Jennifer Jacula Photography

So! Yeah. There’s been a lack of picture posts lately. Sorry! But between the weather and other non-photo-related work, I haven’t been shooting.

I LOVE to work. Seriously. I would rather work than go lay on a beach somewhere. I’m a happy workaholic. But even with my work ethic, I occasionally get behind! So, after the insanity of summer, I’ve been catching up on administrative work, making a ton of pies, and gearing up for the “I Do” Bridal Showcase October 3 in Cold Lake. It’s all those thousands of small tasks that add up to several days of hunkering in front of the computer.

But! The PIES! Did I mention the PIES? My freezer is nearly brimming with pies, where a week or two ago, it was brimming with frozen fruit waiting to be turned into pies. All of those raspberries and saskatoons I picked are slowly being mixed with the apples from my orchard, tossed in sugar/cinnamon/flour and packed into heaps, encased within pastry. Yum!

So, rather than pictures, here’s my pie crust recipe – plus instructions on the way *I* make pies.

Jennifer’s Pie Crust
1 brick vegetable shortening (or 2 cups, if you’re using the tubs of shortening)
4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup water

You will also need tin pie plates and big ziploc freezer bags, and a sharpie if you like to label your bags.

Change into your grubby clothes. This is going to get messy.

Put the dough hook in your Kitchenaid mixer. What do you mean you don’t have a Kitchenaid mixer? Stop what you’re doing. NOW. Go to the store. Buy a Kitchenaid mixer – one of the big, heavy, fancy, metal ones like Martha Stewart uses. Then come back and make pie.

I’ll wait for you.

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…
..
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Okay. Got your mixer now? Good.

Add your flour, salt and then shortening to the mixer. Turn it on low until these three ingredients are mostly combined. Then add the water and increase the mixer speed. Yes, I know that’s not how mom/grandma did it. They cut it in with a pastry mixer, right? With chilled ingredients? Well, baby, we’re going for speed and volume here, not flaky-ness.

Anyway – you might have to stop the mixer and scrape the bottom of the bowl to make sure there’s no flour still down there. Mix it with your fabulous Kitchenaid mixer until it’s all combined.

Dump a cup of flour on a flat surface and spread it around. Pull off a handful of dough and roll it into a ball, then roll it out with a floured rolling pin until it’s roughly round and thin enough to make you happy. Put it in the pie plate and trim the edges. Reroll the scraps into the next ball of dough. Repeat with about half of the dough. I get about seven 10″ pies (top and bottom) out of one batch of dough, but if you like a thicker crust, you’ll get less pies made.

What? You thought you had to refrigerate your pie dough? Pfffft … that just takes more time. Sure, you *probably* would get a flakier crust by working with chilled dough, but for me, it’s about the filling, not about the crust. Also, by NOT chilling the crust, it makes it MUCH easier to handle – you can toss it around like pizza dough. You can also roll it thinner. I suppose that means less calories/grams of fat, but whatever. It’s about volume and speed, remember!

For the filling, core and slice your apples. No, don’t peel them. Peeling sucks. Who has time for peeling? Not me!

Make a mixture of 2 cups sugar, 1 cup flour and enough cinnamon to make it delicious. If you’re using apples that are quite tart, or if you’re combining your apples with sour/acidic fruits like rhubarb or raspberries, add more sugar to the mixture. I throw in whatever I have stockpiled – raspberries, saskatoons, rhubarb, blueberries, strawberries … but everything is apple-based here, because that’s what I have a lot of.

Toss your apples/fruit in this mixture and then heap your pie crusts full. Seriously, heap them. The fruit will cook down quite a bit, so make a nice hill of deliciousness. Top with another rolled piece of pastry, fork the edges down (or do fancy finger flutes if you prefer. I’m a forker, myself.), stab the top a few times with a fork, then either freeze them (the 9″ pie plates fit really nicely inside a ziploc freezer bag. The 10″ take some persuasion.) or bake them. If I cook a pie from frozen, I throw them in at 350 degrees for about an hour, hour and a quarter. Until it looks done. It’s not a scientific method.

If you’ve done this all correctly, you should be covered in flour and sticky with sugar, your house should be coated by a fine layer of flour dust, your floor should look like a disaster zone and you should have buckets of apple cores. If children were involved, expect some licked-off apple slices that used to have sugar and cinnamon on them.

Enjoy!

(The recipe for the crumb topping shown below is in the comments section for this blog post.)

Saskatoon-raspberry-apple pie with French crumb topping

Saskatoon-raspberry-apple pie with French crumb topping

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This entry was posted by Jennifer on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.