Carla Makes Blueberry-Ginger Pie

If you're a lattice person, like,

there is a place for professional pie makers,

and it is not today's Bon Appetit channel.

(bright contemporary music)

This video is about pie.

I fully believe that even if you don't think

you're a pie person, you can make pie dough.

There's a lot of myths about dough.

People think they have hot hands, they can't make,

you'll be fine, you're gonna do fine with the dough.

Not every grandmother was like, a great baker.

They all made pie, everything is fine.

All-purpose flour.

So, there's a couple things that are important.

That said, if you follow my instructions,

anybody can make pie.

Little bit of sugar.

Sugar, obviously sweetens the dough,

but also helps with browning, because sugar,

sugary things get brown.

Little bit of salt, because everything

sweet should have some saltiness.

And then, I'm mixing these dry ingredients together.

I really like making pie dough by hand,

because I can see and feel what's going on.

My mom is a Cuisinart pie dough maker.

She puts her pie dough in Cuisinart.

She knows how many pulses.

Her pie dough is amazing.

So, to each her own.

But if you've never made pie dough before,

make it by hand, okay?

The butter has to be cold.

You want to keep it from melting.

And I'm just using my fingertips

to break them apart, and smoosh them open,

but I'm leaving them in pretty big pieces.

So to get a dough that gives you both tenderness

and flakiness, you kind of want a mix of sizes.

When I was in cooking school, and they

taught us how to make pie dough,

there was a guy in my class,

and he did, he like, I think it was like a,

I don't think he had a diagnosis or anything,

but the poor guy had hot, he had hot, hot hands.

And he could not even spend this much time

touching butter, without it just turning into liquid,

and the poor chef was like, It's okay,

I can teach you to do anything,

I can teach anyone to do anything.

And then the guy would like, look at the butter,

and it would just melt like, just into

a puddle, and the chef was like,

Yeah, actually, you just have hot hands.

And you can't make dough.

All right.

I feel happy with where we are.

The flour has taken on the color of the butter.

And that's because a lot of the flour

and the butter, are like, worked in together.

But there's also big, some bigger pieces.

So that's done.

The next thing, and working quickly,

you don't like, go take a phone call now,

you don't go walk the dog, you don't go like,

put a baby down for a nap.

And if you needed to do any of those things,

take the whole bowl with the flour

and the butter, and stick it in the freezer.

So, the phone rings, the Jehovah witnesses

show up at the front door, you get a package,

like, a snake on the deck, that happened

to me, last week, there was a giant freakin' snake

on the deck, and it took like, 20 minutes.

Had I been in the middle of making dough,

I would have put the whole thing,

into the thing, kept my ice water,

and then, come back.

So, five tablespoons of ice cold ice water.

So now, I'm tossing.

I want to make, this is going to look

dry and crumbly, as it should, okay?

So you're not, trying to make like,

pudding, at this point.

And from there, you could keep going inside the bowl.

I just find it a lot easier to do this on

a surface, and again, I'm not

kneading this like it's bread dough.

I'm kind of just pushing it around

enough to feel like, it's come together.

Because I'm making a double crusted pie,

I'm going to take this, and eyeball it,

and divide it in half.

The rounder they are when they go into the disc,

the easier it'll be to have them

round when you roll them out.

And then, these guys go into the fridge.

You want to chill your dough for at least an hour,

which is going to make it possible, not just easier,

but actually possible to roll it out.

And if you wanted to do it for longer than that,

I would say refrigerate for 24 hours,

or pop these into a zip-top freezer bag,

pop 'em in the freezer, and they're good for

a couple months, so you know, think ahead.

Plan ahead, people.

(upbeat R&B music)

Couple things that always happen to me

that are common pitfalls for rolling out of dough.

One is that the edges of the dough

crack, as you start to roll them out,

and then you get these like,

you know, big crevices, and crevasses, and fissures,

and it just looks like (bleep), you know?

You're like, (bleep), (bleep) (bleep),

my dough is cracked.

You're gonna bleep that out, right?

The other thing that can go wrong

is sticking, sticking to the surface,

sticking to the rolling pin.

Flour is your friend.

Don't be afraid to add extra flour,

you can always brush the excess off.

Saffitz, Claire Saffitz, no one's here.

They all went to a chocolate tasting.

Saffitz taught me a trick, which is kind of,

pressing around the edge so that

anything that's cracked from the get-go,

you're kinda like, just telling it

to get to know your neighbor, and stick together,

and don't like, get all cracked up from the beginning.

Now, another thing you see Saffitz doing a lot is

(pounds the dough) hitting the dough.

I like what's happening here, because

the weight of the dough is both

flattening my disk, and it's also pressing stuff together.

I already have a crevasse, and that's okay.

I'm just going to pinch it back together.

Something else that I learned from watching

Chris Morocco, who has a lovely, deft hand

with the pastry dough, may I say,

is that he really believes in turning the dough

a quarter turn, like, literally, every pass,

which seems insane, but is very effective.

The other advantage of turning the dough frequently,

as you roll it, is that you can tell

whether it's sticking or not,

very easily, because you're constantly

rotating it on the surface.

Now, I'm getting to this point,

and I'm like, Oh my God.

What in the hell?

It's already cracking.

Just pinch it back together.

