Oil crust, anyone?

10 years ago

These are apparently unfashionable these days, but there were recipes for oil pie crusts in cookbooks when I was a kid. I rediscovered the idea through an Italian cook who explained "pasta matta" to me, which is a thin oil crust used for some savory pastries. I worked out the proportions, and since then have returned to making pies--lots of pies--now that I have a healthy vegetarian alternative to butter, shortening, and lard.

An oil crust may not be the tastiest pie crust around, and may not be the flakiest. But it is tasty and flaky. It certainly is healther than the alternatives, and it's easy to work, which I never found to be the case for butter.

The base recipe is 2 cups flour (I use soft wheat all purpose and soft wheat whole wheat, in any proportions), 1 tsp salt, 5 Tbsps oil (I use sunflower seed oil; or olive oil for savory pies like potato pie), and cold water as needed. This will make a large one crust or smaller two crust pie (the amount is tight for the latter). Mix flour and salt, then add oil slowly, tossing the flour as you do, then cut it in until well mixed. Add cold water slowly as needed, tossing the dough, chill if necessary, then roll out the dough.

I'm breakfasting as I write this on pumpkin (actually winter squash) pie, coffee, and fresh fruit. The pie is good. Everybody makes their own decisions about how healthily they want to eat. But for me it's important that food I serve often be good for the body. I've been very happy with the oil crust, and perhaps other cooks may find it useful.

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l pinkmountain

10 years ago

last modified: 10 years ago

I love pie more than just about anything and I love it with butter, lard and oil crusts. And with a whole wheat crust too. Let's not forget graham cracker or chocolate cookie crusts either! But honestly, pie just isn't that healthy. The crust is fat and flour. Even with another grain, it still is grain and fat. If you want healthy, then eat fruit compote. Even that is high sugar, but not so much fat. That's why I try to exercise, I want to be able to squeeze in some pie occasionally. It's a good thing I hate making pie and am lousy at it, or I'd probably pig out on it way too much!

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Comments (22)

Islay Corbel
10 years ago
It's commonly used throughout Europe and I agree with you - it's very good and very easy to use. It's great if you want to make a free-form galette as to opposed to a pie in a dish.
grainlady_ks
10 years ago
last modified: 10 years ago
Each step of making a short crust pastry is geared to minimizing gluten development - from using a low-protein flour to the type of fat and the mixing methods. But the general characteristics desired for a pastry are based on using a solid fat (preferably cold hard fat), but oil pastry sure is simple to make and easier to handle, but it has the wrong characteristics for a "great" classic pastry.

The bottom line is to use the type you like for whatever reasons, just don't take an oil crust to the County or State Fair for judging. The judging standards will never be met with an oil pastry. But we don't all make our food to judging standards, so love the one you're with (so-to-speak ;-).

Here's the science...and what makes the difference.

Fat is a tenderizer. When done correctly a good pastry will be a combination of both tenderness and flakiness. When we work a solid fat into the flour it coats the flour. Where the fat coats the flour the water can't be absorbed, which will "shorten" the development of the gluten strands - hence the term "short crust pastry". To assure a pastry is both tender and flaky, mix the fat in two halves. Cut the first half of the solid fat into very small pieces, creating tenderness. Cut the second half in leaving larger pieces to build flakiness. And as always, keep mixing to a minimum so the gluten doesn't develop from over-mixing leaving you with a tough pastry.

When the pastry bakes, the first addition of fat will prevent gluten development when the liquid is added for tenderness, while the second addition will melt, creating pockets of steam, which will lift layers of pastry to create the flakiness.

When you add a liquid fat (whether it's a vegetable oil or a melted solid fat), it ends up coating the flour so well that NO gluten develops. Oil and melted solid fat are considered "warm" fats and give different baking characteristics. Oil creates extremely tender crusts that are easy to cut with a fork, but oil crusts tend to be mealy rather than flaky. An oil crust will crumble rather than have layers of flakes. Don't confuse the blisters on the surface with flakiness, and don't confuse it's dry, fork-tender crumb with flakiness. Flakiness is only developed by the large pieces of solid fat melting in pockets of dough and lifting the layers.

Editing to add: Coconut oil can be used as a solid fat as an animal-free option. In fact, you can reduce the amount of total fat in the recipe by 20-25% and still get good results by using coconut oil. Just keep the coconut oil well-chilled (frozen or refrigerated). You can also melt coconut oil and use it as a liquid oil. If you don't like the mild coconut flavor, use LouAna brand or another flavorless brand like Barlean's Organic Gourmet Coconut Oil (FYI - Barlean's Organic Virgin Coconut oil has a mild coconut flavor).

