does not shrink.

We're gonna do adult version of pumpkin pie with some bourbon, which is lovely.

And then we're also gonna do a three-berry crostata.

It's something you can throw together any night of the week with some fresh fruit, and you're good to go.

So please stay tuned as we look into and engineer the world's best pie dough, the easiest to work with, and bring you a couple of great recipes as well.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - Okay, it's that time of year, and by that I mean the time you have to make some pies, because the rest of the year you probably don't make any pies.

So the problem is, and don't take this the wrong way, but everybody is wrong about how to make pie dough.

I've been fighting this fight, I don't know, since the early 1970s, but on my tombstone it's gonna say, "He made really good pie crust."

Okay, that's the only thing I want to contribute to the world of culinary advancement.

The problem is everybody thinks that American pie pastry should be "flaky" and therefore there should be pea-sized pieces of shortening or butter in with the flour.

We'll get to that in a second.

If you spend any time, let's say in France and walked into a kitchen and someone's making pastry, they fully cut the fat into the flour.

So what you want to do, the first thing you want to do is think about how to cut in the shortening or butter to the flour.

Now, in this case, we're gonna do a single pie crust, a cup and a quarter of flour, a little bit of salt, little bit of sugar.

The other thing people don't realize is that for 200 years, people used to make pie dough with lard.

So when you use vegetable shortening from the store or you use butter, you're not gonna get the same amount of flakiness.

So let's just put flakiness aside.

We're gonna use a mixture; 50-50.

We're gonna use five tablespoons of butter.

We cut this up, threw it in the freezer for ten or 15 minutes.

And then we also use a little vegetable shortening, you know, and by the way, I researched this back in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book back in the late 1800s.

I looked up Fannie's recipe and it said, mix with your hands or with a pastry blender by hand until the butter or lard or whatever is no bigger than pea-sized pieces.

That's where it comes from.

So this mistake has been around for a long time.

You don't see any big pea-sized pieces here.

It's got that yellowish hue.

This is important because if you coat the flour in fat, you're gonna create less gluten, right?

Because when you add the water, there's some fat around the flour.

So it's gonna be a tender pie crust.

We're using a little less fat with this.

Because when you pre-bake, the less fat you have in the pie dough, the less shrinkage there's gonna be.

Next thing.

You can tell I'm really worked up about this.

The next thing is water, you know, and you look at these recipes and they say, four to five tablespoons of water.

Forget that.

It depends on the condition of your flour.

It depends whether the flour's kept in the refrigerator, it's cold, it's warm, et cetera.

Don't worry about it-- just use that as a rough guide.

I don't actually measure, usually, when I do it.

So I'm just going to put some water in.

Now, if it's too dry and you try to roll it out and you've had this happen, I know you have, it crumbles and falls apart.

So you definitely want to have enough liquid.

Not so it's wet, but it definitely holds together.

There should be no doubt about that.

The key thing you want to remember is, can I make a pie dough that's going to be easy to work?

Will it roll out properly?

Can I get it in the pie pan?

Can I pre-bake it without it slumping?

That's the most important thing.

We can argue about how flaky it is later, but the first thing is to make a manageable pie dough.

Something you can actually, you know, get on the table for Thanksgiving.

Once it's put together, I'm gonna add a little flour to it and I'm just gonna shape it-- I'm not gonna press it really hard, I'm not gonna knead it.

I'm just gonna shape it.

Now, you can also tell that I didn't mess this up.

You don't see big pieces of butter in here.

Big pieces of butter are gonna melt and the dough is gonna slump in the pan.

It should feel soft, it should feel very malleable, and you're good to go.

Now, if you don't do this a lot, I really recommend you do this the night before.

If you're doing Thanksgiving start on Wednesday, the dough will hydrate nicely.

It'll be much easier to work with when you roll it out.

So to put this in the fridge and let it sit, we'll come back.

I want to roll out two mistakes.

That is a dough that's too dry and one that has big pieces of butter.

I'll show you what happens.

Then we'll do it the right way.

We'll fit it into the pan, throw that in the freezer and then we're going to pre-bake.

Okay, now the fun part, the disasters.

