The apple pie was picture-perfect. It had an impressive dome, an evenly browned crust and a sprinkling of coarse sugar over the top.

Being a neophyte baker, there was no way I could have made it myself. But at The Flaky Tart on Mount Pleasant Ave., just south of Eglinton, owner Madelaine Sperry was more than happy to take my pie plate and my order.

"You tell me how you want it to look and I'll do it," the affable baker says. "It doesn't bother me."

I ask for apple and direct her to make it look amateurish. I am going to present it to my neighbour Ed Lamb, a pie maker extraordinaire who had, about six months earlier, taught me and six other women on my street how to make apple pie.

Only one of us had attempted it. And every time I saw Lamb, the teacher would gently remind this pupil that she had yet to tackle her fear of flour.

Like many other people who grew up in a non-baking household, I never learned how to make pastry. Or bread. Or pasta. Gluten, truth be told, terrifies me.

Sperry understands this.

"Baking is very fickle. If something isn't right there isn't anything you can do about it. It's very scientific."

Most North American pies use all-purpose flour because it has a higher gluten content (10 to 12 per cent protein), which holds up the fat when it melts and creates the flaky layers we so adore. Cake and pastry flour (8 to 10 per cent protein) is often added to lower gluten content. But work the pastry too much, and the dreaded gluten develops anyway, creating a tough dough. The fat also changes the outcome: You can't beat butter for flavour, but it's harder to work with.

So $22 later, I take the picture-perfect pie home. Sperry uses a mix of cake and pastry flour, all-purpose flour, sugar and salt, and sticks with Crisco vegetable shortening for the fat. Each pie is rolled out by hand, which avoids the factory look. But Sperry has been baking since she was 4, so she can't help herself. The crust, for example, is perfectly fluted.

Lamb likes it.

"This is very good, Kim," he says. "The pastry is very flaky. It definitely tastes like a homemade apple pie, which is key."

When he was growing up in Ottawa, in a household with seven kids, his mother made pie four or five times a week.

"You didn't buy desserts in those days," says Lamb, who is 62.

In early August, when the temperature was cool, he made 19 pies in eight days. A couple of summers ago, he made 50 in two months.

The pies are given away to neighbours, particularly to newcomers and families of newborns. Dinner guests are always forewarned pie is coming, a gentle nudge to let them know they need to save room.

"It is a genuine source of joy for me to make and serve a pie, to see the happy faces," Lamb says.

I fess up to the fake after I see his contented smile. He takes it well.

"You totally fooled me," he says. "I was fooled by somebody who makes a good pie."

Later, he calls me. He didn't want to be too critical of his pupil, but now that he knows it was a professional job, he wants me to know he thinks the crust was too tough where it joins together.

My other pie expert, David Keogh, is so enamoured of pastry and filling that he requests birthday pies, not cakes. On one trip up to his cottage in Southampton this summer, he stopped in no fewer than eight towns to try the pie. This is what he refers to as "outside" pie, given that his wife, Moira McCallum, makes a pretty mean pie at home, known as "inside" pie.

"A lot of that pie was crap," says Keogh, who has worked in the restaurant business for 30 years. "There's a lot of bad pie out there."

I tricked him with the Flaky Tart pie, too. "This is like a classic Canadian pie," he says.

When I tell him it was an "outside" pie, he says he never suspected.

"Perhaps I was infatuated with the pie itself," he says. "Perhaps I saw through nothing because I just saw the pie sitting on the counter."

Like Sperry, Keogh is in favour of farming out pie if the host is stressed or has the fear of flour.

"Making a pie for people on the outside is hard. People who know how to do it, don't think about it."

Sperry says it takes practice, and there are a lot of factors that are beyond the baker's control.

"With pastry you have to have patience," she says. "I think it's a time factor. You can't rush pastry."

In the home kitchen, there are two kinds of people: cooks and bakers. For cooks, recipes are mere suggestions, flexible in their ingredients and proportions. For bakers, on the other hand, recipes are gospel truth, precise in their measurements and techniques.

