Testing 1-2-3-Whole Wheat Pie Crust

If you are a purist about pie - seasonal fruit, organic ingredients, all natural - then it makes sense that you would eschew white flour in favor of a more healthful option for your pie crust....If it makes the pie better, that is.

Whole wheat pie crust: just the words seem to connote hardpan, hockey pucks, hippies, humorlessness, heaviness, and humdrum. On the flip side, though, there are the health benefits and perhaps the fun of experimentation with a new approach to pastry.

The challenge is to find a recipe that not only does what pie dough should - rolls, stretches, flakes, browns, and tastes good - but provides those attributes without requiring some other ingredients that subtract from the good reasons to use whole wheat flour. Whole wheat crusts that we've tried in the past were made with cooking oil instead of shortening, and they were, to be blunt, miserable to work with, unbeautiful to look at, and unpalatable to eat. Let's see if this one is an improvement.

In this inaugural attempt, we had to start somewhere...and Sac Pie can almost hear you moaning about this already...so we picked a recipe that included some familiars - butter as well as shortening, white flour as well as whole wheat. We know, we know. We hope you whole wheat zealots will not be too disappointed. We need a jumping-off point for continued experiments, and we figure we can gradually reduce butter and white flour and stop before we reach that "humdrum" end point. We are going to follow the recipe to the letter and see what happens. This trial is also a first for us using butter in pie dough ANNNNNDDD using our Cuisinart to make the dough.

This recipe comes from WikiHow. We chose it because it could be done in relatively few steps and without ingredients that we wouldn't otherwise use in a pie pastry.

For this recipe, we decided to make a pie with the remaining frozen peaches from last summer (which were luscious, were they not?). So that, if the crust was a bust, we would at least have that lovely fruit to spoon up.

As with most pie dough, the key thing again is that your liquid is ice-cold. If you do use a food processor to blend the fat into the flour, open it up and lift the bottom ingredients upward with a spatula or spoon, to make sure nothing is getting trapped in a clump on the bottom.

All right, here is the recipe, from WikiHow for pie dough with whole wheat flour:

Ingredients:

2 c all-purpose white flour

1/2 c whole wheat flour

1/2 c butter

1/2 c shortening

ice cold water (several tablespoons)

1 tsp(ish) salt

1 T(ish) sugar

Instructions:

Add the dry ingredients to the bowl of a food processor and pulse, roughly 5 times at 1 to 2 seconds each pulse.

Cut the butter into small chunks.

Add the chunks of butter to the bowl and pulse again, roughly 5 times at 1 to 2 seconds each time. With a spoon or spatula, lift the mixture from bottom to top all the way around the bowl.

Add the shortening, in small chunks to the bowl and pulse again. Lift again. At this point the mixture should look slightly crumbly.

Add the water in 1-2 T increments, followed by a pulse of the processor (and a lift). Repeat until the dough begins to clump and pull away from the sides of the bowl.

When you reach this point, feel the dough by squeezing it lightly. It should be moist, pliable, and slightly sticky. Remove it from the food processor and into another bowl, and shape into a ball.

The dough should be worked with rather quickly to keep the butter from melting. You may elect to cover it with a damp towel if the day is warm and dry.

You can see that the dough forms a ball quite easily, is moist and not crumbly, and that the butter and shortening are well distributed.

Follow this recipe and you will end up with almost enough dough for two pies. In addition to the pie shown above, we made a small 7-incher with the extra dough (also with double crust). You will find that the dough is very easy to roll out - possibly a little more elastic than our usual recipe. As with our usual recipe, it is, however, still slow to brown. We left this baby in the oven for nearly an hour (fearful of overcooking), the last 20 minutes on the top rack.

We encountered almost immediate shrinkage of the pastry as it began to warm up. You can see a little warping of the edge in the picture below. Interestingly, this did not happen to the small 7-inch pie made with the same pastry. Hmmm. Was it the result of two different pie pan materials? Was it anything to do with the differences in the two fillings? Sac Pie is mystified. We only know that it's not the dough itself that causes shrinking.

It doesn't look like it's going to taste bad, does it?

Well, it was perfectly fine. We wanted it to be a little more flaky on top, so there is room for improvement. We could not discern the benefits of the butter in either taste, appearance, or texture of the crust. We detected a slightly dry feel to the crust, but this might have been the result of the pie's bake-a-thon in the oven rather than the ingredients. With all of those things in mind, we still enjoyed snarfing up this pie and the first one gives us confidence to try again: less butter, maybe a small increment of whole wheat flour to replace the white flour.

Don't be intimidated by the novelty of this recipe. It behaves well, tastes good, and is pleasing to the eye. It makes a fine package for your frozen peaches, and is a homey, comforting product.