-Grainlady
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Rolling pie dough: I always have success, and have followed the Joy of Cooking's basic pie dough recipe for decades -- I've successfully baked pies for 40+ years. The recipe calls for only the basics: cold butter, room temperature shortening (I use Crisco), all purpose flour, salt and 4-6 Tablespoons of cold water. That's it. Very simple and very traditional. The dough is NEVER chilled. Think about it: You want the butter and shortening to be soft and absorb/mix-in with the dry ingredients. Chilled fat will take a LOT of handling to get to that consistency, and increased handling results in tough pie crusts. That's why most of the recipes I've seen do not call for chilling the dough. I mix the flour, salt and butter together using a hand-held pastry blender -- See photo. It's a simple, basic pastry making tool that costs between $5 - $10. Very traditional, very tried & true. Sometimes I mix the butter in first, sometimes I mix the shortening. Whichever you choose to use, use the blender to mix the dry ingredients and butter/shortening until the crumbs look like peas. Then add either the butter or shortening and continue mixing with pastry blender until the ingredients look like cornmeal. You really will notice the difference. At that point, add the cold water 1 Tbs at a time, using a fork to lift and mix the ingredients together. While the recipe calls for 4-6 Tbs., I find that 4 Tbs works for me ....sometimes as much as 5. This has been true regardless of whether I've made pies in the dry, mountainous West, or the humid east coast. You'll add only enough water until you can get most of the dry ingredients to hold together in a ball. Assuming it's a 2-crust pie, I halve the pie dough and immediately begin working the first crust. I leave the rest of the pie dough in the bowl, uncovered, open to the air, at room temperature. I ALWAYS roll the dough on a pastry cloth, using a cheese cloth cover for the rolling pin. I use a 40 year old wooden rolling pin. Standard size and weight. Absolutely nothing fancy or unusual about it. The key to using a pastry cloth and cheese cloth cover for the rolling pin is that you will be able to roll out your pie dough and use MUCH less flour. All you need to do is lightly sprinkle a small amount of flour on the pastry cloth, roll the rolling pin over the top of the pastry cloth to get some of the flour on the pin, then begin to work the dough. I have granite counter tops in this house. Other houses have had Corian, wood and the old fashioned vinyl. The type of counter makes absolutely no difference in the quality of the crust. I promise! I anchor the pastry cloth with my body in the front and cannisters in the back, so that everything stays fairly quiet...but even it if moves a bit, that's not a problem. When rolling out your pie dough, work gently but quickly. Do NOT lean on the rolling pin. Merely lightly push the pin from the middle of the dough out in circles. You'll work around the dough. You'll have thick spots of dough and thin, and work the thick spots out...by gently rolling the pin over the dough. Don't lean on it or force it by brute force. More often than not my pie crusts are not perfect when they are rolled out. I like a thinner crust, so that means that I'll have some repair to do as I lay the crust in the pie pan, or lay the top crust on top of the filling. There is lots of room for forgiveness. If it's the bottom crust you're repairing, no one will ever know because it will be hidden by the filling. If it's the top crust, your cut-outs to allow the steam to escape the baking pie will camouflage that. The key is to ensure you have a solid bottom crust so that juice will not escape the pie crust, AND to ensure you have a large enough bottom crust that you can flute the edges of the pie. OR, a large enough top crust for fluting....I've done it both ways, and it just depends on what the crust gods decide that day. I hope these suggestions help. I assure you that once you understand what you're supposed to do, you'll be able to turn out consistently good pie crusts, with confidence and speed. Here is a link that might be useful:
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Grainlady-- Your chemistry lesson is great because my mind works that way. Understanding how a crust develops makes pie crust much more understandable to me. My mother always peached that overworking the dough makes it tough and now I understand why. The explanation of water vs. gluten is very helpful. Last year I was misdiagnosed with celiac disease and learned a bit about the behavior of gluten in foods while I was on a gluten free diet. Many thanks! I am going to try a butter crust and use my grater on the butter.
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I debated on whether to add this since it is long. It was submitted by Marys1000 back in Oct '08. Don't know which forum. But it was a lot of fun to read and you might enjoy it: Here is an article I found very informative in my search for info on pie crusts. She spent a lot of time actually baking with lard, oils, goose fat, and even suet. November 15, 2006 Heaven in a Pie Pan: The Perfect Crust By MELISSA CLARK A FEW years ago, I achieved perfection in a pie crust and it smelled like pig. Not in a muddy, barnyard way, but with a very subtly meaty, nutty aroma. Carefully confected with part butter and part freshly rendered lard, this pie pastry was everything baking-book authors and bloggers wax poetic about: a golden-brown-around-the-edges epiphany richly flavored and just salty enough to contrast with the sweet apple filling, the texture as flaky as a croissant but still crisp. It shattered when you bit it, then melted instantly on the tongue. The only problem with my masterpiece, I told my guests as they licked the crumbs off their plates, was that I was never, ever going to make it again. Because what they didnt see was the outsize effort that went into acquiring and preparing the not-so-secret ingredient: leaf lard, the creamy white fat that surrounds a hogs kidneys. The veritable ne plus ultra of pig fat, its far superior to supermarket lard, which is heavily processed stuff that can have an off taste. But leaf lard is hard to track down (I special-ordered it from a friendly butcher) and a headache once you get it. Step one: pick out any bloody bits and sinews, chop the fat into pieces, and render it slowly in a double boiler for eight hours. At the end of the day, be prepared for a kitchen that smells like breakfast at a highway diner, and a pan full of dangerously molten fat crowned with cracklings. The leaf lard may have made great crust, but, like homemade cassoulet and puff pastry, this was a culinary Everest I felt no need to climb twice. Everest became a lot more manageable when I discovered that rendered leaf lard was available at the Flying Pigs Farm stand at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza Greenmarkets on Saturday and by mail order. With this convenience at hand, I decided to have a pre-Thanksgiving pie crust baking binge to see whether, with the prep times and mess not being a factor, lard pastry was really the best when tested next to my favorite standby, an all-butter crust. Or was my memory of the lard pie crusts sublimity simply a hallucination caused by long hours of