Me, I'm definitely a cook. I enjoy the spontaneity of tweaking a recipe or making one up based on what's in the fridge. But the downside to being a cook is that, no matter how often I've prepared a particular bread or pastry recipe, I can't guarantee the same results every time. I envy my grandmother, who can whip together dough for dozens of dinner rolls without even measuring the flour. She just knows when the dough looks and feels right.

After a recent cheese-puff disaster my typically lofty gougeres came out of the oven as flat as cookies I decided to become less of a cook and more of a baker. So I quizzed six baking experts about ingredients and techniques.

Essential ingredients for baking, clockwise from top left: eggs, butter, milk, vegetable oil, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar, yeast, and flour.

The secret to successful baking? It's all in the chemistry. And here's the scientific lowdown on how each basic baking ingredient functions in the kitchen.

Flour

I started my research with flour. After all, the protein in flour lends structure to baked goods, from poufy popovers to crusty artisanal breads. As pastry chef Shuna Fish Lydon wrote recently, In baking, protein provides the walls holding up roofs. But you can't build walls of any kind without elbow grease.

I coaxed Peter Reinhart, a baking instructor and the author of several books, including The Bread Bakers Apprentice, into sharing the basics behind dough construction. He told me that two proteins, glutenin and gliadin inhabit flour.

When you add water to the flour to hydrate the ingredients, these proteins are drawn to each other and bond, Reinhart says. This new protein is gluten.

Reinhart suggested I call Shirley Corriher for the nitty-gritty on the science of baking. A former Vanderbilt University biochemist, Corriher turned her kitchen into a laboratory of sorts and published her experiments in two cookbooks, CookWise & BakeWise.

Kneading builds gluten networks, says Corriher, which in turn support bread. While dough rises, existing gluten threads touch and create more links. Later, inside the oven, the proteins and starches in the flour transform into the sturdy webbing inside a loaf of bread.

Pastries, on the other hand, demand a more tender crumb. Corriher explains that the lower protein content in pastry, cake, and all-purpose flour creates a less rigid gluten network and a finer crumb.

But selecting the right flour for the job isn't as easy as it seems. The problem with all-purpose flour is that it is all over the place in protein content, Corriher says.

So she shared a trick to help determine flours protein content: Measure two cups into a bowl and stir it with a scant cup of water.

If you have a high-protein flour, its going to suck in water like crazy and form a dough, she says. Less protein-rich flour won't come together unless you add more flour.

I tested the all-purpose white flour in my cupboard. Sure enough, I had made my top-heavy cheese puffs with a high-protein flour more appropriate for hearty bread.

Unfortunately, as Corriher says, there's no easy way to determine the protein content of flour. Just check out the label on the flour in your pantry. The manufacturer has rounded the protein weight to the nearest gram per quarter-cup. So one flour that contains 2.5 grams of protein per quarter-cup, and a second flour that contains 3.4 grams, would both round to 3 grams of protein for labeling purposes. That difference, however slight, can affect how the rest of the ingredients play off each other.

Because there's so much guesswork involved with flour and the other elements of baking, Reinhart suggests treating recipes as templates, not rigid rules. But wait a sec; isn't precision the whole point of baking?

Every situation is different, he says. The instructions are a general guideline to get you into the ballpark. You let the dough dictate to you what it needs.

Bakers benefit from learning more about the reactions that happen in their mixing bowls, pastry chef Carole Bloom adds. Once you know how ingredients work, that?s when you can start to improvise, she says.

Leavening agents

I love peering through the oven window to watch as loaves and cakes puff up. Yeast, baking soda, and baking powder combined with the extra oomph of steam supply airiness to bread and pastries.

Reinhart reminded me that yeast literally brings bread to life. As yeast feeds on sugars in dough, it oozes a liquid that, when it touches an air pocket, lets loose carbon dioxide and alcohol. Or, in Reinhart's words, Thee yeast burps and sweats. The elastic dough traps those tiny carbon-dioxide bubbles like a balloon.

Baking powder and baking soda, meanwhile, release carbon dioxide that ?only enlarges bubbles that are already in the batter, Corriher explains.

