Cook’s Illustrated Pie Crust, Redux

Back by popular demand!

The resulting mess before you is a cherry pie with a joe-made-it-way-to-freakin-think lattice top. If I was better, the lattice would have been woven and much thinner. Obviously I’ll just have to practice.

You can get a bit of a closer view of that crust on top – it’s flaked up nicely and browned beautifully. The innards were good and simple – just a quadruple handful of cherries, some sugar, and a bit of flour and egg yolk to make a stab at binding it together. It’s not exactly set up beautifully, but it doesn’t suck.

The results of the Cook’s Illustrated pie crust were pretty darn good. I clear suck at rolling out the crust, but I didn’t have any of the terrible cracking problems that I remember having many years ago, and the results were definitely flaky and very, very tasty. The vodka did indeed evaporate, leaving no trace – a brilliant thought and suggestion from the geniuses at Cook’s Illustrated.

I’ve learned that the little fold-down table in the kitchen is about 8 inches too short for me to roll out dough. It’s surprising how much your back can hurt when you’re bending over at a weird angle and trying to focus on something like rolling out crust. Next time I’ll clear the living room table or something.

Next experiment (in a while, I still have one and a half pies available for eating…) I think I’ll tackle a classic apple pie. I want to try and do the woven lattice crust. I might instead go for a series of small tarts – lots of crust practice without needing a huge amount of innards…