porcine toil? And while the kitchen was a floury mess anyway, why not test a variety of other fats to see how they affected the flakiness and flavor of the final crust? With fat as my variable, I decided to keep all the other ingredients in the crust as straightforward as possible. That ruled out using a mix of flours with different protein levels (like bread flour, cake flour and Wondra). For this pie, I went with all-purpose all the way. But before I started baking, I did some research in the pie crust recipe canon. Most crusts were a combination of shortening and butter, or all butter, so I started there. I first made five crusts: all-butter; all-shortening (I used the trans fat-free kind now on the market); 50-50 butter and shortening; 70 percent butter to 30 percent shortening; and vice versa. Crisp, flaky and sweetly luscious with deep, browned flavor, the all-butter crust was the hands-down favorite. The shortening crust, however, was a bust among tasters. Even when combined with 70 percent butter, all agreed that the unpleasant greasy film the shortening left on the palate was not worth the vague texture improvement. Shortening is much less expensive than butter. Is it popular with bakers because of the cost? Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of "The Pie and Pastry Bible" (Scribner, 1998), gave another explanation. Because shortening is manufactured for stability at extreme temperatures (both hot in the oven and cold in the fridge), it is very easy to work with, she explained in an interview. "Shortening crusts enable you to get fancier decorations that will hold up when you bake," she said. Once she mentioned it, I realized that even the quickly crimped borders on my shortening crusts stayed pert in the oven compared to the butter border, which melted into Gaudí-like undulations. With round one going to butter, I next experimented with oil crusts inspired by the Mediterranean appeal of a pie pastry scented with extra-virgin olive oil holding a caramelized pear-pomegranate filling. I tested several olive oil variations, chilling the oil in the freezer before cutting it into the flour, and trying other desperation measures like adding egg to one, baking powder to another, and some butter to a third. Then I went on to test canola oil, grapeseed oil, coconut oil and ghee. Not one managed to even get close to a minimally acceptable flakiness level. I had better luck using chilled mixed-nut butter (you could use any natural nut butter, such as peanut, hazelnut, cashew, almond and so on). Combined with regular butter, it turned out a marginally flaky, cookie-like crust with a toasted nut flavor that goes particularly well with pumpkin pie. A dozen or so pies down, it was finally time to pull out my hero, the rendered leaf lard. I pitted it against an array of animal fats beef suet (the fat surrounding the kidneys), duck fat and processed supermarket lard just to see what would happen. The processed lard was not available at my Park Slope supermarket, but I scored it in a nearby bodega. I ordered rendered duck fat online, and picked up suet from the butcher, who charged me a token dollar and told me he usually threw it away. Then I baked and baked. The whole house took on a rich pastry scent with undertones of roasted meat and butter, tinged with ginger, nutmeg, thyme and honeyed apples from the fillings. Not wanting to give up the flavor of butter entirely, I tested all the recipes using half butter, half other animal fat, and also at a ratio of 70 percent butter to 30 percent other fat. I also made a few crusts using all high-fat, European-style butter. The crusts were spectacular, each in its own way. The high-fat butter produced a crust that was markedly flakier, more tender and puff-pastry-like than those made with regular butter. It also shrank a bit less when I pre-baked it, and had an irresistible, browned butter flavor. This was the perfect crust for anyone not inclined to include meat products in a dessert. But overall, the favorites were the crusts using 70 percent butter and 30 percent animal fat. Any more animal fat pushed the meatiness factor too far onto the savory side of the pie spectrum, making these better for quiches than for fruit and custard fillings. Of the three animals, pig, cow and duck, the duck fat crust had the lightest flavor and, texturally, struck the best a balance between crisp and flaky. The pie crust revelation, however, was the suet pastry. As easy to work with as the shortening crust, it retained its shape perfectly in the oven, baking up crisp yet marvelously tender and flaky. It was nearly as delectable as the leaf-lard crust, tasting rich and slightly meaty, though not identifiably beefy. Suet is easy to find (most butchers can get it for you) and inexpensive. One caveat: suet is sold unrendered, but, as I discovered by way of my own laziness, you do not need to render it. Simply cut out the pinkish bits, finely dice or grate the chilled white fat, and toss it in with the butter. More refined bakers might blanch at the idea; if youre one of them, go ahead and render to your hearts content. Still, the leaf lard crust was as gorgeous as I remembered. Puffing up in the oven, and crumbling deliciously when you cut it, it took the crown. That very mild hint of bacon was happily still there. Not so with the processed lard pastry, which had an off flavor veering toward barnyard. Now, after my brief moment of pastry satisfaction, Ill move onto the next obsessive round of pie crust testing. Theres a whole roster of fats Ive yet neglected goose fat, marrow, foie gras fat, browned butter, truffle butter ... and if anyone out there has a source for bear fat, Ill try that too.
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carolb_w_fl_coastal_9/10
10 years ago
I like to use extra virgin olive oil in mine - sometimes diluted w/ a milder oil like sunflower, if I'm running low on the olive. I use that type of pastry for savory dishes like pot pies & turnovers. I have an old recipe from the 50s that instructs you to roll between 2 sheets of waxed paper - no flouring needed.
agmss15
10 years ago
I have made Tortas d'Aceite - which are sort of a marriage between pastry crust and crackers. They have a very short dough - all olive oil. I love them with tea and at $4.99 for 5 it is worth making them occasionally.
suzyqtexas
10 years ago
I also use the oil pie crust recipe, except mine calls for milk instead of water. Also, roll out between wax paper which makes it easy to transfer to the pie plate.
Rusty
10 years ago
I use an oil crust for pies that are not baked, like fresh strawberry pie. The recipe I use is VERY easy, virtually no fail and mess free. It is mixed in the pie pan it is baked in. I don't remember the proportions, but, like suzyqtexas' recipe, it uses milk. Mix the ice cold milk in the oil, whip it (with a hand whip) a bit, until it looks like it's thickening, add to the flour, salt & a bit of sugar that you've measured into the pie pan, and mix, as lightly as possible. Press it out into the pan, prick all over with a fork, and bake. It has a texture almost like a thin shortbread. I've never tried to roll it out, nor have I ever used it for a pie that the filling is baked in the crust, but I don't know why it wouldn't work that way. You could leave the sugar out if you wanted to use it for a savory pie.

