Originally Posted by
roger wiegand
Practice, practice, practice. A good crust takes way more practice than hand cutting dovetails or carving shells. Make a pie every day for three or four years and, if you pay attention, you will get pretty good. It's all about feel and doing each step just enough, but not too much. Recipes are not terribly helpful because the dough changes with the particular batch of flour, the particular butter (if you use butter) as well as temperature and humidity. That said even a mediocre homemade crust beats the heck out of any commercial pie crust I've ever tasted.
I like a 50/50 mix of butter and crisco, cutting the crisco in until it is like very coarse sand and leaving the butter like small peas (lentils, maybe). Lard is way better if your consumers don't give you the "yuck, gross" reaction. The art is in blending in just enough water with the absolute minimum of handling. A halfway decent result can be obtained with a food processor, but only ever halfway and only if you are incredibly ginger with the amount of pulsing you give it. A hint is that if you can manipulate your dough after rolling it out without it breaking into pieces it is way over-blended, with too much water.
Apple pie is my favorite. Apple choice is critical, with some of the hard winter apples either alone or in combinations being best. Cortland is my go-to for taste, but apples like Baldwins, Northern Spy, 20 oz pippin, and Rhode Island Greenings also being great and having better texture. The Cortlands don't hold their shape very well. Blends work well. if you only have access to grocery store apples, Macs are OK. For the love of God, do not use a "Delicious" apple in a pie.
The pursuit of great pie is a worthy endeavor, one which, I fear, is in great danger. I'd guess that 95% of Americans at this point have never tasted a well-made pie, and thus have no idea what the goal of pie-making is. My own pies are decidedly mediocre (not nearly enough practice), but get raves that are very embarrassing, knowing how far off the mark they still are. My grandmother, who did make a pie pretty much every day for 60 years, would tell me to go back and try again, with a lighter hand.