Pies are the third most popular American desserts following ice creams and cookies.

Considering the amount of work you put in, you get more mileage out of pies than from any other dessert, considering both taste and eye appeal. Attain the experience to make a good pie dough quickly, and you have the basis for making a very good dessert for any occasion.

Most fillings, whether simple or elaborate, are reasonably easy to make, even with meringue, whipped cream or any other topping. You can even prepare the dough (or baked crust) days in advance and finish it in no time on the day you plan to serve it fresh from the oven.

If you use a good recipe and good ingredients, preparing a delicious pie or tart has only one secret: you must make your own crust. Commercial food processors learned how to make quite acceptable cake mixes, frozen cakes and a number of other frozen pastries, but they haven’t managed to produce a good fresh or frozen pie dough or crust.

If pie crust is not yet on your list of skills, take a few hours and learn how to do it. The ingredients are inexpensive, even if you have to throw a dozen doughs or crusts out before your thirteenth attempt is a winner. Once you master the technique, making your own crust is a snap.

A simple way to learn is to watch someone who is good with pie dough. Or learn it by yourself from books or videos. It helps to understand what happens in the dough so don’t skip this article.

What goes into it?

Pie dough has only four ingredients: flour, salt, fat and water. Tart pastry has the same four ingredients plus sugar and maybe egg.

Commercial bakers use pastry flour specifically made for pies. Like cake flour, they mill it from low-protein and high-starch soft wheat to promote tenderness. Pastry flour is not as finely milled as cake flour. Don’t try to use cake flour for pie dough. It is too fine-grained, and tends to paste up when you add liquid.

Specialized pastry flour is not available to most home cooks, but you can mix cake flour with bread flour in a 7:3 ratio and come close to commercial pastry flour. But that is hardly necessary-all-purpose flour is quite suitable, too, and you always have it on your shelf.

Salt is an essential ingredient and does not vary in amount, without salt the crust tastes flat. Use ¼ teaspoon salt for every cup of flour.

The amount of water you need, however, varies with the humidity, your climate and the amount of moisture in your flour and fat. Recipes give an approximate amount, but start with smaller than called for, and add more little at a time to arrive at the correct, easily workable dough consistency.

Fat is also a variable. What fat you choose and how much you use makes a huge difference in the consistency, texture, flakiness and flavor of your pie crust.

The role of fat in the dough

The fat’s ability to interfere with the formation of gluten is called its shortening power. What happens is that the fat coats the protein grains in the flour and keep them from absorbing moisture.

Without moisture the proteins cannot convert into gluten, that elastic sheet-like substance so essential for good breads but a killer in pie dough. Lard, vegetable shortening and oil have high shortening power. Butter and margarine have less because they are not all fat-they contain about 16 percent water (while other fats have none).

Lard not only has high shortening power but also just the right physical properties (called plasticity and dispersability by food scientists) to produce the most flaky pastries. But you cannot use just any kind of lard.

Which part of the pig it comes from, or even from which part of a single

layer it is taken, determines the type. The ideal lard for pies is leaf lard, a layered fat located around the pig’s kidneys. It has a crystalline structure that readily forms tiny layers in the pastry, resulting in flakiness that a top pastry chef can be proud of.

When bakers, both commercial and at home used lard extensively for biscuits and pastries in the past, leaf lard was readily available. Concerns about fats and cholesterol in modern times has changed all that, and these days you would be hard put to get leaf lard even from a good butcher.

Slaughterhouses no longer separate fats from various parts of the pig; there is not enough demand for leaf lard. The lard that is available in retail markets is a rendered fat that may be from any part of the animal. It is a refined, emulsified, hydrogenated all-purpose product meant mostly for frying.

Though not ideal, this lard still makes good flaky pastry.