Definitely, the finest handmade recipe of filling for apple pie you'll ever bake using fuji apples. The crust is buttery and flaky, and the apple filling is soft and subtly flavored. With a flaky and crisp exterior, this pie's crust bursts with sugary crunch and a savory, buttery flavor with every bite. Inside, sweet and sour apples are glazed in a rich glaze and complemented with toasty spices without taking over. The importance of flour in baking is not fully appreciated until the function of gluten is analyzed. If you don't have celiac disease or a specific allergy, gluten is not bad for you despite what marketers will have you believe. It's a protein that occurs spontaneously when wheat flour is mixed with water and stirred.
Gluten is a literal ingredient in many of our favorite foods, such as bread and noodles. However, freezing the flour is the true secret to success. Keep your components cool for two reasons. The first is that you'll have a bit more leeway to handle the dough without making it tough because gluten development in the flour is slowed by the cooler temperatures. The second is that butter doesn't melt into the flour in cold weather. The only thing you need to know right now is that cold is beneficial; I'll go into further detail later. I always keep my flour in the freezer so I never have to worry about it going stale and so I can use it in last-minute recipes like this one. There is some controversy over which type of fat is the best to use for pie crusts, and in order to choose the type of fat that is best, we need to first understand why fat is added to pie crusts in the first place. The first factor contributing to the crust's flakiness is the presence of alternating layers of fat and dough, which results in the formation of small pockets in the crust. Because of this, you want the fat (and the flour) to be cold. This will allow you to produce flakes of fat that will not become completely absorbed into the dough.
The second reason is that fat prevents gluten from developing to its full potential. The addition of fat to the crust can also impart more taste, which brings us to the third and last reason for doing so. Listed here are some of the different kinds of fat, in the order of my preference, from most desired to least favored. The melting temperature of butter is approximately 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and it also includes approximately 16-17% water. Because it has a lower melting temperature in comparison to other fats, working with it can be a little bit more difficult because you have to be careful not to melt it as you knead it into the flour. Other fats have higher melting temperatures (remember, we need flakes of butter to form layers in the dough). The positive is that the water that is present in the butter causes it to produce steam while it cooks, which puffs up the pockets that it is present and makes a crust that is airy and flaky.
The flavor of butter cannot be matched by any other ingredient, which is another major advantage of utilizing it. I enjoy using cultured butter (a.k.a. European butter). This does not imply that the butter itself is complex; rather, it refers to the process by which it is produced. The churning of fresh cream results in the production of standard American butter. Before the cream can be used to make European butter, it must first be cultured (also known as fermented) with bacteria, which helps to intensify the butter's flavor. The melting point of lard is higher than that of butter, and it also contains 16-17% water. Lard is also known as tallow. Because it is less difficult to deal with than butter, lard was traditionally used to make pie crust because it has the same ability to cause steam to expand and puff your crust in the same manner as butter does.
Last but not least, although lard has a fuller flavor than shortening, it cannot compare to the flavor of butter, which is why I consider butter to be the flavoring of choice when creating pie dough. Shortening is a solid fat that has a relatively high melting point and is manufactured by chemically modifying vegetable oil such that it is solid at room temperature. Shortening is used in baking and cooking. Since shortening was more affordable and was seen to be healthier than lard in the 20th century, it gradually supplanted lard as the fat of choice for making pie crusts. In addition to the questionable nature of the processing that shortening goes through, the main reasons I avoid using it for pie crusts are that it has almost no water in it and no flavor at all. Because oil is a liquid, it is not a good choice for pie crusts because it will blend in equally with the flour and will not produce layers in the dough like other options, such as butter or shortening.