I'd be glad to look the recipe up and post it if anyone is interested in the proportions.

Rusty
l pinkmountain
10 years ago
last modified: 10 years ago
I use an oil crust and like it. Mine is not noticeably better or worse than my butter crust. I am not a good pastry maker and frankly the difference isn't a big enough deal for me to lose any sleep over it. Do I love a good flaky crust, sure, but life somehow goes on without it!
marymd7
10 years ago
I've made oil crusts for various Italian savory tarts/pies/whatever. They're fine and were certainly appropriate to the recipes involved, but I actually found them much more difficult to work with than my standard butter or lard crust. Then again, when I first began making those crusts, I found them difficult to work with. I make pastry so often now, though, that I'm pretty sure I could literally do it in my sleep.
Melissa Northern Italy zone 8
Original Author
10 years ago
Hmmm, so people are making oil crusts. Interesting to read all these accounts, and grainlady's technical explanation. I roll mine out on a floured surface. I honestly do think my recipe makes a good crust, with good flavor and texture. I'm perfectly willing to believe others make better pie crusts than mine, but I don't know those cooks and don't eat their pies, so the thought doesn't make me discontented. This is the tastiest one in my universe. The health aspect is important to me. I practically stopped making pies for some years because I couldn't stand the thought of stuffing all that saturated fat into my body, and doing the same to my husband and daughter. Now we can eat all the pie we want.

