Pie crust using pastry flour
 

Any one have a recipe and/or tips? I just tried it using my normal
(AP flour) recipe and had disastrous results.

Larry

Echo44 > wrote in news:1pAnd.71091$5K2.57893@attbi_s03:

>
> Any one have a recipe and/or tips? I just tried it using my normal
> (AP flour) recipe and had disastrous results.
>
> Larry

Try mixing it half and half with AP flour. My experience with using only
pastry flour produced a pastry that was much too soft.

--
Wayne in Phoenix

*If there's a nit to pick, some nitwit will pick it.
*A mind is a terrible thing to lose.

at Sat, 20 Nov 2004 05:14:37 GMT in <1pAnd.71091$5K2.57893@attbi_s03>,
(Echo44) wrote :

>
>Any one have a recipe and/or tips? I just tried it using my normal
>(AP flour) recipe and had disastrous results.
>

What was your recipe and how did it go awry? This may help us better
identify what you needed to do.

Using pastry flour in a pie crust requires at most only minor adjustments,
not major modifications. The basic principles are still the same:

Cut in the fat only long enough to get a coarse mix reminiscent of clumpy
soil.

Use as little water as you can get away with and still have the crust hold
together.

Work the dough as little as possible.

Keep everything well-chilled.

I have 2 basic crusts I make using pastry flour. One uses half lard, half
butter in a ratio of 4:5 fat:flour by weight (which is 2:5 by volume). For
5 cups of flour, you then use 1 cup butter, 1 cup lard. The other is all
butter, in a ratio of 1:1 fat:flour (1:2 by volume). I also add a pinch of
salt, pretty standard routine.

I cut the fats in using 2 knives (which I find makes for slightly better
results than a pastry cutter), then sprinkle just enough water to get the
whole mass to bind together. It's usually not very much. For 5 cups flour,
I generally measure 6 oz to use, add about 2/3 of this, then add some or
all of the rest as needed to keep the thing together. Pastry flour does
generally absorb less water than A/P.

When rolling, you want to be a little more gentle than with A/P. Pastry-
flour crust has more of a tendency to crack and break if you're too
vigorous with the rolling. I use only the weight of the pin to roll it out
and don't exert any force on it whatsoever.

Don't try to make puff pastry, though, with pastry flour. It doesn't really
have enough gluten to stretch into the thin sheets puff pastry creates.
All-purpose is a better bet in this case. So if your pie was using puff
pastry, this may have been the source of grief. Also, just to make sure, it
wasn't cake flour you were using? That's also unsuitable for pie crusts of
any type. Finally, was your pastry flour white or whole-wheat? If you were
using your method for white AP flour with whole wheat pastry flour, this
could also have created difficulties. Whole wheat pastry flour also doesn't
hold together as readily and absorbs more water. Generally if I were making
a pie crust with whole wheat flour I'd up the fat and water, and lower the
amount of flour. However, I lean away from whole-wheat flours for pie crust
because the coarseness of whole wheat flour IMHO interferes with the flaky
sensation of a good pie crust, which is its raison d'etre.

--
Alex Rast

(remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)

Alex Rast wrote:
>
> What was your recipe and how did it go awry? This may help us better
> identify what you needed to do.

My recipe is 2 1/2 cps flour, 1/2 cp shortening, 1/2 cp butter, salt,
water. I used whole wheat pastry flour because that was all I could
find. I pulsed the shortening and flour together in a food processor,
and then added the butter and within seconds the whole mass came
together like a lump of putty. This has never happened before. As the
dough was holding together just fine, I rolled it out without adding any
water and blind baked it. It looked okay coming out of the oven but with
the slightest touch, the crust reverted back to it's flour state. I had
a pie plate full of dust.

Thanks for all your comments so far.

Larry

Alex Rast wrote:
>
> Shortening can be more problematic than lard, because it's a softer fat and
> generally has emulsifiers in it. Sometimes this can have an effect on
> pastry dough because it will cut in too evenly.

Funny, when things start to go bad they just get worse. It seems this
batch of pie dough was doomed from the start. I had been using lard and
had run out when I started this batch. The shortening vs lard makes a
lot of sense to me as does cutting in the butter first as Vox has
suggested. My pie crusts, generally are pretty good, but I've learned
more about pie crust in the past week than I have in the past 20 years.
I appreciate all the helpful advice and if I ever try the pastry flour
again, I'll hold out for the white.

Larry

A little off of subject, however, does anyone know how to prevent the
crust from rising off of the fruit when baked?

Thanks for the help.
A lost man in the kitchen!

A. L. Shaw > wrote in
:

> A little off of subject, however, does anyone know how to prevent the
> crust from rising off of the fruit when baked?
>
> Thanks for the help.
> A lost man in the kitchen!

Do you mean, like in an apple pie where a gap is left between the top crust
and fruit? That's caused by the cooked fruit settling.

I find this happens less if the apples are sliced smaller and thinner and
arranged rather compactly in the pie shell before covering with pastry.
There will be less settling. It should apply to most other fruits as well.

--
Wayne in Phoenix

*If there's a nit to pick, some nitwit will pick it.
*A mind is a terrible thing to lose.

"A. L. Shaw" > wrote in message
...
> A little off of subject, however, does anyone know how to prevent the
> crust from rising off of the fruit when baked?

As was mentioned, the gap forms when the fruit cooks and settles. IF the
crust has set, it remains where it was when the pie was assembled, leaving a
space. The only sure way of preventing this is to cook the filling first.
This is especially helpful with apple pie.