So we have papa bear, mama bear, baby bear.

This one, let's start with that.

This doesn't have enough water in it, so we're going to try to roll this out.

But you can see what's going to happen here.

It's just not coming together.

You can take this and put this in a bowl, add a little water to it, mix it up with your hands a little bit, flour it, put it in the fridge for half an hour or an hour, and you can actually save this that way.

So we'll put that out of the way.

So the other thing I said you don't want to do is you don't want big pieces of butter.

And you can see the pieces of butter here.

As you roll it out, you're gonna see big smears-- I think that's a culinary word-- of butter.

These are gonna get sticky and they're not gonna pre-bake well.

Now for the one that's just right.

Unlike the dry one and the one with the big pieces, as I'm working it, you can see it's actually staying together.

Now, I like a taper pin, a thin one that's not too heavy.

I put the left hand here, if you're right-handed, and roll it about 90 degrees.

And then I turn it and do the same thing.

And I'm going to do this until I get it out to eight or nine inches, something like that.

The next question is, how do you know when enough is enough?

Take your pie plate and put it in the middle and you want to make sure you have enough evenly around.

You want to have an overlap of about that.

The next thing is you want to push the sides down into the pie plate.

The reason you want to do that is it'll mean less shrinkage when you pre-bake.

If you're doing a single crust pie, you're going to leave about this much, just a little bit.

Now fold under.

I'm gonna press it into the sides of the pan using thumb and forefinger.

I'm gonna press in here just to make sure it's there and then I'm gonna dock it; docking helps prevent the dough from bubbling up.

Now in the freezer for 30 minutes.

Okay, frozen pie crust, double thickness of foil is probably a good idea.

I like to get the foil up to the edges.

I like this style of pastry weight.

They're nice and light, but heavy enough for this.

One of the things that's really helpful is.

Not just covering the bottom.

You want to use more so it comes up a little bit higher.

Again, if you doing this for the first time, you could actually fill it to the very top.

So we're going to put this in a 375 oven and give it about half an hour for the first part of baking.

Now I feel much better.

I've had my little moment here, my tirade.

So there you have it.

You have a dough that's really easy to make, a dough that's easy to roll out, a dough that's really easy to pre-bake.

- If you're baking a pie that calls for a blind baked crust, that means a crust that is baked without its filling.

Now, a crust can be fully blind baked, like for a cream-style pie where the filling gets refrigerated.

Or it can be half-blind baked for a pie that gets filled and then goes back into the oven like a pecan pie or a pumpkin pie, for instance.

Well, what you're probably visualizing is a perfectly golden, fully cooked pie with high sides, well-defined, crimped edges, and a beautiful tone to it.

But what you might end up with is a pie that looks like this.

What we have here is slumping sides and an overly-darkened edge crust.

And what we're going to talk about now are ways to avoid this.

Okay, so now you've got your really nicely filled pie plate full of raw dough.

If you were to put this in the oven just like this, you're gonna get slumping because as that butter melts, the pie dough gets really soft and it has nowhere to go but down, right?

So you need to support this pie shell in the place that it is now.

And we're gonna use pie weights to do that.

Now, your choice of pie weights varies.

These are traditional pie weights.

They're ceramic balls, they're heavy, and they have no other purpose other than to help you blind bake the pie crust and have it stay in place.

You can use dried beans.

Dried beans are great because they're inexpensive.

You can reuse them over and over, just like the ceramic weights, and they're easy to find.

Or you can even use raw rice.

We're just going to use a piece of aluminum foil, parchment works, also.

Press lightly in the middle and then go outward from there to press it all the way to the edges of the pie shell.

I'm going to choose beans today.

The next tip here is to make sure you use enough of the pie weights-- you need the pie weights to come all the way up to the side so that they come as high as the rim here.

So put them in, press them down lightly, spread them out.

And now this is ready for the oven.

Here's a pie shell that's intended to be partially blind baked.

We're going to add a pecan filling that then will go back to the oven.

At some point, you'll need to take the pie weights out of the pie shell.

So how do you know when it's ready for that step?

Well, the best thing to do is to lift the edge of the foil a little bit.

