[SCA] Purim cooking

[cellio]

Tonight I did a trial run of one of the recipes for the Purim event, a fish pie. The ones for the event will not all be as whimsical as this, but one probably will be.



(The tail "fins" slipped in cooking.) I'm not sure what to use for the eye. I'm thinking maybe a green grape (or half of one), but I didn't have any in the house.

I seem to have zero talent for pie crust. The first problem is that it was kind of tough (I mean even before baking); I understand that this means I kneaded it too long, but the line between "not yet one coherent ball of dough" and "over-kneaded" is, in that case, way too fine. As soon as it all held together I stopped.

I assume my problems rolling it out are related to this. I couldn't get it as thin as I wanted. It just wouldn't go, after a while. I suppose I should go looking for "pie crust 101" on Wikipedia or something.

Comments

[ellipticcurve.livejournal.com]

Pie crusts ARE tricky. I'm fairly competent at them, but it took me a while (and a lot of terrible crusts) to get that way. My tips, FWIW:
Use cold water.
Use cold butter. I like to soften it a little, cut it into cubes, and stick it back in the fridge.
I mix it in the electric mixer until it's not quite consolidated into a ball. Finish by hand. Try to touch it as little as possible.
It not getting thin enough sounds to me like there's too much gluten in the dough (this could also be contributing to toughness). If you're using bread flour, certainly switch to all-purpose; also, consider pastry flour.
For regular pies (i.e. not the free-form one pictured above), I almost always blind-bake the crust. I've never had an underdone crust since I started doing this.

[cellio]

Thanks!

More evidence that this particular recipe intended something unusual: it specifically called for warm water (for priming the yeast). Now I know not to try to generalize from this.