Welcome to my little corner of culinary delights.  Last time we covered making pie dough.  We should learn a little about pie shells made from the dough.

There are various approaches to preparing the dough for making pie shells.  I have already given the basics for rolling it out.  The dough created in the previous article is a flaky rubbed dough used for your most common applications. 

It is best suited when the filling is baked along with the crust.  Therefore, it is restricted to such things as tarts and your traditional pies.  Blind baking is different.  This is where, mealy rubbed dough is needed.  Make it the same way as the flaky dough except for the need to cut in the butter or shortening even more. 

The object in this is to distribute the fat more evenly.  Rather than pea-size, it needs to be mealy, thus the name.  The fat is more incorporated into the flour.  Why do this?  Blind baking requires much higher temperatures for a quick set.

Mealy pie doughs have a finer texture and more tenderer than the flaky version.  This is mainly due to shortened gluten strands.  That makes this type of dough most suited for all kinds of pies and tarts.  The disadvantage is that you lose out on the flaky texture but most suitable for tarts and precooked fillings. 

Yes, I know that I have recommended flaky rubbed dough for pies and tarts and now I am recommending mealy rubbed dough for the same.  It depends upon your purpose and desired results.  In the first case we are dealing with uncooked fillings that need to bake.  In the latter, we are dealing with shells that will be filled with precooked fillings such as custard and cream pies that must set under refrigeration before serving.

In earlier articles, I covered the various types of flours and attempted to explain the reasons for this.  Now I have a perfect example to get this point across.  All-purpose flour is ideal for pie dough for the following reasons.  The high starch content of cake flour prevents proper water absorption.  This would give a pasty consistence to the dough.  Because of the high protein content of bread flour, the flour will absorb a relatively high volume of water thus developing great amounts of gluten.  This in turn makes the resulting crust tough and the dough elastic.  You most certainly do not want that in pie dough.

I will let you in on a little-known secret.  A mixture of pastry flour and all-purpose flour in proper proportions give a perfect balance of starch and protein.  This allows for the proper amount of water absorption for a controlled gluten development to produce a pie crust both flaky and tender.  Wow!  For a change you can get the best of both worlds.  You will not be reading that in your cookbooks or culinary classes in your junior colleges.  It is important to know your ingredients.

Until next time, peace to all.