Boozy pie

I've been subscribing to one of my favorite food magazines, Cook's Illustrated, for a few years now. The most recent issue had a *ton* of really interesting recipes (Nov/Dec... would highly recommend folks pick it up). I made the buttermilk biscuit recipe a few days ago... it counts on getting its flakiness from mixing hot butter with cold buttermilk and stirring the dough together - the butter then forms tiny pockets which make nice light biscuits.

The weirder one that made sense but still sounded incredibly odd was the pie crust the asked for water and... wait for it... vodka. The premise totally made sense (alcohol evaporates from baked goods while they're baking), but it was supposed to make it easier to roll out since you could have more liquid (in the form of vodka) in the crust before baking it.

The results really were different when rolling out the crust - it was fairly gooey, but super easy to roll out into a perfect circle. It seemed easier to patch up edges with extra dough as well, just pressing it together and it would actually stick (drier dough doesn't stick to itself). I found it harder to get the dough into the pie pan, though - normal dough keeps its shape more, but I had to be really careful not to stretch this dough or put my finger through it while I moved it to the pan.

I didn't think about it when I was making the crust, but while I was baking the pie I thought of a small potential flaw in my plan - I was baking a pumpkin pie. The pumpkin mixture goes into the wet pie crust - you don't pre-bake it. So would the alcohol actually be able to evaporate?? Luckily, the crust came out great, both the sides and the bottom. It was nicely flaky, and didn't taste like vodka at all. The crust didn't even seem to shrink from the sides - the edges stood up really straight after I'd fluted them, and stayed that way. Overall, it was really brilliant - A+ to Cook's again!