My First Pear Pie

So about two weeks ago, one of my co-workers was going on and ON about how his wife made this pear pie at home.  Wait!  Let me clarify!  She made the pie at home with a store-bought crust, and fresh pears.

Now, I had not yet had a pie of pears...so all week I salivated over the idea of making a pear pie.  I cracked out the old 70's cake-n-pie book which Little A and I got at a local library bookstore, on a WHIM.  (yes, it's fantastic all the wonderful things we can find that are old and thrown away.  I LOVE thrifting!!  AND, we weren't even looking for a pie recipe book ;-) Anyway, my crust recipe came from this fabulous little book below:

I printed off the recipe for "fresh pear pie" from HERE, and arranged all the ingredients for both the pie crust + pear filling...

I actually (at first) followed the method "cutting" the ingredients together for the crust.  I used butter knives, per the retro pie booklet.  Then my husband walked up and showed me how to use a fork.  That went much quicker.  

For those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of making pie crust from scratch, the ingredients get mixed COLD (that's butter, milk, shortening, flour, a bit of salt - *the milk and butter being cold, duh*).  The key here is to not allow the butter and*or shortening to "melt" in with the other ingredients.  You want to keep the fat source in chunks, as to create a "flakiness" in the crust.  For those of you whom appreciate a flakier, tastier crust, use more (or ALL) butter.  The reason for this is that butter is something like 80% fat, 20% liquid, whereas the shortening is 100% fat.  The liquid portion of the butter helps to create pockets/layers in the crust.  The shortening cannot afford this, as it is 100% fat.  You can use equal portions of each to substitute (that's what I did and it worked out well).  Another note:  shortening is flavorless, butter is RICH.

STAY CALM

and

EMBRACE THE

BUTTER

 See?  My pink pyrex pie plate (say THAT fast 5 times!) is also embracing the butter...

Roll out the pie crusts (top & bottom!)

 

Layer the filling (slices of pears, I used d'anjou, bosc, & those small apple pears) and sugar/dough mixture...

Remember, the recipe is "fresh pear pie" on allrecipes.com!

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Both my husband AND Little A loved the pie!  They loved it by itself and with vanilla ice cream.

XOXO.

(I will later post the actual recipe for the crust...when I remember ;-)