Too much of a beginner to make a pie crust?
Too much of a snob to buy a frozen one?
We’ve tested 10 recipes that require zero rolling, but you can still brag that you made the crust from scratch.
Nancy Baggett has written the book, literally, on desserts, and she says it’s fine to leave the rolling pin in the drawer.
“Almost any pie crust – even if it’s a pastry crust – you can press it into the pan,” says the author of “The All-American Dessert Book,” (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
These no-roll recipes make crunchy, hearty and even savory foundations for summery fillings of fruit and chiffon.
No-roll crusts are not flaky and delicate like traditional rolled-out pastry dough, but who wants to work that hard in the middle of summer anyway? All we really want is a delivery system for the filling.
“I can barely draw a circle, much less roll one from raw, cold pie dough,” writes Stephanie Alleyne in the August/September issue of Cook’s Country magazine. “There are so many places that pie dough can go wrong, no wonder most cooks throw in the pastry cloth and buy a prebaked shell.”
Test cook Alleyne took a break from tasting pot roast recipes to discuss her pie procedures: “We wanted to take the fear out of making a pie, and we didn’t want people to resort to store-bought.”
She tested 23(!) pat-in-the- pan crusts, and finally found that a cream cheese-butter- flour crust fooled the pie snobs in the Brookline, Mass., test kitchen the magazine shares with Cook’s Illustrated and the “America’s Test Kitchen” PBS show.
“It had to be something that wouldn’t intimidate people, that they could make in the summer when kitchen counters are hot and not everybody has central air conditioning.”
Standard pie dough uses shortening for flakiness and butter for flavor, she said, but overhandling can ruin it. “The heat from your hands makes the butter melt and that’s when it gets greasy,” Alleyne said.
The cream cheese makes the dough easier to work with and gives it better flavor than butter or shortening alone. “The fat in the cream cheese coats the particles of flour and prevents toughness, a problem in many crusts,” writes Alleyne.
You don’t get very far in baking before the chemistry lessons begin. You can fast-forward here, but it pays to understand the process.
Baggett’s shortbreadlike almond crust for the fresh fruit tartlets works because the sugar makes it more tender, she said.
Cue science teacher: Sugar grabs up some of the protein in the flour, and that keeps the protein, or gluten, from stretching, something you do want in bread dough, but you don’t want in pie dough. Then, “The fat coats flour particles like little raincoats and keeps them from absorbing liquid,” said Baggett.
OK, class over. Time to get in the kitchen.
“Smushing the almond dough into tartlet pans is a perfectly acceptable way to go,” said Baggett.
Food editor Kristen Browning-Blas can be reached at 303-820-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com.