It?s important to cream butter thoroughly to whip those bubbles of CO2 into the fat. Start with butter that?s soft, not runny,? advises Bloom, If the butter is too firm, you?re not going to get it to that fluffy stage.

Baking soda reacts with acids ? citrus juice, buttermilk, molasses, honey, and chocolate are all acidic to produce carbon dioxide, which in turn puffs the batter.

Double acting baking powder, adds Corriher, releases carbon dioxide twice during the baking process: once when it reacts with liquids during mixing, and again when it?s exposed to higher temperatures in the oven.

Bakers struggling with heavy cakes and too-dense breads can often point to leavening agents as the culprit. Resist the temptation to add more leavener to compensate for a weak rise, warns Corriher: ?If the recipe is overleavened, the bubbles run together, float to the top, and pop? ? and your pastry sinks.

One teaspoon of baking powder ? or just a quarter-teaspoon of baking soda ? is enough to leaven one cup of flour, says Corriher.

Eggs

In pastry, eggs ?help bind things together, explains Mani Niall, a pastry chef and the author of the cookbook Sweet!.

Egg whites work as leavening agents. When heated, the proteins in egg whites uncoil and practically explode up the sides of the pan, just like Dutch baby pancakes.

Because it calls for lots of eggs, a Dutch baby pancake puffs up in the oven and then deflates once removed from the heat.

Corriher has experimented with substituting egg whites for whole eggs to force a bigger rise out of cream puffs or gougères. But substitutions can be tricky, she cautions, because the proteins in egg whites force out moisture when they?re heated. The result: puffy but chalk-dry pastries.

Egg yolks, on the other hand, lend richness and moisture to baked goods, says David Leobvitz, a pastry chef whose books include Room for Dessert. ?If you were to make a cake with all egg yolks, it?d be moist, but also kind of wet, he explains.

And make sure to bring eggs to room temperature before mixing. If you add cold eggs to butter and sugar, they won't combine correctly, Lebovitz warns.

Fats

As anyone who's ever eaten a delicate, buttery croissant can attest, fats are incredible tenderizers. Fats coat the proteins in flour, says Corriher, preventing them from bonding with water and forming gluten.

You don't want a lot of gluten in muffins and scones, making them chewy in a breadlike way, Niall says.

Oil coats flours proteins better than butter does, which explains why oil-based cakes are moister than butter-based cakes.

Sugar and milk

Sugar gives pastries their addictive sweetness, but it also helps keep them moist. ?If you think of baked goods without sugar, it's bread, because it?s not tender,? says Niall. Not surprisingly, there's a scientific explanation behind sugar's tenderizing properties.

If you have a lot of sugar present, your glutenin runs off with sugar, your gliadin runs off with sugar, and you don't get much gluten formed, Corriher explains. And then your pastry won't have any structure.

Likewise, adding milk to batter helps keep baked goods moist. Milk contains the sugar lactose, which bonds with flour proteins and hinders gluten formation.

Both sugar and milk promote browning, Corriher says. Essentially, bread crust is caramelized sugar.

Salt

Recipes for baked goods usually call for a pinch of salt because it helps conceal bitter tastes. But the mineral also plays a key role in gluten formation, says Patti Christie, a biochemist who teaches a series of popular kitchen chemist courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The reason you add salt to dough is to make dough more elastic,Christie explains. Charged amino acids in the flour are going to interact with the ions in the salt, and that helps line up the gluten fibers. Your bread is going to have better texture.

As for sugary treats, a bit of salt added to batters and doughs helps to balance sweetness and enhance other flavors during baking. And if added as a finishing touch to, say, chocolate chip cookies, salt provides a pleasing textural contrast.

Lab work

After talking with bakers and chemists about ingredients, methods, and reactions, I decided there was one more person I needed to quiz: my grandmother, the master baker in my family. She didn't have advice about science, but she did say that practice is the key to good baking.

But just how much practice? Well, she's baked four to six dozen dinner rolls for our big, hungry family every week or two for the past 58 years. That adds up to nearly 150,000 rolls in more than 2,000 baking sessions.

