Pie crust in particular seems to be a challenge, that's usually what most of my students are concerned about learning to do well. I never seemed to have a problem with it, and I don't really know why, it was just one of those things that I guess I mastered early on. I remember one day in particular in culinary school, our topics that day included making pate brisee (pie dough) and breaking down and deboning chickens. In my team that day, I was partnered with two guys, both of whom could butcher a chicken with their eyes closed, but were terrified of pastry. So, I helped them with their pie crusts, and they walked me through breaking down my first chicken. I think it was a fair exchange.
Pie crust is four simple ingredients--flour, salt, butter and water. Depending on how you put them together, you can get a buttery, flaky, tender loveliness....or a pasty, tough, piece of cardboard. The two most important things to manage for a successful pie crust is the temperature of your ingredients and the amount of water you add to the dough. Keep your butter cold, you want to cut the butter into the flour, not make a paste. The separate, distinct pieces of butter mixed into the dough are what result in those flaky layers in the crust. In order to help manage the temperature of the butter, use cold water to make the dough, but don't use too much. You need just enough water for the dough to come together. Too much and your dough will shrink as it bakes--if you've ever had a crust break and leak in the pie plate as it bakes, this is why.
The other challenge my students have is in rolling out the dough. I would love to find a young psychology student who needs a topic for a research paper, I'm convinced that how a person approaches rolling out a pie crust tells more about their basic personality than any test on paper can. I have students that are so focused on perfection, that they start to sweat if the slightest crack appears on edge of the dough or if it isn't staying in a perfect circle, and I have to jump across the kitchen to stop them from balling the dough back up and starting over. That's just about the worst thing you can do, it over-develops the gluten in the dough and pretty much guarantees the dough will be tough and chewy. Then I have students that just roll and roll the dough, blissfully unaware that it's completely uneven, nowhere close to being round, and don't even realize how far off the rails they've gone until it's too late to fix it--and they're often completely unfazed and happy as clams. And, don't get me started on fitting the dough to a pie plate and crimping the edges--that can put many of my students completely over the edge.
I like starting my students out with a galette. I call it a "lazy" pie because you don't use a pie pan. It takes some of the stress out of the situation, not only do you bypass the challenges of fitting the dough to a pie pan and crimping the edges, but the dough doesn't have to be rolled to a perfect round circle. In fact, I think galettes are more beautiful the more imperfect they look. This time of year especially, when we're starting to get such beautiful fruit in the markets, galettes are not only easy, but they really shine. Enjoy!
Honeyed Apricot Galette
Makes one 9 to 10 inch galette
For the dough:
1 ¼ cup all purpose flour
½ teaspoon
Kosher salt
1 stick
(4 ounces) of unsalted butter, cold and cut into 10 to 12 pieces
3 to 4
tablespoons cold water
For the filling:
2 pounds
fresh apricots, pits removed and sliced
¼ cup
honey
2
tablespoons all purpose flour
juice of ½
a lemon
1 egg,
beaten
1
tablespoon granulated sugar
To make the dough, place the flour and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse to mix. Add the butter pieces and pulse until the mixture looks like damp sand with pebbles.
Add about 2 tablespoons of water and pulse to mix through.
Add additional water, about ½ a tablespoon at a time, pulsing the food process
to mix, until the dough just begins to come together into large pieces.
Turn
the dough out onto a clean work surface and bring it together into a round flat
disk. There's no need to knead the dough, just press it together. Kneading it
will only further develop the gluten and toughen the dough. Forming the dough
into a round flat disk will make it easier to roll out later, the dough will
tend to stay in the shape it starts in.
Wrap the dough disk in plastic wrap and place in the
refrigerator for a minimum of 30 minutes. This will allow the butter to get
cold again, it allows the flour to fully absorb the water and the dough to
evenly hydrate, and it will allow the gluten to relax. You can also freeze the
dough at this point, a great way to get ahead of your holiday baking.
While the dough is chilling, make the filling. Mix the
apricots, honey, flour and lemon juice together in a bowl. Make sure the
apricots are evenly coated with the other ingredients.
Remove the dough from the refrigerator, unwrap it and place
it on a lightly floured work surface. Roll out the dough into a 12 to 14 inch
circle about 1/8th of an inch thick. Carefully
transfer the dough to a parchment paper lined baking sheet.
Spoon the apricots into the center of the dough, making a
mound of the fruit and leaving a 2 to 3 inch border of dough around the edge.
Lift the dough edge, folding and pleating around the perimeter of the galette, covering
the edge of the fruit. Using a silicone brush, brush a thin layer of beat egg
on the exposed dough, then sprinkle with the sugar.
Bake for 40 to 50 minutes until the crust is browned and the
fruit filling is bubbling in the center of the galette. (The starch in the
flour is activated when the liquid in the filling boils. If the filling isn't
bubbling in the very center of the galette, the flour has not fully activated,
and the filling will be watery and run when the galette is cut to serve.) Allow to cool, slice and serve.
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