why'd my apple pie crust come out sucky?

Question

i recently tried making apple pie from scratch, the apples were good but the crust, not so much. i used all-purpose flour and a crisco-type shortening.

Answer 1

"Sucky" doesn't give us much to go on, but here's a try. The concept of a flaky pastry is that the fat you use should be coated with flour in little tiny pieces, then briefly pressed into a dough. You have to work with the fat while it is cold, so it doesn't melt into a gooey mass. You put the fat in a bowl, and cut in the dry ingredients (an old fashioned pastry cutter works best) until your mixture resembles small balls of "stuff". Like, smaller than a pea. Then you add a LITTLE liquid to hold it together, and mushing it around as little as possible, roll it into the shape you want. You want those little flour coated balls of fat to cling together, so when the heat of the oven is applied, they work with the flour to become light little flakes of dough. Pie dough is something you have to work at to get right, don't give up. Best of luck.

Answer 2

Hi there. Quite a few reasons can contribute to sogginess ( a technical term just like your 'sucky', so we both know what we're talking about, right? ) in pastry, but your choice of flour and fat isn't one of them. It would've been good to know the type and proportions of your pastry, but let's wing it without those niceties. :-)

If your base crust was soggy, the apples were excessively juicy, or your oven temperature was on the low side, or both. Things to help with this, one by one:

Excessive juiciness:

1. When you've lined your tin, lightly beat some egg white -- just to loosen it, we're not going for meringue here! -- and paint the base pastry with the egg white and let dry. It will resemble varnish, and that's just what it does: create a barrier between the apples and the pastry base.

2. With or without the egg white 'varnish', sprinkle the base with semolina, a few millimetres thick overall. This will absorb excessive moisture and as the base cooks, it will be bonded, egg white and all if used, to the base and 'disappear', merged with the base.

Temperature:

Because of convection, and the density of the filling on top of it, the base of the pie will cook more slowly than the top. That gives the juices a chance to penetrate the base before the heat has penetrated enough to make the base resist the moisture. Pre-heat your oven to 220°C / 425°F with one or even two baking/cookie sheets on the shelf you will be putting the pie on later. When ready to bake your pie, adjust the oven temperature to the one for your type of pie/pastry and place the pie on top of the baking sheet(s). The high heat stored in the sheet(s) will cook the base faster than the top, redressing the balance. Midway into cooking, the temperatures will have evened out, and normal cooking continues for the rest of the required time.

Top crust soggy:

Oven too cool and/or cooking time too short. Check that you have got the right cooking time for the type of pastry you have used. If needs be, raise the temp by 10-15% higher than the recommended temperature, and watch the cooking process carefully. It's generally better to raise the temperature slightly than extend the cooking time, as the latter will dry things out to the point of producing (ship's) biscuit. :-)

Hope this helps, & good luck!

Answer 3

NY is known as "The Big Apple" because long ago a famous folk hero (Johnny Appleseed) planted a single seed in the middle of the city. Then, in a strange warp in space-time, a boy named Jack planted a seed he believed to be magical in the same spot. In what is still considered a marveling biological advancement, the two seeds fused together on a molecular level. After an impressive rain, the seed hybrid grew into an apple 300ft tall and approximatively 330ft wide. The strangest thing being the absence of a tree. It seems the apple was completely normal, except it grew straight from the ground with its own roots like a beanstalk of some sort. For decades to come, people would visit the city and look up at the impossible fruit and think "that is a big apple". After a while people began referring to the city itself as "The Big Apple". But then, 1943 Oct 11th, something strange happened. As the city laid to rest, the night once again upon them, there was a blinding flash of red light. The flash lasted for nearly 4-5 seconds. No one is certain what caused the flash, but once it was over the apple had simply disappeared. Not only had it vanished, the ground it had grown from had closed as if it were never there. Some say the apple had grown so large it created some sort of fruity supernova and collapsed in on itself in a black hole. Some say the aliens responsible for the death of the dinosaurs came back and destroyed the apple as well. We may never know exactly what happened that night, but one thing is for sure. That was a big-*** apple.

Answer 4

I always use....I'm not sure in America...cake flour, I think (or pastry flour...one or the other), and only chilled butter. And then you don't want to work the dough too much or it will get tough...cut the butter in with a pastry blender or use a food processor, then add the water toward the end and don't work it much (no kneading, and maybe you'll want to drop your dough on a board and smear it away from you with the heel of your hand). You don't want the butter and flour too well incorporated if you want flaky crust.

Answer 5

Could have been a problem of "overworking" the dough. The less you mix it, the flakier it will be. Cold ingredients such as butter or shortning also help. You are not trying to "mix" the ingredients, just "combine them. Too much liquid in your fruit also makes the crust soggy. I put my fruit mixture in a colander or strainer while I make the crust and let it drain.

Answer 6

Cut some corners and use the Pilsbury crust in the dairy section at your grocery store. You simply unroll them and place in the pie dish. They taste great and noone can tell they aren't from scratch.