It's almost the end of peach season, and while I've made some nice peach desserts, and the kid has taken a bunch to camp and school in her lunch, I just didn't feel like we'd had our fill yet. So last Saturday one of the things I picked up from the Farmer's Market was a basket of peaches.
One of the obnoxious things about the Farmer's Market is that produce varies greatly vendor to vendor, and that the same vendors aren't always there every week, and some of the vendors are liars and cheaters who drive to Toronto to purchase produce and then try to pass it off as their own (this last thing is a HUGE controversy that has divided my entire town, it's been very exciting this summer, a bunch of the vendors who complained about it were KICKED OUT and started their own market, and I don't have time for two markets!). So yeah, as if on top of everything else I've got going on, I'm supposed to somehow start a spreadsheet and test/track who has the best corn, or whose tomatoes stay fresher longer, or who has MEALY PEACHES?!! If you couldn't tell, I made a poor choice and ended up with mealy peaches and I'm not happy about it. All the other peaches were from a different vendor and they were amazing. But, I guess if this is going to be the mediocre batch, at least they'll get doused in sugar and baked. Because darling daughter asked for a pie.
I don't like pie. I feel like it's a waste of my dessert time. There are a lot of pies that shouldn't even COUNT as dessert, like pumpkin and sweet potato and apple. Those are breakfast entrees, or side dishes. Strawberry Rhubarb with tons of ice cream is passable, and maybe blueberry or bumbleberry served the same way. But I can give or take cherry, or chess, or custard. Now, cream pies are basically pudding, so I'll eat those and leave the crust. Mmmmm lemon meringue. Because crust is bread, and you know how I feel about bread. To try to help with this I tend to add weird stuff to my pie dough, be it sweet or savory. If I'm making a quiche, for example, I'll add herbs and grated cheese. If it's a peach pie, I'll add cinnamon and sugar and vanilla and peach vodka. Oooh, or apricot vodka, I just picked up a mini bottle of that in Kentucky last week. That significantly helps. And why should a dessert crust be flavorless and boring anyhow? Who made that rule? It's like, here's this awesome delicious filling, and here, let me serve it to you on a particle board plank that you're expected to chew on. I also get mad every single time because I pin all these gorgeous photos and tips for decorative crusts, and then I never try them because after getting everything assembled I've lost interest and I just don't care anymore. So they taste ok, but they look terrible. I apparently have pie issues.
I let the kid choose whether she wanted a double crust, or a no-bake single crust version. She chose double crust, of course, because in her mind pie crust is love. Her grandfather would definitely approve. I ended up going with vanilla bean powder (nice when you don't want a liquid addition but want vanilla flavor), peach vodka, and I thought I might try something new - I had let the sliced peaches sit in about 3/4 cup of sugar to pull off some of the juice, and I mixed that in.
IIn the end I only added probably 1-2 Tbsp of water. Now, I know you can make pie crust easily in
the food processor, and usually I'm all for that, but the important thing about pie crust, the way that you get it nice and flaky, is to keep the liquid to a minimum. It's why I like to add vodka, because it cooks out. And we all want a nice flaky crust, right? I won't be able to tell by looking in a food processor whether my dough is still too dry, or too sticky - I need to be able to feel it. So I'm admittedly a little old school; I cut in a mix of butter and lard with two knives (not even a pastry blender! Damn I hate cleaning that thing!), and then use my hands to mix in everything else until I can feel it's pulling together. I don’t often use shortening unless I’m feeling cheap or doing a ton of baking, like at Christmas.
A lot of people fear baking because they've been told it's an exact science, that you have to do everything right and measure everything perfectly. I do not. I don't level off my measuring cup, I don't cut my butter or shortening into pea-sized pieces (look at the visible chunks in this! They're the size of Hot Wheels!). When you're starting off, it's probably good to start with the 'exact' methods, but then as you get more comfortable and understand how everything reacts (too much flour, falls apart; too much shortening, soggy), you can more easily eyeball stuff and have a good sense of what you need to do. And that's when it gets really fun, because that's when you can start changing stuff up, without ruining everything and again crying or screaming the F-word and scaring your dog.
I actually let the dough chill for a couple hours because I've done some testing with dough
temperature and everyone is right, cold dough is happy dough. I've gone so far as to ice my hands, ice my marble cutting board and rolling pin, whisk things from freezer to oven in mere seconds. All those things didn't make a huge impact, but you should chill the dough. Oh, and another seriously imperfect thing I do? Since a lot of my cooking projects are last-minute, I keep a lot of supplies like extra butter in the freezer, and then when I go to make something I want it thawed and ready NOW, not in a few hours. So I've totally been known to hack off frozen solid butter and pop it in the microwave on a Defrost setting for a scarce amount of time to speed things up. Hey, nobody has died, except I might have accidentally given my sister's boyfriend food poisoning one Christmas.
Oh, you’re going to love this; so I did my usual slack-ass job on the crust, and cut some slits, and decided to do an egg wash because it looks nice and then the sugar sprinkle sticks better, and then I was all, “Hey, it looks nice, maybe I should actually do that thing where you put foil on the crust” and it went TERRIBLY, HORRIBLY WRONG, and the stupi foil stuck to the crust, and when I went to pull it off I PULLED OFF CRUST. So that was disheartening. Serves me right for trying to follow instructions.
Let's see, what else can I tell you about pie... mini pies are fun, cooked in muffin tins, but man, are they ever fiddly and fussy. Some people here make a French-Canadian meat pie called Tourtiere, it's heaven, I'll do a blog about that in the winter. Mmmm with maple dumplings for dessert.
This did, in fact, turn out mostly lovely, hosed crust and all, and sure tasted ok. The kid was too stuffed with Beef ‘n Broccoli to eat more than one bite, but she says she’s looking forward to more tomorrow. It’s a little, ahh, ‘juicy’, but I’ll take that over dry pie any day.
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