Hello from NL 34. This is Bake Sense, the somewhat ordered record of ramblings that concern the world of baking, from championing flavour and wholesome ingredients to questioning where those ingredients come from and how we can make the most of them. Along the way, you’ll find recipes and insights from life in and out of the professional bakery and plenty of fruitful chat.
Let’s be honest: pie season is always open, from those that speak of summer…think classic cherry served a la mode to honey-infused custard kinds and cool, cream-topped ones. But the onset of cold weather in my little place on the globe makes the desire for pie all the more present. Regionality dictates diet, and for yonks, Yorkshire has been known for its fondness of encasing foodstuff in a mixture of fat and flour.
On Sunday, I spent the day at Eric’s in East Dulwich, leading a workshop on pie, a reward for those who had supported the crowdfunding efforts of owner Helen to get this incredible bakery up and running. In place of Sunday’s missed newsletter, here’s a run down of what we did and the results. A huge thank you goes to Miki for the photos included throughout and for helping to make batches of such perfect pastry.
Pie is a broad, rich subject and subject to so much imagination we could’ve spent days digging deep. But by way of introduction, demystifying the construction process and breaking it down into manageable prepare-ahead parts is a good place to start.
To begin with, we constructed three pies, all with pre-cooked fillings, one apple, and another plum, both in flaky pastry and a raspberry linzer* in sweet shortcrust pasty.
*I know a Linzer is considered a tart, and a tart is not considered a pie, but we can debate nomenclature and pie semantics another time.
Pre-cooked fillings are under-used and underrated. They’re helpful when scheduling busy production in a bakery, but even in my home kitchen, I turn to them often. They offer assurance for tackling common pie problems that make baking fruit pies seem daunting, namely undercooked fillings and sad, sodden pie crusts. There are several ways you can ‘pre-cook’ a fruit filling; I’d argue macerating the fruit with a portion of sugar and acid alone is one method, but cooking on the hob or roasting fruit are the more direct acts that come to mind.
Helen’s approach to baking and ingredient sourcing is closely aligned with mine; she shares a passion for building solid relationships with the farmers and millers who supply the bakery with a variety of flours. We combined wholemeal Flanders and wholemeal Miller’s Choice with a soft, sifted Rivet flour, which made for the most delicious, bran-freckled, flaky pastry. It was a great opportunity for those attending the workshop to learn more about the functionality of wholemeal versus sifted flours and to experience the joys of working with them.
We played around with crimping techniques and discussed their function (namely creativity and often to denote the contents of the pie). We latticed and vented and discussed what can be expected from using different fruits in different seasons and how starches differ in their thickening potential. We covered chilling and freezing assembled pies ahead of time, the nuances of oven temperature and the visual cues to look for that signal the pie is finally baked. It sings!
We made hand pies, expressive, creative, diverse and characterful. Squares and rectangles, from postcard to postage stamp sized, a hand-built patchwork.
The exact formula for the flaky pastry is adapted slightly from the one I’ve included in previous editions of the newsletter. After some side-by-side comparisons, I’ve done away with the apple cider vinegar, which is typically there to inhibit too much gluten formation, yielding more flake, and tweaked the butter ratio, nudging it up a percentage or so. This years flours seem to like it, and as I am often working with softer wheats with delicate protein potential, a light hand and performing a few gentle folds of the dough are all that’s needed to yield a level of flakiness I’m happy to use across all formats of pie. I have included examples of the wheat varieties used; these are more for reference. As always, I encourage you to use a variety you enjoy working with, aiming for a combination of soft sifted wheat and a flavourful wholemeal wheat flour.
Flaky Pie Pastry Autumn ‘23 Ed.
Yields 1 x pie base or 6-7 hand-pies (depending on size).
Double to make enough for a pie top as well as the base.
90g sifted wheat flour (Maris Widgeon, Rivet Wheat)
75g wholemeal flour (Atle, Millers Choice, Flanders)
1g (1/4 tsp) fine sea salt
6g (1.5tsp) caster sugar
115g Unsalted Butter (cold)
75g Water (cold)
Combine the flour, sea salt and sugar in a bowl.
Dice the cold butter into pieces roughly 1.5 x 1.5 cm, add to the bowl and toss to coat each piece in flour. Press a rough two-thirds of the butter into flat shingles and toss them through the flour as you go. Rub the remaining one-third of the butter pieces into the flour to form smaller pea-sized pieces.
Begin to add the cold water to the bowl in a steady stream, and as you do so, use a fork to toss the mixture, ensuring the water does not pool in the same place.
Continue to toss the ingredients using the fork until it begins to look as though it is coming together. Add more water, very little at a time, as required if needed. The dough should be neither too dry nor too wet and sticky, and you can expect some dry patches of flour to remain.
Turn the mixture out onto the work surface and use your hands to bring it together into a squarish/rectangular shape.
Flatten to a centimetre or so using your hands or a rolling pin, and then fold the dough as you would a letter. Rotate and repeat the same step.
By this point, the shaggy dough should start to appear more cohesive. Repeat the step one more time (three letter folds total).
Wrap the dough and rest overnight or for at least 20 minutes before proceeding with your pie.