Fresh Pie Pastry from Scratch

 

 

For A Double Crust Pie 

2 level cups PILLSBURY BEST® All-Purpose Flour
1 level teaspoon salt
3/4 Crisco® All-Vegetable Shortening
7 tablespoons cold water

Crisco shortening is not just a lubricant for fisting. Making a fresh pastry from scratch is a culinary art form that died with thousands of queens in the 1970’s. The gay days of succulent pies are gone. Women are like men now. There are very few housewives who know how to work a rolling pin.

Factories now produce near-perfect pie crusts that taste wonderful and are conveniently sold in frozen food sections of supermarkets. Very few kitchens have rolling pins. Most women fake it in the kitchen.Directions for making fresh pastry are still printed on the labels of Crisco cans.There are a few tricks the J.M. Smucker Company neglected to publish on their product. Follow my guide and claim the stomachs of your men.

Use a glass bowl for mixing.

Stir the flour and the salt together with a fork.

Shuffle the dry ingredients momentarily and look sexy while whipping.

Measure out the shortening. Crisco manufactures and packages the greasy product in blocks wrapped in paper. The lard-like substance can easily be measured by cutting on lines printed on the packaging. New blocks of Crisco make baking and measuring much easier. Poorly written and confusing cookbooks instruct readers to use chilled shortening. For a beginner this is not necessary.Purchase a metal pastry blender, or a kitchen fork works just as well in breaking down large chunks of shortening into smaller pea-size pieces. Even fingers can be used to cut the shortening down. The goal is to create pea-sized, flour-covered, shortening pieces from the ingredients: flour, salt and shortening. After the pea stage is reached, add the final ingredient, water.

Dribble in the water one tablespoon at a time.
At first, the mixture will not resemble a perfect pod of peas. There will be lots of loose flour alongside the flour peas. By adding water slowly, the loose flour finds a home as part of the other peas. The result is a glob of flour peas, which, like the men you feed with this form of unleavened bread, can be easily worked.

Throw and scatter flour on the work surface as if the cameras were rolling on a made for television cooking series with you as the star. (Even if alone in the kitchen, throw the flour out as if the world were watching.)

Throw the flower dramatically.

Homemade pastry is as precious as oil in Iraq. Don’t over-work the product. Form it only to a point to where it sticks together. Squeeze it into a ball. Pop the softball in the freezer for about 5-10 minutes. Don’t let it freeze it to the point where it can cause real harm if thrown.Press the pastry with your hands a few times on a floured surface. Shape it as you did as a child while playing with Play-Dough, forming a disk slightly larger than a man’s face. Keep the edges rounded and crack-free by gliding your left hand along the outer edges as the right hand slowly presses the dough in a disc shape.

(Left- handed individuals cannot make pie pastry.)

Dough should never stick to fingers. Use flour as often to keep it from sticking to the work surface, but don’t make the pastry too dry.Throw more flour just for fun.Start rolling out the dough with a rolling pin or wine bottle. Flip it over when it’s the size slightly larger than a man’s ego.

Flip at least one additional time. Handling the pastry becomes more difficult the thinner the pastry becomes. Flipping it three times is sufficient.The only time to add flour to the work surface is when turning the pastry over. By adding flour to the top of the pastry, it’s not necessary to scatter more on the work surface as recipes often suggest.

Remember, throw flour prior to each flip. Also, keep the edges in order with hands before flipping. Flour the rolling pin too. (Flour serves as lubricant.)Learning to roll with a rolling pin is similar to learning to write with a pen. Start with fresh ingredients, follow directions from those of us who have paid our dues, and trust that the pastry will make itself.It will not take long before the potential pie shell reaches a size somewhat larger than the circumference of a pie plate.

My mother once visited my lover and I in New York. She couldn’t believe I too became a housewife. She gasped when she saw that I was just like her. She criticized me for not using her method for transferring my flattened pastry into the pie plate though.I simply bend it over and shove it in. (She may be right, freshly rolled pastry gets a crease on its surface, while using the folding method. ) There is also a risk of it breaking apart.

Food does not always have to appear perfect for it to serve a purpose or taste good, I explained to my mother.You may wish to use my mother’s method for transferring the crust: Wrap the pastry around the rolling pin. Start by placing the rolling pin at one end of the flattened product, hold the edge of the pastry against the pin, and allow the pre-baked crust to wrap itself around the rolling device. This method helps to prevent the pastry from slipping out of control. One can simply un-roll the fresh dough into the pie plate.

When utilizing the wrap-around the pin method, just before unrolling the pastry into the plate, take the time to glide your hands along the perfect pre-baked shell before unrolling it into the plate as men do while masturbating. I don’t know why that step of the process is important, it just is.

Real men who do not eat quiche will eat this type of pie. It may take several bags of flour and countless Crisco blocks to finally get the groove.

Be creative with these secrets of mystical pastry. So much more than fruit pies can be created with the talent of pastry making.