Food, Home & Lifestyle

Desserts: Apple Pie With Lard Crust

Lesson time 34:54 min

Chef Keller teaches you how to make an apple pie with a lard crust, reveals why he prefers the Granny Smith apple, and demonstrates techniques for creating the lattice top.

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Topics include: Desserts: Apple Pie With Lard Crust

Thomas Keller

Teaches Cooking Techniques III: Seafood, Sous Vide, and Desserts

Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.

Preview

- We're going to make apple pie, certainly one of my favorite desserts. Reminds me of when I was a child, with my grandmother. Slice of apple pie, a little bit of whipped cream, or better yet, vanilla ice cream. It was the perfect way to end the meal. [MUSIC PLAYING] As American as apple pie. But as I've learned from my English pastry chef, the apple pie actually originated in England. So as much as that is true, I still really associate this with childhood. And it's such an important part of childhood. My grandmother had an apple trees, and cherry trees. And she'd make pies for us in the summer, and in the fall. And they were just great, in large part because of the crust. So this is really one of the most important parts about any pie. And certainly this crust can be used with any pie recipe that you have. It's a really, really wonderful pie crust. So we have here, we have all purpose flour. We have pastry flour, which is a finer ground flour. This helps with keeping it a little stronger. We have lard. We have sweet butter. We have vinegar, which is going to help shorten the gluten to keep it tender. Water. We have sugar. We have salt. We have a little baking powder. The baking powder is going to help, help make it expand without making it rise too much-- or, help making it rise without expanding too much. Again, the flakiness of a crust is the most important part, I think, of a pie. We're going to just work quickly here because everything needs to be cold. And that is a critical part of making a great crust, is keeping your fats cold. They don't have to be totally incorporated. In other words, if you have little pea sized pieces of the fat, whether it's butter or lard, that's totally OK. So getting all of our dry ingredients in our mixing bowl. Get our fat in there. We'll work with our hands here. Now remember, this is hard butter and hard fat. So it's very cold, and that's what we want. Now we're going to separate this, or divide this in two pieces-- one for the bottom, and then one for the lattice which we're going to do on top. I love lattice on top of a pie for two reasons. I love the way it looks, but also, it helps to vent the filling. We want to make sure that the venting is continuous. I know you've seen where there's a small vent on top of a pie that has a solid top. I prefer the lattice because there's more vents, more dehydration, so it keeps the crust crispier, and that's what I really want. Vinegar. Water. Just squeezing with my hands. You're working as fast as you can, keeping it cold. OK. I'm going to turn it out onto my table top. Bring it all together. Just make sure it's-- all right. And you can see those little pieces of lard, or those little pieces of butter. That, those are OK. Get it all off my hands. And then just bring it all together. Finally getting all the little runaway pieces. Shouldn't take you any longer than that to make this crust. OK? We'll go ahead and divide it...

About the Instructor

In his third MasterClass, Chef Thomas Keller focuses on preparing fresh seafood like lobster and salmon, making classic desserts such as apple pie and lemon tart, and showing how sous vide cooking can be done at home to enhance flavor and texture. Whether you’re a beginning or advanced cook, you’ll learn the techniques and principles that will give you the understanding and skills to get the most delicious results.

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Thomas Keller

Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.

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