A recipe for tragic pie crust

Saying it will make it so: I’m actually going to start keeping a list of which recipes I’ve made for this newsletter, because it was only after finishing making this pie that I realized I had already made this crust and written about it for you all, and much more successfully to boot. So if you’d like to read about how to make this crust the right way, go here. If you’d like to hear about me fucking it up, keep reading.

Our neighbors have a ton of fruit trees and on Sunday, they dropped off literally a massive bag of yellow and white peaches. My only association with life-altering peaches is from time spent in Southern California, so it was absolutely wild to taste these—they’re so, so good, and we’ve been eating them like they’re candy, though not fast enough to take them down before they completely spoil. As such, I decided to make a peach pie on the recommendation of my friend Dayna, who is a big fan of the Petee’s Pie cookbook and loved this particular recipe.

I first turned to my mother, who said the recipe she uses for crust is from New Basics, which was news to me, and suggests half butter and half shortening, not all shortening, which is what the Fave Recipes recipe calls for. That information was not shared previously! In any case, the recipe in New Basics is basically (ha ha ha) the same as the one here, except this time I did as she said and subbed in half butter. This was where I first went wrong—the crust wasn’t holding together and instead of going with my gut and adding more water, I just forged ahead and hoped chilling it for a bit would work. Could it have also been that I used frozen butter? Sure, but let’s not get into detail work about baking, it’s not like that’s all that matters. I attempted rolling out and it completely fell apart, so much so that I had to put the pieces into the crust and smush it together there.

The larger, crucial detail is that I was confused about how much I needed to make both the bottom crust and the top latticed crust; I thought one recipe split into two would be fine, as it says “This recipe will make two pie crusts” in Fave Recipes. FALSE! And had I consulted myself the last time, when it made but one bottom crust, I would have realized my error. This meant that I had to use about 3/4 of my crust for the bottom, and had but a few scraps to forge together something that was a latticed crust. As you’ll see in but a moment, that did not work out very well.

I won’t go too much into the detail of making the actual filling, except that peeling peaches is extremely hard—I gouged myself while doing it—but that the final result was, even including the subpar crust, so good. Blasphemy though it may be, I’m not a massive fan of all fruit pies, but please do make this, should you have access to so many peaches you are worried you’re being wasteful by throwing the soft ones in the compost. With the correct crust recipe and more brains than I have.

Postscript from my mother:

First of all, that has happened to me more than I'd like to admit. I finally realized, like you did, that I just needed to add more water. Also, I saw the remainders of the peach pie at your place this afternoon and it looked delicious! Could not tell about the bottom crust, which is what has happened so often with my Thanksgiving pecans, etc.

I think I stopped using the Fave Recipes crust recipe when I realized it was too skimpy for two crusts. Fave Recipes calls for 2 cups of flour and The New Basics recipe calls for 2 1/2, so that's the crucial difference.

I actually don't know where the Fave Recipes crust comes from!

I made a peach crisp, which was very good. But this makes me want to make a real pie. Perhaps I will attempt one this weekend.

KATE

Donations Time: Last month, $115 went to The Sylvia Center. Next month, your money will go to the Haitian Health Foundation to help relief efforts after the recent earthquake there. As usual, you can switch to paid by clicking this button right here.