This recipe makes enough dough to line a 9″ pie plate and make a lattice top.
The Dough Itself
Add 1/3 C chilled shortening; (I use crisco in sticks) and 1 T chilled butter. Cut in with pastry cutter until mixture looks like coarse corn meal
Add another 1/3 c chilled shortening and 1 T chilled butter. Cut in until flour/fat mixture has pea sized chunks.
Sprinkle dough with 4 T very cold water. (I put ice cubes in the water. ) Use a fork to help the water spread around. You need just enough water to let the dough hold together in the next step. If the dough won’t hold together, add 1T – 2T more water.
Gather up the dough into two balls cover with plastic wrap and let rest in the fridge for about an hour. (It’s ok to let it rest longer– even over night. My 4-H teacher said letting the dough sit helps make the crust flakier. I don’t know if it’s true; I’ve never rolled the dough out immediately.)
Rolling out the dough
Place one dough ball in the center of the plastic wrap and pat down. If the edges break up a bit, press them together to make a nice firm ball. Place plastic wrap over the dough. Using a rolling pin, roll the dough into a large roundish sheet that’s at least 2″ or so larger than the diameter of the pie plate.
(You can also skip the plastic wrap and dust with flour, but you don’t want to work too much flour into the crust.)
Slide the dough onto a light weight cutting board, plate or piece of cardboard. Remove top layer of plastic wrap from the pie. Center the pie plate upside down on the dough. Slide your hand under the cutting board and the flip everything over. Your pie plate is now lined.
If you like, leave the plastic wrap on the top and store in the fridge while you prepare the filling. Peel plastic wrap off before filling.
Fill with the pie filling
(Recipe to come. I never pour the filling in until after I’ve rolled out the top lattice. Just leave things in bowls.)
Roll more dough.
Roll the second dough ball into a sheet using previously explained technique. Cut into long 1/2″ slices. Interlace over the top of the pie. Don’t worry if it looks too skanky, it always looks better after cooking.
You can also just roll out another crust circle and place that on top. If you do that, pierce lots of holes into the top of the crust. (If you don’t, the steam will burst the top of the crust.)
Trim over-hanging edges of dough leaving about 1″ . Fold over the edges, press. If you like, flute the edge by pushing in and out with your fingers and thumbs.
Bake
If you filled this pie, you will obviously bake following recipe for the filling.
You can also bake the lower crust to use as a prepared crust. To do this, preheat the oven to 450F. Prick the lower crust and weight with dried beans of clean pebbles. Place in the oven; remove when lightly browned. It will take 10-12 minutes.
We live in a less politically correct country and so can (and do) use ingredients which will probably horrify you! Pastry needs some kind of fat of course. We now use beef suet once more, which was the British traditional baking fat before the current rage for using heavily processed fats for baking. It is of course high in saturates, which, after reading Nourishing Traditions, no longer strikes me as a bad thing, and certainly better than any hydrogenated fats. But the real reason for using it in place of (say) the equally natural butter is that the texture of the pastry is unique and lovely. I don’t know if you can still get beef suet in the US, but try it sometime. Don’t tell anyone, however!
The saturated fat issue is totally bemusing. I have reverted to eating bread and our own dripping, either from a lamb roast, or from the organic bacon we occasionally have. It was a childhood treat and its delightful to have felt able to return to it. I also now guiltlessly eat three egg omelettes made with liberal amounts of full fat cheese, and use the UK ‘gold top’ Jersey milk, creamy and unhomogenized, on cereal.
And no, it doesn’t raise cholesterol levels. I recently had a series of exhaustive medical tests including angiogram. My arteries were pronounced pristine. The idea that eating saturated fats leads to high cholesterol levels or high plaque is simply a myth. The idea, even, that high cholesterol levels leads to increased heart attacks may well also be a myth, as the recent evidence from statin trials with and without cholesterol reducers shows. The idea that polyunsaturated vegetable oil, whether hydrogenated or not, is healthier than naturally source animal fats in the product of the corn agribusiness marketing machine, and has been a public health disaster., alond with the idea that industrially processed soy extracts of various sorts are health foods. We only use olive, or sometimes peanut oil now.
In fact, the standard diet of the English rural population all through the 19c and early 20c depended heavily on bread and dripping. They were generally not over weight and did not die of heart attacks, and did heavy labour. The bread was from flour ground on stone, not steel, and was higher extraction. When you read about bread rations in, for instance, poorhouses of the 19c in England, they are emphatically not talking wholewheat bread, but it is nothing like today’s white bread with 70% or lower extraction rates. Theirs was a fairly coarse white, a bit like the wartime ‘national loaf’. When you read about bread rations in, for instance, poorhouses of the 19c in England, they are emphatically not talking wholewheat bread, but it is nothing like today’s white bread with 70% or lower extraction rates.
They were very poor. The dripping was their own, for they collected and used every scrap of the meat they bought, including the fat.
Flora Thompson’s books have fascinating accounts of what they ate and how they prepared it. Bread and dripping and cold tea was what you gave your husband to take to the fields for lunch, and was probably what he ate for breakfast too, perhaps with salad leaves from the garden in season.
So my dear Lucia, put aside correctness, get some suet if you can find any, and delight and surprise your family! And if you haven’t read Nourishing Traditions, get a copy. You will never feel the same about food and health again.
Fred– Suet is hard to come by around here. I’m sure I could find it. I can find leaf lard, which is similar but made from pork. Some people really like That.
Last time I had my cholesterol checked it was. . . (you aren’t going to believe this) 112 (whatever the units are.) My all time high measurement was 148, 112 is the all time low. I later read people with super low cholesterol tend to commit suicide at a higher rate and also have higher mortality as they get very low. There are just so few of us that we don’t here any warming.
I decided to eat eggs regularly!
My inlaws have high cholesterol.
The main reason I use the Crisco is shelf life. I can get it easily, and I don’t back pie very often. I usually make things more like crumbles or in the summer I make a pastry that does use butter. (And which is yummy.)
But I’ll look around for suet.