It wants to be together, and the reason that it's

doing that a little bit on the edge

is because it's just a little bit drier out there,

because they were out on the edge.

The didn't have the benefit of being on,

tucked on the inside, where they were protected.

They're like the penguins on the outside of the circle.

Did everybody see March of the Penguins?

You know the guys who are on the outside,

and they have to get folded in?

And ultimately, I'm trying to get

this out to about 13 inches.

Imagine if you went over to a friend's house,

and they made you a homemade pie,

and they were like, I never made pie dough before,

and I made it, and it's not the best I ever had.

You wouldn't tear them a new one.

You would be like, You're amazing.

You made pie?

That's rad.

Wow.

Oh my God.

13, pretty good.

So, starting from one end, and being delicate,

because where it's most likely to tear

is right around the edges, is just kind of,

gently encouraging it to come onto the rolling pin.

Okay?

And then, instead of bringing the dough,

over to the parchment, I'm gonna

bring the parchment to the dough.

This has to chill a little bit longer,

just because it got warmed up again,

and if we were to go, to put it in the

pie plate now, it would get kinda loosey goosey.

So, you put this away, and you make your blueberries.

Here you go, Tommy.

[Tommy] Thank you.

(upbeat R&B music)

This is blueberry ginger pie,

which is such a delicious combo.

This is freshly grated ginger.

If you can't get fresh ginger.

I would say, for this amount,

maybe half a teaspoon of ground ginger,

and add that at the same time.

All of this salt?

This looks like so much salt.

Oh. Oh yeah, sorry.

So glad I asked.

[Crew Person] Yes.

Cornstarch, which is key for making it

so that you don't just make a hot blueberry juice

inside of the pie, and then, a tablespoon

of zest, which, I'm just gonna eyeball.

That's gonna be about,

it's gonna be at least this whole lime.

Now, I love this part, rubbing the sugar,

the cornstarch, the lime zest, and the ginger together,

and really getting in there to

use the abrasiveness of the sugar

to coax out the essential oils that are

sitting in that lime peel,

and the sugar is gonna start to get moist,

because, again, that word.

It is the worst word.

What else is there to say?

The sugar is damp?

That doesn't sound good either.

What's a worse word, Katherine, damp or moist?

[Katherine] Moist.

Moist is terrible.

Also, if you grow up in a humid climate,

like, damp isn't good either.

I'm not even gonna say swamp ass, but I did.

(laughs)

Okay.

Tossing, tossing.

Approximately quarter cup

of lime juice, and then toss toss.

(bright contemporary music)

So again, now that this dough has been

chilled a little bit, while I made the filling,

I don't feel like it's so loosey goosey anymore,

so I'm not gonna do the rolling up onto the

rolling pin trick, but you certainly could.

So, I wanna kind of lift up from the side,

and then use my other hand, and then rotating

the dish a little bit, and pressing

the pie dough against the pie plate.

And when I put this in, you're gonna say,

This woman is so insane.

That is way too much fruit.

It's not.

It's all going to cook down.

Part of the beauty of having the filling

really mounded up in the pie plate

is that it's gonna give you that beautiful

kind of domed top of pie.

Push everybody over.

I'm gonna take a little glue now,

in the form of beaten egg.

I'm gonna brush the edge, where the lip

of the pie plate is, right underneath,

kind of following that all the way around.

And that's gonna just hold the top

and the bottom crust together.

Now, I have my second piece of dough.

And I'm not gonna hold it from the edges.

I'm gonna go underneath, like a pizza man.

And just kind of center it, and drape it over.

I'm feeling through the dough,

for blueberry mountain, underneath.

Tucking in around, making sure I have

about the same amount of overhang,

all the way around.

So, I'm just gonna use a fork,

and just working my way around.

This is the easiest crimp you could possibly do,

and it's also really sturdy, and really works.

And if you wanted to, you could go again,

kind of like, peanut butter cookie style.

And if you're great at braiding dough,

then, I don't think you should be watching this channel.

But I want people who have never

made a pie before to make pie.

So, if you're one of those people,

and you watch this, and you get psyched,

and then you send me a picture of your pie

to my Instagram, I will be so, it will make my day.

So, please do that.

Using shears, you could also use a paring knife.

Crimps are crimped.

Edges are trimmed.

And I'm gonna take the same egg wash,

just enough to make it glossy.

I'm gonna cut a few steam holes.

And this is demerara sugar.

You can use Sugar in the Raw.

You can also use granulated sugar.

The idea here is just enough for sparkle and for crunch.

Very important, bake your fruit pie

on an aluminum foil lined, rimmed baking sheet,

unless you really love scraping

burnt juices off of the oven floor.

So, the pie is gonna bake for kind of a long time.

It's gonna take an hour and a half

for the bottom crust to get what

Mary Berry would call, A good bake on it.

So, give it the time it needs.

Okay, so this is the color of brown that you want.

A lot of people pull their pies too early.

They're afraid of this dark brown color.

They want something blond or light golden.

Go for deep golden brown.

The other thing is, do not cut into a warm pie.

So, you have to let it cool overnight.

Cook it the day before.

It's,

it's perfect.

A nice wall of fruit.

Nice juices that are moving, but not running,

and they're soft and liquidy, without being jelly.

It's a great color.

This is like, the color of my dreams.

Mm, it's a perfect thing.

(giggles)

Where'd everybody go?