After you've made bread for a while, you can tell just by feeling the dough how good a batch you're going to get, she says.

So even though I?m fresh out of my lessons on baking science, I still have lots of homework ahead of me. But with enough experimentation, I may be able to switch on my family baking genes after all.

Based in Portland, Oregon, Kelly Stewart is the editor of Roast magazine. Her writing about food has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Meatpaper and Zagat Survey guidebooks.

This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #24

The first time I saw a home cook ''open'' phyllo the papery pastry dough essential to such classic Greek dishes as baklava and spanakópitta (spinach pie), I was visiting a monastery in Metsovo, a scenic mountain village in the Ípiros region of northwestern Greece. Ípiros is pítta country?not pita, the ubiquitous Middle Eastern flat bread, but pítta, which is the word Greeks use to refer to a whole inventory of savory pies, whose ingredients are tucked between buttered or oiled layers of crisp phyllo. There are literally hundreds of variations, with fillings of greens, cheeses, eggs, grains, sometimes meat, and just about anything else the area's bounty can provide.

The monastery caretaker's wife was in her kitchen preparing cassiata, a local version of cheese pie made with about twenty layers of phyllo, and invited me to watch. 

She was so proficient as she ''opened'' the dough (this is the term Greeks favor for the process) that it was hard to follow her movements, but both her tools and her technique were deceptively simple: Dividing the dough into small balls, she worked one piece at a time, first flattening each sphere with her palms into a small disk, then gently wrapping the disk around a long, thin dowel. A big, round piece of wood, resembling a giant Ping-Pong paddle permanently coated with flour, was her work surface. With incredible speed and dexterity, she stretched the dough along the length of the dowel, coaxing it with her fingertips from the center towards the ends in order to form a circle about two feet in diameter when rolled out. It was an impressive performance.

Phyllo yufka to the Turks, strudel to the Hungarians (who learned to make it from the Turks in the 16th century), and brik to the Tunisians. Is common throughout the Balkans and the Middle East. It has been known in the Anatolia region of Turkey since at least the 11th century and possibly earlier, and its presence there provokes debate over who invented phyllo (and the many filled and layered dishes based on it) in the first place. Writer Charles Perry, an expert on foods of the Islamic world, believes that phyllo evolved from the stacked thin griddle cakes that were a staple of the Turkish nomads who arrived in Anatolia from Central Asia between the 11th and 15th centuries. The poverty of the migrants' diet, Perry suggests, might have encouraged them to make layered breads similar in shape to the ''thick breads'' found among settled peoples. Speros Vryonis, a scholar of Greek culture, disagrees, arguing that thin layered pastry was just too complicated for a nomadic people to either prepare or develop and asserting that the Greeks were making layered pastry as early as the second century A.D.

In Greece itself and in American cities with large Greek populations, like New York and Chicago, a guild of phyllo makers still exists. Its members, usually men, make and sell the pastry in small, quaintly anachronistic neighborhood workshops like the one at Manhattan's Poseidon Bakery, whose back room is crowded with huge bags of flour, two eight-foot-square tables for stretching the pastry, the requisite Hobart dough mixer, and a slew of muslin sheets?all covered (as are the phyllo makers) in a fine film of flour.

The phyllo made at commercial bakeries like Poseidon is very similar to the homemade kind: Both are made with flour, salt, water, and a little shortening or oil, though home cooks occasionally add yeast and some vinegar, wine, or lemon juice, which supposedly makes the pastry more elastic (and commercial phyllo usually contains preservatives). Once the commercial dough is mixed and relaxed, it is flattened into large, thin slabs, sometimes with the help of a roller. Next, the phyllo mastoras (master) slaps it onto the center of the table, which is tightly covered with muslin onto which cornflour has been sprinkled to keep the phyllo from sticking. Then the pulling and stretching begins. Working his way very quickly around the table six or seven times, the mastoras pulls the dough outwards towards the edges, stretching it little by little. It doesn't take him more than a minute to transform the dough into roughly an eight-foot square, an awe-inspiring feat. (Some phyllo makers have a flair for the dramatic. One artisan I know takes a golf ball-size bit of dough, stretches it along the arc of his arm, and turns it into a huge sheet with just a flick of his wrist.) The pastry is then cut into smaller sheets, stacked between muslin to help keep it moist, and packed in plastic bags. It takes two bakers eight to ten hours to turn out about a hundred and fifty pounds of dough.

