Cook's pie crust odyssey goes from crumbly to flaky

I tried to avoid the cliches: Easy as. In the sky. Mom, baseball and apple.

But the real thing is too alluring for me to stay away.

Some people are cake people. For others, cookies hold an endless allure. For me, a slice of pie wins out every time. I don't know what that might say about my or anyone else's personality, future successes or luck at cards.

Mostly, regrettably, I live without it much of the year. A good pie is rare and becoming even harder to find.

Forget the store-bought: that stuff is cardboard. I love the look -- but not the taste -- of pies at diners, bright beneath the fluorescent lights on their metal shelves, sadly tasteless on your plate. Even the resurgence of small bakeries hasn't turned up any wonderful pies that come to mind, and I'm a sucker for a bakery every time.

No, homemade is the only path to a true pie.

Crust's station

This conviction is probably based on some mythology of mine about the past, where pies cooled on window sills (echoes of Tom Sawyer ). I vividly recall a childhood outing to an apple orchard that spurred my dad to a triathlon of slicing, rolling, baking. We ate a lot of apple pie that winter.

But high summer is when my pie craving really comes to a boil.

It's the fruit, obviously. Strangely, though, I don't care much about what fruit it is. Blueberry, strawberry, cherry, apple, lemon, rhubarb, pecan, coconut, custard even. It's all good, as long it's fresh and not some supersweet glop boiled to death or even out of a can.

Nope, for me, the heart of a pie is the crust.

Not that it ever came easy to me. (Whoops, broke that cliche promise).

Truly, pie crusts mystify me. Bread, with its interaction of yeast and sugar and liquid, seems natural. Slow-cooking barbecue, simple. But a pie crust's reliance on fat and flour, cold and heat, stumps me.

A revelation

Over the past few summers, I decided to see if I could learn what I didn't know. It helped that lying around my in-laws' vacation cabin is a book called "The Pie and Pastry Bible."

Author Rose Levy Beranbaum lays out, with intricate, virtually scientific precision, every single variable: ingredients by weight and volume, minimum times to chill bowls and utensils; variations for single-crust pies, lattice-crust pies, double-crust pies; crusts with only butter and crusts with cream cheese; crusts with vegetable shortening and crusts with lard.

My first crust, for a rhubarb pie, did the job and no more. A food processor made the elaborate cutting of the fat (butter and cream cheese here) into the flour quick and painless. But the crust was ultimately a patchwork, falling to pieces as I tried to transfer it from the rolling surface to the pie pan. It had no zip.

And two days later, the food processor mysteriously, fatefully, reached the end of its natural life.

I would've given up my plan right then, if I hadn't already bought four quarts of fresh strawberries for pie No. 2, and meticulously sliced and seeded lemons to steep in sugar and their own juices overnight for pie No. 3.

So while everyone went on to the sun and the water, I broke out the bible, dusting my hands and everything else around me to attempt the foreboding "by hand" method. Her theory is to freeze the butter (and the bowl, and Ziploc bags for mixing), put everything together deftly, chill again (warmth is the enemy of a flaky crust, apparently), and, most importantly, roll out in a way so that the fat turns to flakes.

Then gather into a ball, then flatten to a disk, chill again, and hours later roll out.

How sweet it isn't

I'm still not entirely convinced about what happened. Maybe it was just that I'd made another crust a day or two earlier, so I'd learned a few mistakes to avoid. Maybe the closer contact -- mashing the pieces of frozen butter into the flour with my fingers was a drawn-out process.

But crust No. 2 was a tremendous leap beyond any pie I ever made before. The strawberry pie (uncooked local fruit, the crust a baked shell just to hold the sliced, juicy fruit and a thin glaze of cooked juice) was crunchy and buttery against the bursting red summeriness of the filling.

Then came No. 3, another leap. A double-crust with lemon curd inside, it was the flakiest, lightest thing I've eaten in years. (Not to boast). With nothing but egg yolks and sugar to soften the thinnest slices of whole lemon, the rind turned into something like soft-curd candy and the filling transformed in the oven.

Not sweet enough for some, it has become my perfect pie. Juicy with a sharp bite against the sweet, almost as much about the smell as the taste, the crust stands out as the star it should be.