Pastry Day

I finally broke down today and made more pastry. We've had some gorgeous apple varieties in the house (including Northern Spy) and I couldn't stand another weekend without a pie in the house.

For pastry I use a modified version of a recipe from Cooks Illustrated. The original recipe is just gorgeous but absolutely loaded with fat. So I've cut it back. And what I ended up with is this recipe

Pie Crust Recipe (for two crusts)

• 3/4 cups white flour
  
• 1-3/4 cups whole wheat white flour
  
• 6 tablespoons stick margarine
  
• 8 tablespoons unsalted butter
  
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
  
• 1-1/2 tablespoons sugar
  
• 6-8 tablespoons chilled water

Mix the flours, sugar and salt together in a large bowl.
Cut in the margarine and butter until the pieces are the size of peas.
Add the water, it should be chilled and from the fridge. Mix with a spatula until it starts to stick together. Then finish mixing by hand.

Divide into two halves, each is enough for a single pie crust. Wrap tightly in cling wrap and store in fridge until ready for use. Let it warm up for at least 15 minutes before use.

Nutrition Analysis
The two flours that I use are very different from each other. I thought you might be interested in seeing a quick analysis of the carb difference based on using the mix that I have, versus just plain white flour. Here are the nutrition labels for each type of flour. (Note I'm using King Arthur flours, which are just great for baking.)


The recipe contains ten 1/4 cups of flour.

If I use white flour the carb count would be ten times 21 effective grams for a total of 210 grams for all the pastry. I'm allowing for a full gram of fiber in each serving.

By using the proportion that I do I have three times 21 grams of carbohydrate from the white flour (total 63 grams) and seven times 15 grams for the whole wheat white (total of 105 grams). This gives me a total of 168 grams of carbohydrates or a 20% reduction in the overall carbs.

Each pie crust with my recipe is 84 grams of carbs. Using white flour each one would normally be 105 grams of carbs. Plus with my recipe you also get 21 grams of fiber per pie crust. And I think it tastes better with the whole wheat white flour.

Note that I've started using a single pie crust rolled very thin for an apple pie. There's enough pastry to fold over the apples and make a rustic type of pie. If each pie yields 8 slices then the carbs from the pastry add about 11 grams, instead of nearly 22 grams when I'm using a double pie crust for the pie.

In writing this post, I noticed an error in the nutrition label from King Arthur. The calorie count appears to be wrong for whole wheat white. The table below shows my calculations. Whole wheat white flour has only about 81 calories per serving, not the 100 calories per serving that's shown on the label. I'll contact King Arthur Flour during the week to let them know.

Labels: baking, kingarthur, nutrition

posted by Bernard @ 3:48 PM 2 Comments Links to this post