I’m a big believer in belief. If you believe you can do it, you will. If you believe it will happen it will.
Well, for all the good things anyways.
And then there is pie crust.
Not quite sure if that’s one of the good things, or the let’s just pretend it worked fine anyways, and ignore it things.
Especially no fail pie crust… I mean, who on earth made that one up… no fail, ha.
Pfffft.
All the perfect ingredients were there, ripe juicy apples, hand picked at a local orchard that has been in their family for generations… [there’s a fulfillment of a muddy boot dream, sourcing our own local food]. A perfectly sunny day, the weather crisp and beautiful, the view of the valley below spectacular.
The flour, locally ground, sea salt, ice water, and a recipe off of the box that claimed it was no fail no matter what.
That was stretching the truth a bit.
Fresh off of the success of rolling out my sister’s amazing pie crust to her specific instructions, making a pie from scratch didn’t seem to be mission impossible on my own.
I’ve got a bit of history with pie crust, it’s like the bad boy memories of my youth, every woman has something to be regretted in her past. Mine is soggy bottoms, wet plaster like chunks, squished sloppy, what was that kind of crusts. It’s something that I don’t do well.
I’ve made my peace with it, and thought we could move forward, no fail crust and I, forge a new and happy relationship, but apparently the pie crust had other ideas.
It fooled me into thinking everything was going along great, like a new boyfriend courting, crumbled nicely, formed two balls of chilled white dough, and then it all fell apart when it came time to commit, or in my case roll it out.
With barely enough to fill the bottom of the pie plate, any attempts to stretch it resulted in tears in the dough and I had to resort to a lattice style topping of crust.
Surprisingly a lattice top takes a lot of dough too, resulting in some parts of the pie not getting covered. But I figured that no one would notice the lack of dough, due to the missing sugar, and spices I forgot to add, before placing the lattice on the pie. Seems that once the dough is placed on top of the pie, removing it isn’t a option, even if you forgot to add anything else.
No fail pastry indeed.
They said it tasted delicious.
Now that’s stretching the truth.
No fail pie crust, I think we need to break up. It’s you, not me.