You want to be able to see the bottom of the crust.

It's going to still be raw, but it should not be shiny.

If it's super shiny, just press the beans back in and put it back in the oven for a little bit longer.

Gather up the four large corners, secure them tightly, and then lift the weights right out.

Pause for a minute to make sure there's no holes in the foil.

We're doing good here.

And then just transfer them to a bowl and let them cool, and then you can reuse them.

If you do that and you have a crack in your crust, there's an easy fix for that, too.

Remember those scraps we saved from trimming the edge of the pie pan?

This is where those come into play.

Just use your fingers to flatten them out a little bit.

Pick one that's wider than the crack is, lay it right on top of the crack.

You might need more than one piece.

Okay, you want these scraps to completely cover the cracked area.

And then press down around the edges of this little piece that you just added and make sure it's completely adhered to the crust on the bottom.

If this is going to be fully blind baked, you put it back into the oven at this point, which is what you would normally do after you remove the beans and you let it finish baking; this little patch here will bake along with it.

If it's going to be filled and put it back into the oven, you leave it as it is, you add the filling at this point-- we're using pecan filling today-- and then this will go back into the oven to finish baking.

So to prevent that pie crust from getting too dark, we're going to make a protective cover just over the border of the crust.

It's easy to do with aluminum foil.

Fold it in half, then fold it in a quarter like this.

This tip is going to be held at the center point.

You want to cut a little bit beyond the edge of the crust.

And then about two inches in from there.

Then open this up.

And place this on top.

Round it off a little bit, just so it doesn't, you know, blow away in the oven.

Okay.

We'll get this back into the oven, and then we'll come out and talk a little bit more.

All right, here are our two examples of blind baked crust.

This crust is partially blind baked.

This one was a fully blind baked crust.

So after the weights came out of this one, it went back into the oven completely naked, and it finished baking all the way through and then was cooled before this pudding-like filling was added, which all it needs is refrigeration; no further baking.

Oh, that's quite lovely.

Look at that.

Now, the dough is a little thicker in the middle.

Can you see that?

That's where we made the patch.

But that is a heck of a lot better than having a gooey, burned bottom underneath the pie shell where the filling leaked down underneath.

So, as you can see, it's really not that difficult to make a beautifully blind baked crust.

There's no reason that you can't go from this to something like this.

This is quite a gorgeous pie.

And coming up next, you'll see Chris make a partially blind baked crust for his delicious pumpkin pie.

My six-year-old loves pumpkin pie.

My 34-year-old makes it with sugar pumpkins, the small pumpkins.

And we fight about it every year.

She tells me that's the only way to make it, so I'm just gonna let her do it from now on-- I find that a can of unsweetened, un-spiced pumpkin works just as well, especially if you do it this way.

So we have one can which is around 15 ounces, and we have three-quarter cup of dark brown sugar.

And what we're gonna do is cook this for about ten minutes.

And that's gonna get rid of some of the excess liquid, the water in the pumpkin or the squash.

And it's also gonna caramelize a little bit with the sugar so you get richer, more concentrated flavor.

So you can see it's starting getting a little bit of a film on the bottom of the pan.

The volume is down.

Okay, I'm gonna now take this heat level down and add some bourbon, my favorite liquid.

We've concentrated the flavor, we've added a little bourbon, dark brown sugar, gotten rid of the moisture.

Crme frache, not usually found in pumpkin pie recipes.

This is going to cool down the mixture so we can add the eggs.

A little salt balances it nicely, brings out the flavors.

Three eggs and that's it.

Now... ...one trick with a custard pie, if the filling is warm and the pie crust is warm, you'll end up with a much crispier crust.

So now we have the warm filling, the warm crust.

Goes back in a 325 oven, and we'll talk about how to know when the pie is done.

So the question is, how do you know when it's done?

One of my older daughters, Caroline, she's been a professional baker, actually, and she still comes to me or calls me up and says, "How do I know when it's done?"

Well, it's tricky; depends on what you're baking.

With a custard pie, like pumpkin pie, there is a trick to it.

The center of it should not be set, so it should still jiggle.

