Your kitchen is lightly dusted with flour, the bowls of ripe fruit are ready to be translated into filling, or maybe a pot of Meyer lemon curd or melted Valrhona stands on the stove. The fruit and curd and chocolate are all things that can go into the glorious pie you’re making. But how much thought have you given to the crust itself?
Consider the landscape of that crust, built with just a few ingredients: flour and butter, sugar and salt. Because most of that is flour, that’s where most of the crust’s flavor comes from. You may have grown up with white flour pie crusts, but these days there are many whole-grain flours readily available.
Not only whole wheat, which lends a rich nuttiness to your crust, but also rye, oat and buckwheat flours can add dimension to the pie. If you think of the difference those flours make for the breads you buy or bake, think of what they can do here. Pair rye with chocolate, oat with berries, a nutty whole wheat with ripe peaches — or more chocolate. Whole grains are not only more healthful than white flour, but they have amazing flavors that can highlight what’s going into your filling.
Using whole-grain flours in pie crust means a little bit of experimentation, but mostly you can just substitute about a quarter of the all-purpose flour in your favorite recipe with the same quantity of whole-grain flour. Then increase the water a bit (the amount depends on a few variables: the weather, how freshly milled your flour is and how full of bran it is). Add enough liquid that the dough comes together but is still a bit shaggy, then chill and continue as you normally would. Pastry chef Roxana Jullapat has a trick if the flour is really branny: She adds a pinch of baking soda to the dough, which helps, Jullapat says, “to ‘cook’ all that bran.”
Clemence Gossett of the Gourmandise School of Sweets and Savories in Santa Monica loves using whole-grain flours in pie crust because, she says, “pie crust is most suitable to graduating toward whole grains because the bran actually interrupts gluten development, yielding a more tender crust.” Another trick? Let your kids help you make pies, as even mud pie experience is a lot more valuable than what they’ll get on food TV.
Wheat flours. Start with whole-wheat flour, which you probably have on hand anyway. Depending on the kind of flour you have (how freshly milled? how branny?), you might increase the proportion of wheat, to 1/2 or 3/4 of the total flour, even all of it, if the flour is mild enough (like Sonora wheat). Then try using other types of wheat flour, such as spelt (which is tart and sweet) or kamut (which is mild and buttery).
Rye flour. This is the part of the story where I tell you to go to Odys & Penelope and order pastry chef Karen Hatfield's chocolate pie. Hatfield, one of this town's best pastry chefs, makes her pie with a rye crust, with chocolate and rye being a fantastic combination. As with rye bread, use only about a quarter of rye flour and the rest all-purpose flour in your pie dough, as things can get gummy if you use too much. What else goes with rye? Stone fruit, particularly apricots and peaches. More chocolate.
Oat flour. Don't have oat flour? No worries, because if you have some old-fashioned oatmeal, you can turn it into flour in your food processor. Then use it to make a pie crust that fits really nicely with fruit, as it's milky and rather sweet; it's also pretty neutral, so it can pair with many ingredients, especially strawberries, peaches, ginger and maple. It also goes really well (think oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies) with chocolate.
Buckwheat flour. Remember Fig Newtons? If you've never made them from scratch with good dried figs, you should try it.But how about using a flour that can stand up to those flavorful, heady figs — like buckwheat, which is almost winey in flavor. Buckwheat also pairs ridiculously well with chocolate (a theme!) and with stone fruit, also walnuts and honey and other flavors that are particularly rich.
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