Off the Fork: Holiday pies, let the games begin
For years, my pie crusts have been edible but unspectacular. So this fall, I attended a baking conference in Vermont where I discovered that the best way to get a crispy and buttery crust with long flakes is to play with your food.
The Zen master of pie at the baking conference was Joanne Chang, chef and owner of the Flour Café/Bakeries in Boston. Before a rapt audience of obsessive bakers, she demonstrated the technique.
She dumped a barely mixed glob of flour, butter, egg yolks and milk into the middle of a butcher block table, gathered it into a mound that resembled the coarse mulch pile at the Recycling Center and mashed the heel of her hand down through the dough repeatedly.
If you saw a group of toddlers doing this, you’d call it art class. Chang calls it “going down the mountain” and told us the actual French culinary term is fraisage. For the kind of people who enjoy kneading bread and beating egg whites, it’s a lot of fun.
The result of all this fraisage is dough with streaks of smashed butter sandwiched between layers of flour. Once it’s rolled out and baked, the resulting crust is not only crisp, but generally doesn’t allow any filling leaks, since the butter is not in lumps that can melt in the oven, creating a hole.
When crust-making is this entertaining, only the most delightful pie filling will do. This sweet potato filling is made from a classic recipe my mother has used since the 60s when it first appeared in “Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook.”
To Mom, Princess Pamela and Joanne Chang, thank you, thank you and thank you.
Princess Pamela’s Sweet Potato Pie
with Joanne Chang’s Pie Crust
The crust:
1 3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (preferably King Arthur)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into 12 pieces
2 egg yolks
3 tablespoons cold milk
The filling:
2 medium sweet potatoes, boiled, peeled and mashed
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs, beaten
1/4 cup melted butter
3/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
Pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg
1 tablespoon flour
Mix the flour, sugar and salt in a stand-mixer with the paddle attachment.
Add 12 pieces of butter all at once and paddle slowly until the mixture just holds together when you grab a handful and there are still lumps of butter.
Mix the yolks and milk and add all at once to the butter/flour mixture. Mix very briefly, just until it comes together into a shaggy mess.
Dump the mixture out onto the table and gather it into a tight mound. Using the palm of your hand, smear the dough from the top down the side of the mound to the table, piece by piece, until the butter chunks are smeared into the dough and the whole thing comes together.
Press the dough into a flattened disk about 8 inches in diameter and 1 inch tall and cover it tightly in plastic wrap.
Refrigerate for several hours (or you can freeze it for several weeks).
Roll the dough out into a 10-inch circle to line a 9-inch pie pan.
Refrigerate the crust in the pan for at least 30 minutes.
Line the crust with a coffee filter or parchment, held down with dried beans or pie weights, and blind-bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees, until the edges are very pale brown.
Remove the crust from the oven and increase the oven temperature to 400 degrees.
Remove the pie weights and coffee filter.
Mix all filling ingredients and pour into the uncooled pie shell.
Bake until the crust is well browned and the filling is cooked around the edges and slightly jiggly in the center, about 35 minutes.
