Apple Pie, Revisited

My First Attempt at a Woven Crust

There are, in the past few weeks, green apples around which are tart and lovely. We bought some about two weeks ago, but all of my papers and exams got in the way. So yesterday, on my day off between finishing my last paper and getting ready to study for my entrance exams, I made three pies to use up the apples in the refrigerator.

Second Pie

I decided to make my own crust, as I have the last 5 or so times I made pie. However, I ran out of bleached flour (which I find makes a flakier and less rubbery crust than unbleached flour). I mixed the end of the bleached flour with some unbleached flour and some cake flour. I made a double batch of pie, so the crust was about 1 3/4 cups bleached flour to 1/4 cup cake flour to 1/2 cup unbleached flour (7:1:2 by volume). This was miraculous. Instead of being hard and troublesome after a few hours in the refrigerator, the dough was silky and smooth but incredibly elastic, allowing me to make a lovely, thin crust.

The First Pie

The pie received rave reviews. Unfortunately I forgot to photograph it when it came out of the oven.

For the final pie, I had to make another batch of crust. This time I made a single batch. I didn't have any more unbleached flour so I mad a batch with 3:2 ratio (by volume) of unbleached flour to cake flour. This proved to be far too much cake flour. I had to use far less liquid and the crust tore easily. Next time, I would stick to a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio if I only had the two flours. However the crust tastes great, but I decided to weave it so that the fragility would not impact the pie as much. The recipes for apple pie and crust are on my recipe page.