Chess Pie made with basic pie crust recipe.
Basic pie crust is a simple and straightforward recipe found in a cookbook by Gerald Ramsey, chef in the tea room at Southern Methodist University when my parents worked there many decades ago. It’s a good starting point if you are intimidated by pie. Makes 1 crust for 9″ pie.
Ingredients:
2 c all purpose flour
1 t Kosher salt
¾ c butter or lard*, frozen and cut into ½ inch cubes
1/3 c ice water
Method: If you are going to bake the crust before filling, preheat oven to 400 degrees. Sift** flour and salt together. Cut shortening into it until the mixture feels like coarse cornmeal. Sprinkle water over dough while you knead with your hand; add only enough water to make a cohesive mass***. Roll into a circle on lightly floured board to a diameter about 3 inches wider than your pie pan, or a little wider if you are going to add a top crust.
If you are going to bake your crust before filling (recommended for fruit pies, not for Mom’s Chess Pie) dump a cup of dried beans into the pan atop the raw crust and bake in 400 degree oven for 12-15 minutes until light brown. Remove the beans (which can be cooked on their own or reused), then add filling and bake according to your recipe.
*Ramsey’s original recipe used Crisco®, of course, You cannot go wrong with butter, but also consider lard or coconut oil. The fat needs to be solid to sift and integrate, so liquid shortening won’t work.
**Does anyone sift flour anymore? Or has improved product uniformity made sifting obsolete?
***Okay, I lied about “simple” because a good result is all in the technique. There are no leavenings or eggs in a pie crust. Success is in how you intermix flour and butter into a form that will bake into a crisp, rich crust. A few tips:
–Everything has to be COLD because melted shortening spells disaster. Keep that in mind as you study the steps above.
–Cutting the shortening means you are coating the little pieces of solid fat with flour then working them till the fat is fully incorporated in the flour, like coarse cornmeal.
–If you start rolling out your first pie crust and see it’s full of big spots of fat that was not fully incorporated, good news! You can cut your pie crust into strips and bake them as cookies while you start over with colder ingredients and a finer mix.
–To get the pie crust into the pie pan, invert the pan over the rolled out dough and flip, supporting the dough with your hand. Gently press the crust into the pan to coat the bottom evenly (no need to pre-oil the pan because the dough already has plenty of fat). Cut edges just beyond the edge of pie pan then make a decorative finish with a fork or your fingers. Bake the extra dough as a separate treat, use it to make a top crust on a fruit pie, or just press into the bottom of the pie pan for a thicker crust.
One day when I was 16 years old, I was sitting on the sofa watching television with my parents and sister. I told my father that I would enjoy having a cherry pie. He too thought that was a good idea and retired to the kitchen to begin making a pie. A few minutes later he came back into the living room and said, “Son, you make the pie.” When I told him I didn’t know how he demurred and said then it is time for you to learn. I replied that I had lost my appetite for pie. He replied that now he wanted a pie, and I was going to make it. This was my first experience cooking. He made a crust just as you described here using Crisco. Everything else was pretty much as you wrote. I now use ice cold unsalted butter instead of Crisco. I have been making pies now for 60 years using this tried-and-true recipe. The trick is not to handle it too much. Also, I have had trouble sometimes when there was high humidity.
This is a fine story of early pie making. Humidity and heat are definitely your enemies as you are preparing the dough. My preference is to mix the dough with my fingers but I would never do that on a hot or humid day.
Since you posted it I will try it. I’m not frightened of pie, but am flour impaired.
Grocery store crusts are OK, but ehh…
Sifting might blend flour and salt better. Would that matter?
Probably a survival, as you implied.
I think sifting was to get rid of impurities when product was not as uniform as it is now… like picking the rocks out of a pan of dried beans. It’s easy enough to mix flour and salt with your fingers or a spoon. As to store bought pie crusts, are you talking about the kind that you have to roll out? to me that’s actually the most difficult part so I don’t see the benefit.
Sifting is necessary if you have flour that has sat long enough to pack down, or to form little hard balls. It’s more important for cake baking
Thanks Eric. Would you say cake flour is more likely to have these issues due to its lower gluten content?
I wouldn’t say cake flour is more likely to have them, but sifting changes the volume of the flour by incorporating air- if you just scoop flour it will be denser than if you sift before measuring and then spoon the flour into the measure. I could go on at tedious length as to the difference between “One Cup Sifted Flour” and “One Cup Flour, Sifted”. This is why we should really be weighing ingredients.
Impurities being weevils? That was probably the original intent.
Or lumps… In terms of pie crust, the tube type or preformed
fresh like or frozen are OK but seem lacking somehow.
I always wanted to get tube type pie crust, crescent roll, biscuit
and pizza crusts. Then form them in to similar shapes or not. Then bake and see if there was any difference. (Take any of those, wrap around a cooked meatball or sausage, maybe add a bit of cheese, bake, and you will be Iron Chef Quick ‘n Dirty!)
My fear of flour may be a mental illness. I made a basic roux and
agonized over it all day. I’m getting a routine checkup
soon. I will mention this fear and maybe get some nice pills, or a
psychiatric consult. Could a baking class be an RX?
So much to unpack here… first, a pie crust is unleavened so the baking powder in one of those tubes of biscuits or whatever is going to produce very unsatisfactory results. No reason to experiment if you know it will result in failure. As to fear of flour, I find it a very satisfying and meditative exercise to knead dough with no thought to the result. I took a pottery class in college from a master and seriously considered becoming a professional potter; that involved kneading clay before I had ever touched a loaf of bread. Similar experience. As to baking classes being an Rx, I would recommend King Arthur classes but they’re a long way from you. (Though a beautiful drive now during leaf peeping season.) But I’ve done them online as well and they are pretty good. Actually you are not that far from Ithaca and I bet there are some good baking classes there too.
While I wasn’t serious about much of this I will do my tube pastry experiment. However bad the results will be edible by me or the birds. My use of flour and baking generally results in bad comedy. My recipes, on the other hand are dead serious 😉
Please post pictures including the birds if possible!