Cooking Cheap

As you all know, there’s Mom’s way and a bunch of other ways all of which are supposed to be perfect. i don’t know enough about them all. Not sure I care because I don’t do pies. I do like quiche though and this worked the first time I tried it by myself. These are all notes to myself in case I forget. If you change the ingredients you might want to change the technique — This is Mom’s way.

Make’s one pie shell.
1 C all purpose flour (maybe less)
1/3 C cold lard (maybe more)
1/3 tsp table salt.

Using your hands, cut the lard into the flour into the flour until the crumbs are the right size, not too fine but fine enough. Add lard or flour if needed. I know that’s not helpful.

Add 1/2 tsp COLD water and gather it into a ball. Might have to add a drop or two more. The texture that describes it best for me is a tortilla dough that is a drop of water short of perfect. That probably doesn’t help you either. Then you work the dough — squish the ball with your hands a few times. Mom says as much as you want and flatten it into a thick disk the size of your palm or a little larger. If it cracks at the edges of the disk, work it some more. On supposes one could add a drop of water if that fails but I haven’t tested that.

At this point, water is the enemy. Everything that touches the dough has to be dry. The counter, the rolling pin, your hands. Clean it of course (before you start) but dry dry dry. Get a sifter half full of flour and generously dust the work space (You can’t have to much) lay down the disk of dough and dust the top of it with flour. From the center, roll out in one direction an inch or so. From the center, roll out an inch or so in the opposite direction. Pickup the sifter with one hand and dough disk with the other. Flour the board, flip the dough over and rotate 90 or 60 degrees. Flour the top of dough, brush off the big clumps of flour. Repeat, dusting the board and the top until it’s too large to flip without tearing (8 inches?). Flour the top again and roll to the final size and the right thickness (another guess, you have to make). Flour the top occasionally as you do this last shaping. If it sticks, you didn’t use enough flour for dusting or something was wet.

Put your rolling pin near one end of your circle of dough and gently lift the edge of the dough up and onto the pin and then roll the dough up onto the rolling pin and then unroll into the pan. Major holes and tears mean you did something wrong. Minor holes and tears can be corrected after the dough is in the pan. You’ll have excess dough hanging over the edge of the pan. Get a small bit of that in one hand, wet one finger and use that to the glue to bits together.

If the recipe calls for blind baking the crust, poke a lot of holes in the bottom of the dough with a fork (don’t rip it , poke it) and each poke need to result in a tink as you hit the bottom of the pan, 20 or 30 pokes isn’t unreasonable. Put it in a 350F oven for 10 and maybe up to 20 minutes. That’s another guess. If it’s golden (but not brown) and flakes away when you touch the bottom, your done.

Like I said up top, this works and obviously so do the other recipes and techniques from all the other mom’s of the world. I like this one because It’s relatively quick and uncomplicated and it’s Mom’s.