Old-fashioned phyllo makers are disappearing, unfortunately, threatened (even in Greece) by the growing popularity of frozen phyllo?which, ironically, owes its existence to one such skilled mastoras. Jim Kantzios, a baker from northern Greece who opened a pastry shop in Cleveland in the late 1950s, grew tired of the time and energy it took to make phyllo the traditional way, and with the help of his nephew, George Pappas?a lab technician and inveterate tinkerer?he invented a machine that could turn out the pastry in exquisitely thin sheets at a rate of about a hundred and fifty pounds per hour. Having originated that machine, essentially a sheet roller, Pappas created a second device that produced phyllo by extrusion at a rate of about eight hundred pounds per hour, or 200 feet per minute. He obtained a patent for his Fully Automated Fillo Dough Machine in 1975. That was the competitive edge that turned a company called Athens Foods into what is now the world's largest producer of the pastry.

Serious cooks in Greece still make their own phyllo, but almost exclusively for savory dishes like spanakópitta. For baklava and other sweets, even home cooks use commercial sheets, fresh or frozen. There is no question that these end up thinner than anything the home cook can produce and thus yield much flakier and crisper pastries.

Consequently, the wooden dowel is becoming all but obsolete in Greece today; the art of making phyllo has been lost to most of the younger generation. That's a shame, because opening phyllo is fun and nowhere near as complicated as, say, turning out croissants. Watching the caretaker's wife in Metsovo, I imagined the making of phyllo to be an incredibly difficult process?the kind of skill one perfects only after years of observation and practice. When I tried it, though, I figured it out after a couple of attempts. Now I'm an ''expert''. I love making phyllo, and I wouldn't part with my dowel for anything.

The annual return of mincemeat desserts is an occasion worth celebratingThanksgiving is a pie lover's holiday. At my house, all the usual suspects are in attendance: pecan, pumpkin, and apple à la mode.

But it's mincemeat pie that always intrigues me the most. My family's version of the dessert tastes like a sophisticated fruitcake: potent with brandy, warmed by spices, dense with dried currants, candied citrus, and raisins, and possessed of a deep, satisfying richness thanks to the inclusion of beef suet (which usually constitutes the only "meat" in modern-day variants of the dish). It's an extravagant pie. A princely pie. A pie that seems transported from another time and place.

Mince pie, as the dessert is known in Great Britain, dates to the 12th century, when sweet-savory flavor combinations from the Near East became popular in England. The pie originally contained both fruit and meat; mutton, beef, ox tongue, and venison were popular choices. The brandy and rum that we've come to expect in this dessert weren't common until much later, when cooks began preserving the filling with alcohol. The pies came in all shapes: there were tall, molded pastries known as raised pies, as well as dainty, single-serving ones. For Christmas, cooks often made an oblong version meant to evoke the shape of Christ's manger; the spices inside?typically black pepper, ground cloves, and mace?were said to represent the gifts brought by the three kings from the East. The lavish use of these once exotic ingredients earned mince pie pride of place at Elizabethan-era and Jacobean-era feasts, where it was served as part of the main course, especially around Christmastime. Each Christmas, wealthy landowners would invite tenants and serfs into the manor house for a saturnalian celebration of eating, drinking, gambling, dancing, and general merriment?a payment in pies for a year's worth of service.

Such bacchanals hardly escaped the notice of the Puritan upstarts who aimed to reform England during the 17th century. The Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell is often credited with banning mince pies after he became lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1653, but in fact he merely enforced existing Parliamentary prohibitions against all things connected with the Christmas feast.

The English Puritans who began arriving in the colonies in 1620 likewise eschewed mince pie on December 25, but, as the culinary historian Sandra Oliver told me, "The Puritans did love mincemeat and other festival foods, and they found ways to enjoy them at other times of the year." Soon enough, once popular Christmas fare like turkey and mincemeat pie resurfaced at the colonists' harvesttime feasts of thanksgiving.