If you fully set it in the oven and then take it out, it's going to overcook and you're going to start to get cracks around the edges.

Not the end of the world.

So any custard pie, the center should still be jiggly.

Okay, so now for some whipped cream, Cup and a half of heavy cream.

We're going to use honey for this.

The last thing is some orange zest.

So we'll start on low.

Now let's just drown this with whipped cream.

Little more.

There we are.

It looks great.

And one thing I didn't say about this is you're probably wondering, where did all the spices go?

And some of you out there are probably going, like, why didn't he add cinnamon?

Well, you know how I feel about cinnamon, the most overused spice in the world.

Because we concentrated the flavors with the sugar in the skillet, and bourbon really is the underlying flavor here.

It doesn't need the spices.

Of course, if you'd like to add a quarter teaspoon of allspice or some nutmeg or ginger or something else, that's fine.

So the question is, is the pastry dough tender?

It's firm, but it's really tender.

You know, if you have a really tough pastry crust and you try to cut through it with your fork, you know, it falls off your plate.

So you can cut this with a fork.

So, as I said, cutting all that fat in fully into the flour gives you a tender crust.

It's gonna be a little on the short side, not long and flaky, but it's going to be delicious in a pie.

So if you want, I think, the world's best pumpkin pie and a pie crust that's super easy to make, even on Thanksgiving morning, give it a try, because you're going to have success, and it's going to be absolutely delicious.

- So there's plenty to think about when baking a pie, making a delicious crust, blind baking it properly.

But does equipment really matter?

The pie plate itself?

Yes, it does.

So the pie plate that you bake your pie in is every bit as important as how you make that crust.

We decided to try out a bunch of different materials of pie plates to see which one performed the best.

Of course, we started with glass.

This one here is about to go in the oven for its blind bake.

Then there is an aluminum.

Then we have an enameled steel.

This is a little heavier and has the enamel coating.

And then we also have perforated.

These are very interesting.

One has a very thin screen, and this one is perforated on all edges.

So we blind baked a pie crust at the same temperature for the same amount of time in each one of these pie plates to see how they performed.

Here are the results.

First up, glass.

Now, this one is beautifully browned on the top and on the bottom.

You can see I got a couple cracks here, this was a little thin.

So I'm going to take Bianca's method earlier, patch this baby up, and it'll be good to go.

The aluminum was a bit of a disappointment.

It does brown lightly.

It does the trick, but it's much less toasted golden brown.

Our steel pan with enamel lining really performed.

Look at how beautifully golden brown this is, interior and out.

It's really nice; one thing you'll notice, I didn't put enough pie weights in this crust and the sides kind of slumped down a little bit, but you can see it still baked beautifully golden brown.

Now for our perforated pans.

These are a little wonky, I have to say.

And this one just has a light screen in the bottom.

It does have a nice brown crust.

The only thing that's strange about these is crusts that we bake here have a lot of butter in them.

Sometimes the butter tends to bake out and it can drip through this pan and onto the oven floor if you don't use a baking sheet underneath it.

The other thing I find strange about this is if you're going to serve this pie, if it's filled and you need to cut the pie, you're going to cut that screen and you're going to get one use out of this.

So to me, that's not really a good deal.

Finally, this is another perforated pan.

I believe it's probably more for quiche because it's high sided.

The tricky part about this one is that the sides are not very sloped.

So to make a nice pie crust with a nice edge, the slope-y sides are better.

In this case, you can see these also shrunk down, so for me, if I want to bake a lot of pies at home, my best bet is glass or enamel lined metal.

Metal pie plates conduct heat a lot better and the enamel lining in this is a plus.

It doesn't stick and it browns beautifully, but a good old sturdy glass one works just perfectly.

Now, if you don't have any pie plates at home, you can still make pie.

Hang around-- Rose is going to show you a beautiful freeform crostata.

- If you're not feeling like you want to make a whole two crust pie, crostata is perfect for that.

It's a really simple dough and it's rustic and freeform and so easy to make.

So I'm gonna start with our dough.

Start with some flour.

We have a little bit of sugar and some salt.

And I'm just gonna zhuzh that up just to mix it a couple of seconds.

