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Aug. 25th, 2006 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickThis evening I am embarking on a new journey in pie: Adventures With Lard. The local grocery store has Manteca, which (besides being a brand name) is Spanish for lard. I bought some. If you want to buy lard for yourself, check in the meat and dairy/egg parts of the store -- my store had it near the eggs and butter. Unlike some other lard products, Manteca is 100% transfat free. (Transfats are added to some lards to increase their shelf life.) The container has both Spanish and English on it, but judging from the amount of Spanish on the lable, I got the distinct impression that they were aiming it at the Spanish-speaking segment of the population.
Lard is rendered from the fat of piggiewigs. This means that it is not kosher. Things made out of pig are nonkosher and could only be MORE nonkosher if they were drenched in cream sauce and leavened for consumption during Passover. I am only mentioning this because I have a variety of people who more-or-less keep kosher and may need to know about the ingredients in my pastry products. (You know who you are.) Lard is also not vegetarian or fish-and-bird-itarian, for those of my friends who are trying not to eat the flesh of mammals these days. (And you also know who you are.) Appropriate disclosures regarding pie crust composition will be made when next I take a pie to a function, so don't worry that I'm trying to sneak animal products in on you so's to condemn you to hell or wreck your aura or whatever eating piggiewig parts is supposed to do to you.
As regular readers are aware, it is my considered opinion that Blue Crisco (the 100% transfat kind) makes godlike pie crusts. It's also more acceptable to the dietary dictates of those who don't eat pigs or mammals or whatever because it's made from crushing up seeds of some kind of plant. However, the transfat thing is a no-no. Pie crust made with Blue Crisco apparently kills on contact, or would, if we kept using it now that we know how bad transfats are for us. So, I'm looking for a new fat to use in pie crusts. As the Boston Globe reports, I'm not the only one. (They report that Manteca has transfats added but I'm sitting here looking at the container and it says otherwise... and it warn't in the "baking" aisle at my store, it was in the fridgerated animal products aisle, near the cheese and eggs and butter. Perhaps they add transfats to the no-fridge-required kind?)
In response to the transfat mess, the fine people at Crisco have given us Green Crisco, which is allegedly just like Blue Crisco (the colors refer to the cans the stuff comes in. All Crisco is white except for the jaundiced hue of the abomination known as butter-flavor Crisco.) except that the exact same techniques which make godlike pie crusts from Blue Crisco make shitty pie crusts from Green Crisco. Since pie crust is one of the very few things I use Crisco for, I cannot imagine that the fine people at Crisco didn't test out the Green Crisco on this recipe. They had to have. If this was the best they could do, I am not impressed. It sux0rs. The pie crust tastes okay but it's impossible to work with. It tears and shatters and has none of the elasticity that makes Blue Crisco pie crust easy (relatively speaking) to work with. If you can get it to work enough to make a pie out of it, the pie tastes okay even though it looks like the edges were fluted by a distrated ten year old.
My mom tried mixing real butter and Green Crisco, half and half. She suggested it as an improvement over Green Crisco. I tried it out last weekend and it makes passable pie crust -- tastes okay, works okay, but gets too brown and shatter-y (The wrong kind of shatter-y. Not the proper kind.) when baked. I don't like the crispity texture of the finished product. Also, brown==bad. This is better than straight Green Crisco, at least in terms of the handle on the dough, but it isn't *right*. Fuck. (If further efforts do not improve results, this is the current leader for best method. But...damn, I was raised on Blue Crisco pie crusts and unfortunately, Blue Crisco pie crusts define perfection for me. Mom? This is your fault.)
I am still trying to find something I can live with for pie and lard is the next candidate on the list. I don't really want to use lard. It's made out of pigs, for fuck's sake. Pigs have nothing to do with fruit pies. I don't see the point, here. I'm heading into a world where Fruit Pies Are Made Of Pigs. How can this be a good idea? But... the existing choices are insufficient. They are not good enough. People used lard for the entire history of this great nation until 1911 when Crisco was invented. Were they all wrong?
But anyway. Lard. Here we go!
Lard is rendered from the fat of piggiewigs. This means that it is not kosher. Things made out of pig are nonkosher and could only be MORE nonkosher if they were drenched in cream sauce and leavened for consumption during Passover. I am only mentioning this because I have a variety of people who more-or-less keep kosher and may need to know about the ingredients in my pastry products. (You know who you are.) Lard is also not vegetarian or fish-and-bird-itarian, for those of my friends who are trying not to eat the flesh of mammals these days. (And you also know who you are.) Appropriate disclosures regarding pie crust composition will be made when next I take a pie to a function, so don't worry that I'm trying to sneak animal products in on you so's to condemn you to hell or wreck your aura or whatever eating piggiewig parts is supposed to do to you.
As regular readers are aware, it is my considered opinion that Blue Crisco (the 100% transfat kind) makes godlike pie crusts. It's also more acceptable to the dietary dictates of those who don't eat pigs or mammals or whatever because it's made from crushing up seeds of some kind of plant. However, the transfat thing is a no-no. Pie crust made with Blue Crisco apparently kills on contact, or would, if we kept using it now that we know how bad transfats are for us. So, I'm looking for a new fat to use in pie crusts. As the Boston Globe reports, I'm not the only one. (They report that Manteca has transfats added but I'm sitting here looking at the container and it says otherwise... and it warn't in the "baking" aisle at my store, it was in the fridgerated animal products aisle, near the cheese and eggs and butter. Perhaps they add transfats to the no-fridge-required kind?)
In response to the transfat mess, the fine people at Crisco have given us Green Crisco, which is allegedly just like Blue Crisco (the colors refer to the cans the stuff comes in. All Crisco is white except for the jaundiced hue of the abomination known as butter-flavor Crisco.) except that the exact same techniques which make godlike pie crusts from Blue Crisco make shitty pie crusts from Green Crisco. Since pie crust is one of the very few things I use Crisco for, I cannot imagine that the fine people at Crisco didn't test out the Green Crisco on this recipe. They had to have. If this was the best they could do, I am not impressed. It sux0rs. The pie crust tastes okay but it's impossible to work with. It tears and shatters and has none of the elasticity that makes Blue Crisco pie crust easy (relatively speaking) to work with. If you can get it to work enough to make a pie out of it, the pie tastes okay even though it looks like the edges were fluted by a distrated ten year old.
My mom tried mixing real butter and Green Crisco, half and half. She suggested it as an improvement over Green Crisco. I tried it out last weekend and it makes passable pie crust -- tastes okay, works okay, but gets too brown and shatter-y (The wrong kind of shatter-y. Not the proper kind.) when baked. I don't like the crispity texture of the finished product. Also, brown==bad. This is better than straight Green Crisco, at least in terms of the handle on the dough, but it isn't *right*. Fuck. (If further efforts do not improve results, this is the current leader for best method. But...damn, I was raised on Blue Crisco pie crusts and unfortunately, Blue Crisco pie crusts define perfection for me. Mom? This is your fault.)
I am still trying to find something I can live with for pie and lard is the next candidate on the list. I don't really want to use lard. It's made out of pigs, for fuck's sake. Pigs have nothing to do with fruit pies. I don't see the point, here. I'm heading into a world where Fruit Pies Are Made Of Pigs. How can this be a good idea? But... the existing choices are insufficient. They are not good enough. People used lard for the entire history of this great nation until 1911 when Crisco was invented. Were they all wrong?
But anyway. Lard. Here we go!