Considering how popular mincemeat pie used to be, why did it become the rarity that it is today? The recipe's richness may be to blame. In the mid-19th century, Sarah Josepha Hale, the American writer famous for petitioning President Abraham Lincoln to decree Thanksgiving a national holiday, suggested that the pie be reserved exclusively for holidays because it had a reputation (wholly undeserved) for being difficult to digest. Other 19th-century writers took a harder line. The physician and educator William Andrus Alcott, for example, denounced mincemeat as a "very unwholesome compound" and an "abomination" in his 1839 tract The Young House-Keeper, in which he posited a direct correlation between physical health and moral rectitude. For the remainder of the 19th century, the battle continued between pie lovers and moral crusaders, who singled out mincemeat as irredeemably decadent. A New York Times editorial from 1873 relates the lurid tale of the "mince-pie debauchee" with his "wasted features and sunken eyes".

To the likely dismay of mincemeat's detractors, the addition of alcohol, which preserves the filling, enabled the dish to become an even more frequent indulgence. Paula Marcoux, a curator at Plimoth Plantation, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, told me that 19th-century housewives used their crock of mincemeat as a sort of convenience food. Meat remained a key ingredient through the 19th century, even as the proportions of fruit and liquor increased. As late as 1931, The Joy of Cooking (Simon & Schuster) contained a mincemeat recipe that called for "4 pounds lean beef, chopped"; by contrast, in the 1997 edition of that cookbook, the recipe forgoes both meat and suet (a dense fat taken from around a cow's kidneys), reflecting the prevailing trend toward sweeter versions of the pie.

Still, most traditional mincemeats continue to contain beef suet. Eric A. Decker, a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offers a plausible explanation for that: "Suet not only creates a richer texture and imparts its own, subtle umami flavor," he says. "It also acts as a reservoir for other flavors. Citrus, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg are all fat soluble. The presence of suet affects the way those elements are released, making for a longer flavor profile." Pork lard would function in much the same way, but pork would have been considered by our English forebears too common a meat to include in a holiday pie.

Thus, when I set out to test a few mincemeat pie recipes, I stuck to ones that featured suet. The oldest recipe I tried was published in 1591, in an English volume unabashedly titled A Book of Cookrye Very necessary for all such as delight therin. The butter, sugar, and rose water glaze for the pastry sounded promising, but the one and a half pounds of minced beef, lightly spiced and untouched by even a hint of liquor, made for a dessert that tasted like hamburger baked inside a pie crust. That recipe also taught me that suet must be minced very fine; otherwise the filling can be lumpy and unpalatable. Infinitely more successful was a recipe from Jane Grigson's English Food (Macmillan, 1974). Made with juicy rump steak and heavy on the raisins and currants, Grigson's version, based on a Victorian one, harked back to savory pies while still delivering the spice and brandy I'd missed in the 1591 example.

Finally, for a more contemporary take, I can highly recommend SAVEUR contributor Tamasin Day-Lewis's recipe for mincemeat, which appears in her book Good Tempered Food (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002). Made with dried fruit and candied citrus, as well as fresh apples, almonds, cognac, dark rum, and suet (but no meat), the remarkably bright-tasting filling works beautifully both in the individual-size pastry shells favored for mince pies in Britain and in larger, American-style pie crusts. When I asked Day-Lewis how she hit upon that recipe, she laughed. "I couldn't begin to tell you at this point, because I change it every year." For me, it's that element of inscrutability that's always made mincemeat the most seductive of the holiday pies. You never quite know what you'll get.

At its most basic, pie crust is nothing more than flour, fat, and liquid. But if that's all it is, why is pie crust so notoriously difficult to make by hand? Let's take a look:

Flour: Flour is there for strength, structure, and elasticity. It's the binder that holds the other ingredients together and, well, makes the pastry a pastry! For pie crusts, we usually use regular all-purpose flour instead of cake or pastry flour because we want some gluten development for structure, but not too much.

Remember - mechanical action creates gluten, so it's important not to over-handle the dough.