Rusty, what's your recipe? It sounds interesting. And agmss15's pastry, too.
agmss15
10 years ago
Here is a recipe...

http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/spanish-olive-oil-tortas-orange-blossom-water-aniseed.aspx
grainlady_ks
10 years ago
I find it ironic, and possibly a little nutritionally misguided, to think switching from animal fat to vegetable fat is improving something health wise, that is made with high-glycemic, basically "dead", void of any of the original nutrients and fiber, like the highly-processed flour used to make pastry, but maybe that's just me and my years of milling whole grains to use for real food. -Grainlady
Melissa Northern Italy zone 8
Original Author
10 years ago
last modified: 10 years ago
Are we talking about fats here, or about flour? Oils are no more isolated from the rest of the fruit, nut, or grain they come from, than animal fats are separated from the rest of the animal flesh, bone, and gristle, or butterfat from the milk. As far as flours are concerned, the human body seems to have a degree of resilience. Quite a few people eat refined flours and manage to live well and healthily; grains, and food in general, are complex, not responding well to simple solutions, though a given solution may work well for a given person. To call refined flour "dead" is zealotry, and zealotry in any field is often worse than the evil it sets out to cure. We all have busy lives; some of us find quite a bit to do besides optimize our consumption of grain products. Patience, then. Life in imperfect.
Islay Corbel
10 years ago
last modified: 10 years ago
Surely olive oil is better for you? Don't people tell us that the mediterranean diet is the healthiest, based on olive oil?

I use this recipe for a yeasted olive oil pastry. you can pull it about all over the place. Very forgiving.

2 tsp dry yeast

1/2 cup lukewarm water

1/2 tsp sugar

1 egg, beaten

1/4 cup olive oil

2 cups flour

3/4 tsp salt

Knead together, adding flour if necessary. Rest 1 hour.

Another - a greek recipe

2 1/4 cups flour

3/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup olive oil

1 tbls red win vinegar, lemon juice or ouzo

3/4 cup water

Mix and knead until smooth. Just a minute should do.Rest 1 hour.
tishtoshnm Zone 6/NM
10 years ago
Nutrition, food and health are funny things. Peoples views on such can be all over the map. Some look for at least a "better" fat, some view fat as rather empty of nutrition no matter what and it is not uncommon for people to take it very personally when someone's view of the matter differs from their own. I find the topic is almost as taboo as religion and politics.

Nutrition aside, I see potential in an oil crust and do need to spend some time working with one (especially the yeasted one, I wonder how it would do with gluten free flours?). From a taste perspective, there are likely times when the different flavor would compliment certain things better. It would also be handy to perfect for those times when my butter stash is getting low and I want to preserve it for other things. I figure the more items in my cooking arsenal, the better for those who eat what I prepare.
Rusty
10 years ago
last modified: 10 years ago
Melissa, here's the recipe I use:

No Roll Pie Crust*

Yield: One 9" crust.

1 ½ C All Purpose Flour

! ½ Tbsp sugar

½ tsp salt

½ C salad oil

2 Tbsp ice cold milk

Put flour, sugar and salt into pie pan. Mix oil and cold milk together. Add to dry ingredients in pan, mix together. Pat dough out to fit pan. Flute edges and prick all over. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes, or until lightly browned.

* This is an easy to make crust, good to use for fresh strawberry pie, any pie that needs an already baked shell. It doesn’t work very good for fruit pies, or any kind that bakes in the crust. (The comment about fruit pies was from my friend, I haven't tried it.)

I got this recipe from a friend that used to cater the lunches in the lunchroom of an arts & crafts shop I used to volunteer in. She made the best Millionaire Pie in the world! ! ! And she used this crust for it.

Rusty
grainlady_ks
10 years ago
Islay Corbel-

I would never use olive oil in baking due to the free radical formation when it is exposed to heat. People assume since olive oil is given the status as one of the "healthy fats" (and correctly so) because it is primarily a monounsaturated fatty acid, therefore it is much less susceptible to free-radical formation. The free radical formation happens when it is used in cooking as heat quickly oxidizes olive oil, which increases platelet stickiness, and raises the risks associated with heart disease. Olive oil is best eaten raw in salad dressings or as a flavoring, not heated.

