It did, Jessica. Any teacher who teaches gifted kids. I mean, really? Such CRAP. I was so angry.

Jessica, was it super airy? Like whipped? Maybe overworked the dough?

Yeah, exactly - I was very dubious about the time they wanted me to process it, and the amount of liquid it calls for, and now I'm pretty sure I was right on both counts. (Also, shortening is gross. Back to all-butter crusts for me.)

I've looked at the recipe before (we never have vodka in the house so it's not one I think to make) and I kept thinking how weird that it wanted you to handle it so much.

Also, shortening is gross. Back to all-butter crusts for me.

My never-fail crust is from CI's The Best Recipe. Calls for a lot of butter, but also shortening. And shortening is what gives the crust its flakiness. Butter for flavor, shortening for flakiness, that's what I always heard.

In general, for pie crusts, anything that calls for a lot of handling is a bad idea: it's the opposite of bread dough that way. And it's why I prefer to make my crusts by hand; well, that and that I don't own a food processor.

And shortening is what gives the crust its flakiness. Butter for flavor, shortening for flakiness, that's what I always heard.

Alton Brown told me the opposite! Butter for flakiness, shortening for tenderness. (My standby pie crust is AB's recipe which pulverizes about a third of the butter in the food processor before cutting in the rest, so you get some teeny evenly distributed globules of fat for tenderness plus some of big flat uneven pieces of butter for flakiness.)

Next time I may try the AB recipe but with vodka instead of water. Hmmmm...

anything that calls for a lot of handling is a bad idea

That's what the vodka is supposed to fix - because it doesn't form long gluten strands the way water does, you can work the dough to death and it won't get tough.

Seriously, tho, that's really bad. I was a special flower gifted child, and being wrong is half the fun! 'Cause then you learn something. Which you didn't know! Or you wouldn't have been wrong to begin with!

And it didn't get tough. It got... cakey?

anything that calls for a lot of handling is a bad idea

The vodka is supposed to counter that, though. That's what's supposed to make it foolproof--that you can't overhandle it, which is one of the most easy (and tempting...just gotta fix this right...yeah...) errors to make.

But it looks counter-intuitive all laid out there, even with the compensating factor (like my alcoholic ice cream cookbook--WHAT??? No, there are rules! This is chemistry! Oh...this is chemistry...)

This is why I let other people make my pie crusts. And my pie.

Liese, that is part of my issue. We learn a lot through failure, mainly about what to avoid.

I think I'm also smarting over this because I had a kid who wanted to argue with me about King Henry IV's speech that ends with "uneasy is the head that wears the crown." She wrote an entire essay about how sleep was death and Henry wanted to avoid it, which is a total misread. Which is what I said. But then she told me the word death is in the poem so that is what it had to be about. I pointed out smoke is also in the poem, but it's not about cigarettes. Or ships, also mentioned.

Just. No. Be wrong and say, "I don't know what I missed." Don't try to argue for an interpretation that requires too much work to prove you are right.