Fat: You can use butter, vegetable shortening, lard, or even oil in pie crust, each to a different effect. Butter provides the most flavor and a wonderful melting quality in the mouth, but it tends to not make the most tender pastry. Shortening and lard make a very tender pastry, but don't always have the best flavor for a sweet pie.

Also, if the fat is left in large pieces, the crust will be more flaky. If it's incorporated into the flower more thoroughly, the crust will be tender and crumbly.

Liquid: The liquid in a pie crust creates the steam that lifts the pastry and creates flakes. It also gets absorbed into the flour, helping to create gluten. Too little liquid and the dough won't hold together, but add too much and you'll end up with a rock-hard crust!

Salt: It might sound odd to have salt in a sweet pie crust, but a pinch or two actually helps boost the flavour without making the crust taste salty.

Sugar: Not all pie crusts have sugar, but those that do will be more tender since sugar interferes with gluten development. In our experience, sugar can also make the pie dough so tender that it's hard to roll out and transfer to your pan without breaking.

Egg: This makes the dough more pliable and easy to roll out. Eggs also make the crust more compact.

Acid and Alcohol: Both acid and alcohol tenderize pie dough, make it easier to roll out, and prevent it from shrinking in your pan. If these things give you trouble, try substituting a teaspoon of the liquid with lemon juice or a tablespoon or two with liquor. Vodka is often used because it won't affect the flavor of the dough.

Do you have a favourite recipe for pie dough? We'd be interested to hear about it. Email us on [email protected]

Spice up your crumbles with nuts, crushed biscuits and rich brown sugars!

If you were asked to make a list of your favourite autumn and winter puddings, crumble would surely come near the top. Maybe it?s the contrast between the crunchy top and the tart fruit underneath; perhaps it?s because it?s so luscious served piping hot with cold cream poured over, or maybe it?s the anticipation of those midnight raids for spoonfuls of chilled leftovers straight from the fridge.

A crumble topping uses basically the same ingredients as pastry ? flour, butter, sugar and sometimes spice ? but is much simpler to make. (During wartime when butter was in short supply, cooks had to use whatever was available.)

It?s possible that the great British crumble is a derivative of Streusel, a sweet topping for tea breads and cakes originating in Austria and Central Europe and almost always containing ground cinnamon. Streusel comes from the German word streusen, to scatter, which is also how we apply our crumbly topping to fruit. Streusel has more sugar in relation to flour than crumble, and the result is a crisper (and naturally sweeter) topping. The Americans also have a version of a fruit-crusted pie called cobbler. The cobbler topping is sometimes used for meat stews as well as fruit.

The original ? and then some
The traditional English crumble starts life as a sweet shortcrust pastry without the liquid. For a basic crumble mix to serve 6, cut 140g butter into 200g plain flour and stir through 75g sugar. Then simply scatter onto prepared fruit in a baking dish. As the fruit cooks, the butter melts and mixes with the flour and sugar to make the crumbly texture that makes it so moreish. Apple crumble is probably the best known and certainly one of the best-loved crumbles, but given our abundance of native autumn fruit (and even some of the exotic imports) there is no limit to the variations and combinations you can make. On the same note, why rely just on flour, butter and sugar for your crown of crumble? Try these variations:

• Whip up a tropical crumble by peeling and slicing several large mangoes and a fresh pineapple (or used canned chunks) and toss into a baking dish. Add the juice from the fresh fruit or several tablespoons if using canned. Make a basic crumble mixture with flour and butter and use vanilla sugar in place of ordinary sugar. Add about 3 heaped tbsp shredded coconut and toss through. Sprinkle over the mango and pineapple and bake at 190C/375F/gas mark 5 until golden.
• Add some roughly chopped hazelnuts to a basic crumble mixture and use rhubarb and raspberries for the fruit.
• Walnut crumble is the perfect topping for peeled, sliced pears, while pecan nuts add something special to a tart plum crumble. Cut the plums in half, remove the stones and place in the dish, cut side up, before sprinkling over the nutty topping.
• For a peach or nectarine crumble, crush some Amaretti biscuits and add a small handful of slivered almonds to the basic mix.
• Try making any of the above nutty versions in individual ramekins or small pudding bowls, and serve each person their own mini crumble.
• Instead of the usual caster or granulated sugar, use demerara or light brown for even more depth of flavour. This works especially well with nut crumbles.
• Use your favourite muesli cereal with bits of dried fruit and honey for a crunchy, chewy crumble. You won?t need as much sugar in this one. Sprinkle over a mixture of apples, oranges and bits of dried apricot.
• Lightly toast some coarsely milled oatmeal, stir through the crumble then fold in a small tub of Greek yoghurt for a taste reminiscent of the Scottish classic cranachan. Use dark brown or muscovado sugar for a richer, mellower flavour. This will go with any of the fruit combinations above.

