Preserve Soft Melted Pie Dough With a Bag of Frozen Vegetables
Heat is the enemy of pie dough, which makes summer pie especially challenging. Even if your home is climate controlled, the resonant heat of the oven and the warmth of your hands can soften the fat in the dough to the point of no return—it will melt too much to handle. But don’t crumple a soft disk into a ball and don’t commit a heinous confectionery crime (rolling puff pastry is a sin). There is a way to save this pie crust. Just take a couple of bags of frozen vegetables.
Usually, if your butter-based dough becomes too soft to handle and handle, you can transfer it to a cutting board and refrigerate it for a few minutes to chill. When you take it out, the saturated fat, whether it’s butter or shortening, will solidify again, and you can pick it up, continue rolling it out, or transfer it to a pie plate if you catch it in time.
When it’s hot outside and even hotter in the kitchen, this moment can sneak up on you unnoticed. Step away from rolling out pie dough for just a few minutes and suddenly it’s so thin and soft that it tears or squishes when you try to lift the edge off the table. At this stage, even a scraper will not help you. Forget to transfer it to the pie dish, it won’t go anywhere whole.
The problem is that the dough is now soaked in softened or thinned fats. You need to cool them to a solid state or get as close as possible. Since you can’t put the dough in the freezer, bring the freezer with the dough. Take two or three bags of small frozen foods like peas, edamame, or corn and place them on top of the pie crust. If you think this is disgusting, you can cover the dough with a sheet of plastic wrap first. (Eventually, it will bake at 350°F or 400°F, so I think you’ll be fine.) Leave it like that for five to ten minutes. Grab a bag and check the dough to see how it’s doing. If you feel that the temperature of the dough is cold, you are probably in good shape to move on.
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Use as many bags as you need to cover every inch of the surface of the dough so you don’t have to worry about bags moving around or that some of the dough is soft and the rest is hard. Any frozen food will do, but I like bagged food because it doesn’t have sharp edges to pierce the dough. Bags with small fruits and vegetables are ideal because more frozen pieces can adhere to the pie dough with fewer air pockets between them. I recently used a couple of packets of frozen blueberries with great results, but ice packs will help.
Once your dough has cooled, try moving it around. Sprinkle a little new flour under the dough, as the melted fats could absorb a fair amount, and immediately finish working with the dough. Roll it out, transfer the dough to a pie plate and place it firmly in the pie dish. You are now in the safety zone. You can put the whole plate in the fridge and let the dough cool while you leisurely prepare the pie filling.