Olive oil is, like all fats/oils, composed of a mix of dietary fats:

14% saturated, 77% monounsaturated, 9% polyunsaturated

http://www.oliveoilsource.com/asktheexpert/what-heating-point-do-free-radicals-form

Question:

I understand olive oil is able to withstand moderate heat before free radicals are formed. Your web site mentions about smoking point and boiling point of olive oil. I would like to know if the smoking point is the temperature at which free radicals start to form?

Source:

Olive Oil News

Answer:

As with most chemical reactions, free radical formation can occur at any temperature (even when refrigerated) but is greatly accelerated as the temperature goes up and the longer it stays there. There is no set threshold.
grainlady_ks
10 years ago
Melissa-

To quote you, The health aspect is important to me. But not the negative aspects of the main ingredient - highly-processed white flour. REALLY?
ci_lantro
10 years ago
To call refined flour "dead" is zealotry,

I disagree. When flour is 'refined', the living part of the wheat, the wheat germ, is removed. The germ is the the part of the plant, the embryo so to speak, that will sprout and grow into a new plant and it is the part of the grain where most of the nutritional goodies are concentrated.
Melissa Northern Italy zone 8
Original Author
10 years ago
agmss15, Rusty, Islay Corbel, thanks for the recipes. Pinkmountain, well, I don't eat pie three meals a day. But pie is our main sweet: we don't do cakes, muffins, cookies, soft drinks, candy, etc. in our house, and even with pie I make only fruit pies and keep a light hand with the sugar. Our per person consumption of refined sugar is well below that of the recommendations. But returning to pie, I find it has a place in my diet. As I've gotten older I've found that my appetite for carbohydrates has dropped significantly--I used to adore pasta and rice, but no more, and I've gotten downright intolerant of sugar--while I still eat plenty of fat, almost all of it oil: olive oil in particular flows in rivers in our household. Much of my diet nowadays is vegetables and legumes. Pie, made of chiefly of fruit, grain, and oil, does quite well in this mixture. As always it's a matter of the whole picture. My husband, older than me, and my adolescent daughter, eat in a fashion similar to mine. All of us are fit and a healthy weight, have good blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and plenty of energy.

Possibly those who are concerned about the nutritional value of the flour used to make pie crust failed to notice what I wrote in my original post: "flour (I use soft wheat all purpose and soft wheat whole wheat, in any proportions)". This crust can be made with all whole wheat flour: I've done it. My usual practice is to use half whole wheat and half all purpose soft wheat, but as I wrote, you can vary the proportions to suit yourself. I would, however, stick with soft wheat flours. I'm sorry I can't be more specific about kinds of flour, but they're different in Italy and I'm not sure what the U.S. equivalents are.
l pinkmountain
10 years ago
I don't know about the others you mention, but I have no opinion or concern about how much you do or do not eat pie!

Interesting that you say you've lost your taste for carbs. I wish I could lose my taste for carbs! When I was younger I didn't seem to have the taste for carbs and sweets as much as I do now. It's like an addiction with me now and I could easily manage my diet back in my younger days. With just me living alone I don't make pie much. I've had pies mold on me before I could eat them all up. One slice a day takes 8 days for a single person to finish a pie. By then it's not quite the same! I could make small pies and freeze them but I barely have the patience to make a big pie. I live in the fruit belt and we make some mighty good pies. We've had some epic pie threads on this forum over the years, I think one of them was on everyone's favorite. I'd be hard pressed to pick one, but peach, apple, rhubarb and blueberry are probably tied for tops, but nothing beats warm pumpkin to me. I also love pecan. But a slice of fruit pie is going to run you 400 calories give or take, and I'm not even talkin' whipped cream or ice cream! But anyway, I would love to live in a house full of pie lovers and pie bakers. That would mean I would eat it more often!!
Islay Corbel
10 years ago
LPink, I try to lessen the damage by making a REALLY thin crust. Like you, I love pies. Any sort of pie from sweet to savoury. If I go to heaven, I will be surrounded by pies! I use the very rich buttery crust I've posted before for making pies and roll it really thin so the calorie value is much reduced. I line the pie moulds (individual) with strips of paper so I can get the more delicate pies out. Plus, I'm lucky in that I don't like very sweet things so I put very little sugar in the pies. Where there's a will, there's a way LOL

Oil crust, anyone?

l pinkmountain

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