One Pie, Two Pie, Yellow Pie, Blue Pie

Sometimes you just have to experiment. After all, without change, adaptation, innovation, invention, there is no progress.

And sometimes, the occurence of unrelated things leads one to create, in the course of which, one might experiment.

It is late July, and two things happened on Saturday that are germane to this post. First, fresh peaches were available at the farmer's market. We bought a 1/2 peck. Second, blueberries were on sale at the Hyve. A dollar ninety nine a pint. I bought four pints. On Monday, a new Gourmet magazine arrived at the Monkey House (along with the credit card bill for the card used to charge all the gas for the last two trips--UGH!). In this particular issue is a recipe for blueberry pie, with a crust recipe that I found intriguing.

I have, for several years, been trying to perfect the process of creating and manipulating my mother's pie crust recipe. It has been difficult work, but I have been getting much better at working with it. I haven't furiously thrown twisted, torn and half-flattened batches of unbaked pie crust into the garbage for a longg time, now, but it used to happen about fifty percent of the time. Well, yesterday, I tried the new recipe on two pies--one peach and one blueberry.

It was a slight dilemma that I had. I felt, on some level, that I had to maintain some family loyalty. I counter-argued (with myself), that nothing is more valuable than flexibility when it came to cooking, baking, washing dishes, removing sauce splatters from the underside of the table after you've dropped a bowlful on the floor--anything in the kitchen. The counterargument won.

Working with the new recipe was notably different. This one has way more butter in it and more flour--it makes way more dough, so that's a plus (but a bit wasteful). I did far less working of the dough with my hands. This is also a plus, since it a) keeps the hands cleaner, and b) keeps the dough cooler. This one also was way easier to manipulate, as far as getting the rolled out dough from the work surface to the pie pan.

As far as taste goes, the new recipe was lighter (because of all the butter replacing the Crisco), but it's taste was a bit less bold. Also, it baked to a much lighter, almost yellow color. (I have pics, but Blogger is giving me a bit of a hard time today. Maybe, later, I'll post them.)

Drawbacks include that working with this dough was much messier (i.e., more flour everywhere). To be truthful, however, this might be due to the fact that I discovered far too late that I was out of wax paper. Wax paper is a rolling out secret that keeps the dough from sticking to the rolling pin without the use of copious amounts of flour. Obviously, that contributed to the mess.

Monkey, after a preliminary taste test, was firmly in the "I like the old crust" camp. I was in the "they both have their good points" camp. I would definitely make this crust again.

The next time, I might try to figure out a way to create a hybrid of the two. Now, there's an experiment!