The Pie Diaries.
When life hands you rhubarb, you make a pie. At least, that’s what I figured when I was handed an armful last week. The problem was, I had never made a pie before. Not a real one. There have been galettes, (rustic fruit tarts), and no-bake pudding pies (is that even a pie?), but I always used a purchased pie crust. There’s something intimidating about making one’s own crust. Everyone has an opinion about how to best go about it… freeze your butter, use ice water, use vodka, use a specialized tool, use your fingers, use a voodoo doll, use a spray bottle, only attempt it when there’s a full moon, etc. You get the idea.
Being who I am (obsessed with food), I have of course READ much of this advice, or looked it up, or seen it on TV. So when I looked in my trusty Fannie Farmer cookbook, I was surprised to see that it didn’t really mention any of these things. It just sort of assumed that any idiot knew the method for making pie crust, and it just gave the ingredients. So I made it up, substituted ingredients when I didn’t have them, and just basically went for it.
It was shockingly edible for my first attempt.
I ended up with an all-butter crust, since I don’t keep vegetable shortening in the house. Or Crisco, or lard, or any other recommended fat. Most recipes say that a combination of butter and shortening is your best bet… the flavor of butter and the stability of shortening. I gamely went for it, the resulting crust was delicious. I found the dough a little hard to manage, but I used an Alton Brown method—rolling the dough out inside a zip-top bag, which you then cut along the sides to remove. This keeps it from sticking to the rolling pin, or fracturing too badly, and it makes it easier to transfer to the pie dish without performing some kind of dangerous pie-dough-rolling-pin-draping trick.
Then all I had to do was fill the pie, roll out and trim the top, and voila. Something resembling actual pie. I even had enough trimmings to make some attempt at decoration. Look out, Aunt Bee.
A few hours in the oven, and the house started to smell like… well, charred rhubarb syrup. Pies (at least, in my observation) always bubble over. I hadn’t forgotten to put something underneath my pie dish, but it still made quite a mess and a small amount of smoke. But when it was finished, it looked like this.
Not only is it pretty, but I’m fairly certain that pie is the actual breakfast of champions. Wheaties, schmeaties.
