Cookaholics Bulletin Board

We have been making banana cream pies recently, for parties and potlucks. While I prefer it with a graham cracker crust, my wife enjoys a pastry crust. So I thought the idea behind CI's crust recipe included in their Banana Cream Pie recipe would be the ideal solution since it had both. Because we already had made some pastry dough and stored it, we used it instead of following the dough recipe from scratch. But we did use the graham crackers that CI called for as a coating of both sides of the dough. I had read good reviews of it elsewhere and thought it might be a nice way of killing two birds with one stone, both my wife's and my preference in pie crusts.

I was wrong. At least for how ours came out. The crust's rim or edge burned quite easily, well before the rest of the crust was done. Problems with the texture of the crust may be due to too much water when making the dough, something I am learning about over on the Kenji Alt recipe thread.

The custard turns out quite nicely and my wife has had many requests for the recipe from her classmates at the last potluck. She has developed a strong preference for hand made custard over the packaged or boxed pudding filling she was used to before. The CI custard recipe calls for a small amount of brandy (optional) but I've been wondering how Amaretto or even Cointreau might work.

I'm just curious if others have tried out the graham cracker coated pastry dough crust and what they thought of it.

Tatoosh

Personally, I'd try rum, especially coconut rum.

Tat,

My Mom and our French college age exchange student worked on this issue when I was in high school. Jean's mother had sent a recipe calling for cognac, armagnac or calvados. They opened the liquor cabinet and you can guess the rest of the story... They both were pretty buzzed by dinner time and the dessert was breathtaking. My sister and I were asleep by 7 pm.

I think an aged Guatamalan rum (Ron Zacapa or Zaya) has the greatest potential. I don't know about the pie but you could even add some of your left-overs.

cc

I make that pie often, but never bother with the graham cracker part of the crust because I don't usually keep graham crackers on hand. However, I love the custard part of this recipe, with bananas or without.

Next time, I'll get graham crackers.

Tim, very interesting suggestions there! Sadly, liquor here in the Philippines is a very hit and miss sort of thing. Sometimes they will have something interesting and when you come back later, no such luck for months or years again. When it comes to Rum they have two kinds, Bacardi (and they just recently added the 151 version) and Tanduay which is almost the national drink besides the infamous San Miquel beer.

trinket, the custard is a very big hit here with all that try it. So nice to have the "from scratch" version and really not much work (I say laughing into my sleeve since the culinary brother-in-law makes usually).

However another demon has recently raised its head. I talked about my wife preferring the pastry crust, or did until she tried the homemade graham cracker crust, which seems to have modified her position drastically. Our pastry crusts went from sandy to flaky as we concentrated on keeping the butter cold, really cold. We freeze it, we use a grater to break it into bits, and we routinely move the dough to the refrigerator to keep it from warming. The sandy thing went away.

Now we have a "hard" or "tough" dough. Last two pies we took to the party were, well, slightly embarrassing. The custard was a hit, and most folks soldiered on through the crust. But it was not a happy experience. I have read that too much water will cause dough to get tougher, but we were not lavish with water when making the dough. Any ideas why pastry dough bakes out very tough? Overcooking? The water thing? Color me puzzled. We use it for other pie and pastry items and I really would like to get it reliable.

Oh, and we are looking for a good food processor so we can move to the Kenji variation and see if we can start getting consistent results with that. However it will be a couple of months by slow boat before a food processor from the States arrives, no Kitchen Aid version here in the Philippines and that's the one I have me heart set on.

Tatoosh

Tatoosh,

I don't think a food processor is required for Kenji Alt's pie crust. The technique is far more important than the machine. You could use any mixer in the same fashion that you would use a processor. It is certainly worth a try.

Tim

If you have to re-chill a pie crust in the time it takes to roll it out you are over working the dough, and thus making it tough. Replacing some of the water with vodka should help.

Heh heh, Tim, you have caught me out! I am in the process of rationalizing and justifying moving the purchase of a food processor up the "to buy" list. I did read his article but when it called for pulsing extra flour to (re)coat the flour and butter appropriately, I sort of tooled out, not having the aforementioned food processor. Which I want/need/covet for so many things. I probably should buy two!

Thank you BeckyH, that may be part of our problem. No one here has what would be called extensive pie or pastry experience, just desire.

To keep the pastry dough cool while rolling, I am looking at taking a large thin marble slab, roughly between 18 inches and 2 feet square, sitting it in a frame that either holds ice water or some sort of chilled water tubing to keep the marble cool. It is a bit of overkill, particularly considering where I live in the Philippines, the one place where a fireplace is the status symbol, not an air conditioner. But it would make working pastry dough out a bit simpler when we are in "production" mode and I would have the pleasure of scratching my inventor itch at the same time.

But I suspect some time hunting a good tutorial on rolling dough is in order.

Steve

Tatoosh,

This is a procedure that is easy to learn. Get two cups of flour, some cheap lard and make a practice dough just to learn the technique. With a little practice, you can easily perfect your technique. Regather and re-roll the dough three or four times just to develop your expertise. Then make the toughest pie crust ever....

Cook's has excellent instructions with a possibly confusing video on pie rolling technique. (LINK) The video is confusing because the cook seems to roll across the complete dough circle rather than from the center.

The technique is to roll forward from the center with even pressure to close to the far edge. Rolling over the edge flattens the edge too much. Then return to the center and roll backward from the center with even pressure to close to the near edge. Turn the dough 90 degrees and repeat. (I prefer to turn 60 degrees each time.)

Tim