Hot cuisine? Here’s how to prevent your melting pie dough

Whether it is due to the inevitable heat of summer, the cumulative result of simmering a pot of stew all afternoon or extravagance of vacation cooking, the kitchen has a way to warm up more quickly than any other room. Air can be a bad heat driver, as Kenji explained before, but it can be powerful effective over time, slowly warming your kitchen by degrees. The ambient temperature is more than air around you; It represents the temperature of your flour, your bowl to mix, your counter and your rolling pin.

Flipping on the A / C can help you feel better in the short term, but unless you do it 24/7, it will not have the possibility of cooling your equipment and your pantry staples. For example, we do not run air conditioning at Serious Eats during the weekend when no one is there. Having it exploded a summer morning cools the place at 74 ° F (23 ° C), but diving a thermometer in a bag of flour tells another story.

This 78 ° F flour (26 ° C) is well below the body temperature, which makes us cool for us, but it is a real source of heat to a block of butter. It is a big problem for the pie dough, because its texture depends entirely on the butter. When this butter is pleasant and cold, the dough will feel as soft and flexible as worn leather – not humid or sticky at all. But when the “ambient temperature” rises above 73 ° F (23 ° C), everything that touches your dough will warm it in contact, softening the butter and making it sticky to the touch.

This is why the pie dough seems to need less water by a hot summer day; Soft butter works more like a liquid than a solid in the dough. Popular wisdom says that humidity plays a role in the amount of water your dough needs, but I have to disagree. Flour has a low enough capacity to absorb humidity of the air, and this property is what keeps it stable on the shelf. If the flour could aspire enough ambient humidity to change the behavior of a recipe, it would be assessed as quickly as a miche of supermarket bread.

Adapting the soft butter using less water in the dough is usually a terrible idea. To start, it is more difficult for gluten to form, producing a lower paste which is more likely to stretch and tear. Low pasta are also likely to collapse in the oven, and they collapse easily once cooked. Not only that, these pasta are also thirsty, eager to absorb the humidity of a pie garnish, which makes the crust soggy and pale.

When things warm up in the kitchen – say, everything that is greater than 73 ° F – the only viable solution is to focus on maintaining the temperature of the dough less than 70 ° F (21 ° C). This means taking a few steps to counter heat sources in your kitchen – and I’m not talking about ice water or frozen butter, fixes that do nothing to approach the heat all around.

Refrigerate

The simplest first step is to launch everything in the refrigerator, from your bowl and to your roller roller on the pie plate itself. (A hot pie plate can soften the dough in contact, encourage it to stick and make it more difficult to cut the finished pie.) You will also want to refrigerate the “dry mix” (flour, sugar, salt) of your recipe, as well as the water, because the measurement cup itself can be hot enough to remove the cooling of cold tap water.

The objective of this step is not to obtain icy things, but to simulate the temperature of a slightly cooler kitchen so that the finished dough ends between 65 and 70 ° F (18 and 21 ° C). The pure and simple frozen frozen ingredients are bad news, cooling the butter to the point where it no longer has the plasticity to roll and fold in the dough, which will make it crack and collapse.

Keep him big

If a recipe provides detailed instructions to manage a temperature sensitive ingredient such as butter, be careful! For example, my old-fashioned puff pastry dough provides two butter sticks cut in half-pouce cubes, each roughly broken.

These specific directions maintain the relatively large and thick parts, and therefore cold and firm. Cutting the butter into smaller pieces will increase the surface, creating thinner pieces of butter that quickly become sticky and soft. This is exponentially more true for butter which is rubbed or cut into a good meal, which will also give the pie crust a friable texture and similar to a cookie.

Ice, baby ice cream

If it is really hot in the kitchen, your counter itself is the enemy, a source of heat with each square thumb of dough. Fortunately, there is an easy solution.

Divide several cups of ice between the zipper bags of two gallons, add a little cold water to each, tightly seal and place flat until the counter below is pleasant and fresh. Again, you don’t try to transform your kitchen into a winter wonderland! You just want a counter that will be your ally to maintain a dough temperature between 65 and 70 ° F.

Know your dough

A digital instant reading thermometer facilitates the identification of ingredients that are too hot from the start, and it is a foolproof way to monitor the temperature of your dough. If it is particularly hot in your kitchen, aim to keep the dough about 65 ° F (18 ° F). Any cold and it will not behave as it should, which makes a digital thermometer particularly useful when you soften the pasta that has been made and refrigerated in advance.

Generously

When the time comes to roll, do not skimp on the flour. I am not talking about a pinch or a pinch, but whole handles, thrown above and below. This will prevent the paste from sticking because it is warmed and broken between the counter and the spindle. You can always dust the excess flour with a pastry brush, so don’t be shy!

Remember that these steps are simply intended to counter excessive heat in the kitchen, you may not need it. The simple fact of being aware of the way the temperature of your ingredients and your equipment may have an impact on a paste will greatly help you to avoid the frustration of arguing a sticky mess. Keep the dough temperature between 65 and 70 ° F, and deploy it will always be child’s play.

September 2016