Loading…
2
I tried the frozen butter trick on my pie crust and now I can't decide if it's genius or cheating
I've been making pie dough the same way for 15 years, cutting cold butter into flour with a pastry blender until it looks like coarse meal. Two months ago my neighbor Ruth, who ran a bakery in Cleveland for 30 years, watched me work and said I was wasting my time. She told me to freeze the butter solid and grate it on a box grater straight into the flour, then toss it with my hands and add ice water. I tried it on a double crust apple pie and the dough came together in about 90 seconds, and the baked crust was the flakiest thing I've pulled out of my oven. But here's my issue. Grating butter feels like a hack, not a skill, and part of me thinks learning to cut butter right is half the craft. On the other hand, the results don't lie, and Ruth has forgotten more about laminated dough than I will ever know. So where do you all land on shortcuts like this? Is a trick that works just a trick, or does the slow way still teach you something the fast way never will?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
the_wendy24d ago
Grating frozen butter is a crutch and you know it. When you cut butter by hand you feel the flour change under your fingers, you learn when to stop, and that feel is what lets you fix a dough that's too dry or too warm on a humid day. A grater gives you the same size shreds every time, which sounds great until you want a mix of big and small butter bits for a crust that's flaky in some spots and tender in others. Ruth ran a bakery with machines doing half the work, so of course she pushed the fast way. Ask yourself what happens when your grater breaks or the butter thaws on the counter, then you're back to square one with no skill to fall back on. Keep the slow way for a month and watch how much better you get at reading the dough, that lesson is worth more than 90 seconds saved.
1