Week 3 -- Pies and Tarts (Lecture)

This week we talked about pies and tarts. We learned about the different types of pie crusts. I didn't know that there was more than one type of pie dough. Mealy dough is a little bit flaky and is good for cream pies, fruit pies, custard pies, and quiche. Flaky dough is, as the name suggests, very flaky. It is good for pies with uncooked filling. For those you would prebake the shell empty. The last type of pie crust we talked about was a crumb crust. In general, I don't like making crumb crusts. It's so much easier to buy the premade Keebler graham cracker crusts! But if you make your own, you can control the ingredients that go into it, so it's definitely better to make your own. We also talked about sweet dough (pate sucre). Sweet dough is used for tarts and is not flaky. Another thing I learned about was the different categories of pie fillings. They are broken down into cream, fruit (cooked fruit method and cooked juice method), custard, and chiffon. After lecture, I was definitely excited for all of the pies and tarts we were going to make in lab!