And then we're gonna add our butter-- this crust actually has ten tablespoons of butter.

So I'm gonna put about three tablespoons of butter in to start.

And I'm gonna run the processor... ...until this is fully incorporated.

And then we're gonna add the rest of our butter.

We want this to kind of look sandy, but to have just a few chunks that are a little bit bigger.

So then I'm gonna put it all into a large bowl.

Because there's so much butter in this, you want to make sure everything is really cold; the butter, the water, all of it.

I'm just gonna move this around with a spatula just to kind of moisten all of the flour.

And then we're just gonna keep doing this until there are no pockets of flour left.

And then what I'm gonna do is just take my hand and gently mash it into a ball.

And then I'm just gonna dust this a little bit with flour so it doesn't stick to my plastic wrap.

We're gonna press it into about a five-inch disc, and I'm gonna wrap it and refrigerate it for an hour.

You can also do this two days ahead of time if you want.

That's the great thing about this dough.

If you feel like you want to have it on the weekend or something and you don't want to make it that day, it'll last in your fridge for a couple of days.

So to start, I want to roll this to about an 11-inch disc.

I think Chris talks about this a lot-- turning the dough to get a nice round circle.

So that's what I'm gonna try and do here.

This is a freeform tart, so if it's not completely round, still gonna be beautiful, still gonna taste great.

Still gonna look like you made it by hand, which I always think is really important.

So here is a little trick that Bianca taught us, and I think it works great for this crostata.

But I use it all the time for even pie crust.

So I'm gonna take about a tablespoon of sugar, and I'm gonna sprinkle it evenly over the top of my crostata dough.

And then I'm gonna roll it another inch.

That's about a 12-inch.

So now we've rolled this sugar into the dough, and then I'm gonna flip it over.

And what that does is it caramelizes in the oven, so you have this extra sugary crispness on the outside of your crostata.

And I've actually used it for pie, too.

So now I'm gonna take the rest of my sugar.

That's about three tablespoons of sugar.

And I'm gonna zest some lemon zest into that.

And then I'm gonna take my hands and just work it in so I can kind of get those oils incorporated into the sugar.

So you have, like, a lemon sugar; I love the smell of this.

And really that's all there is to it.

So I have some beautiful blackberries, some raspberries and blueberries.

Honestly, any combination of berries would work.

Sometimes I like to do all the same color berry, say raspberry, cherry, strawberry.

I think that's really pretty.

Or you could just use one berry if you have a bunch of blueberries, that works great as well.

So I'm gonna take the berries and just stack them right in the middle of our crostata dough.

We want to leave about an inch and a half to two inches of dough on the border.

Because that's what we're going to fold up.

You have to make sure that your dough is ready before you start mixing up your berries.

What will happen is when you add sugar, the berries are going to exude a lot of juice and you're going to end up making your crust soggy.

So you want to kind of just have those berries ready right when you're ready to form your crostata, which I'm going to do right now.

I'm just going to take a couple of inches at a time and fold it in, working my way around the crostata.

And you just press down a little bit to kind of keep it in place.

And even this is a great recipe, if you have children, I think they would love to make this.

This is gonna need to go into a refrigerator for about ten to 15 minutes.

But you don't want to leave it in the fridge much longer than that, because as I said, the juices from the fruit with the sugar in it are gonna start to come out of the fruit.

And you want that to kind of happen in the oven, otherwise you're gonna end up with a soggy crust.

So this has been in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes.

I'm gonna stick it in a 450 degree oven.

We're gonna put it on the lower middle rack to get a nice crusty bottom crust for 20 to 25 minutes, turning it halfway through.

So this is ready, look at how beautiful this is.

This cooled on our baking rack for about 15 minutes before we cut into it.

If you want to, you can take a large spatula, slide this off, and put it on a cake stand or a serving platter.

I'm gonna cut it right on this today.

Everything held together beautifully.

A little bit of whipped cream is a great accompaniment.

So this is Chris's Triple Berry Crostata.

If you're looking for something that's not your run-of-the-mill pie for a holiday, I think a crostata is the perfect dessert.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season at MilkStreetTV.com.

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