These are basically individual pies filled with meats and vegetables that are cooked together. The identifying feature of the Cornish pasty is really the pastry and it’s crimping.

The solid ridge of pastry, hand crimped along the top of the pasty, was so designed that the miner or traveler could grasp the pastie for eating and then throw the crust away. By doing this, he did not run the risk of germs and contamination from dirty hands. The crusts weren't wasted though, as many miners were believers in ghosts or "knockers" that inhabited the mines, and left these crusts to keep the ghosts content. There is some truth to this rumour, because the early Cornish tin mines had large amounts of arsenic, by not eating the corner which the miners held, they kept themselves from consuming large amounts of arsenic.

One end of the pasty would usually contain a sweet filling which the wives would mark or initial so the miner wouldn't eat his dessert first, while the other end would contain meat and vegetables. The true Cornish way to eat a pasty is to hold it in your hands, and begin to eat it from the top down to the opposite end of the initialed part. That way its rightful owner could consume any left over portion later.

Pasties are one of the most ancient methods of cooking and of carrying cooked food. It is said that the early Irish Catholic Priests created them in order to transport food as they walked about the countryside preaching and aiding the people. The dish is mentioned in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor (1598).

The earliest known reference to the pasty contribute it to the Cornish. From 1150 to 1190, Chretien de Troyes, French poet, wrote several Arthurian romances for the Countess of Champagne. In one of them, Eric and Enide, it mentions pasties:

Next Guivret opened a chest and took out two pasties. "my friend," says he, "now try a little of these cold pasties And you shall drink wine mixed with water...." - Both Guivret and Eric came from various parts of what today is considered Cornwall.

Irish people that migrated to northern England took the art of pastie making with them. Soon every miner in northern England took pasties down into the mine for his noon lunch. Pasties were also called oggies by the miners of Cornwell, England. English sailors even took pastie making as far as the shores of Russia (known as piraski or piragies).

The Cornish people who immigrated to Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the United States in the middle of the 19th century to work in the mines made them. The miners reheated the pasties on shovels held over the candles worn on their hats. In Michigan, May 24th has been declared Michigan Pasty Day. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan the pasty has gone from an ethnic food to a regional specialty.

Do you know any interesting info/facts about pies or pasties? We'd love to hear from you. Email us on: [email protected].

The first pies, called "coffins" or "coffyns" were savory meat pies with the crusts or pastry being tall, straight-sided with sealed-on floors and lids. Open-crust pastry (not tops or lids) were known as "traps." These pies held assorted meats and sauce components and were baked more like a modern casserole with no pan (the crust itself was the pan, its pastry tough and inedible). The purpose of a pastry shell was mainly to serve as a storage container and serving vessel, and these are often too hard to actually eat. A small pie was known as a tartlet and a tart was a large, shallow open pie (this is still the definition in England). Since pastry was a staple ingredient in medieval menus, pastry making was taken for granted by the majority of early cookbooks, and recipes are not usually included. It wasn't until the 16th century that cookbooks with pastry ingredients began appearing. Historian believe this was because cookbooks started appearing for the general household and not just for professional cooks.

1545 - A cookbook from the mid 16th century that also includes some account of domestic life, cookery and feasts in Tudor days, called A Proper newe Booke of Cokerye, declarynge what maner of meates be beste in season, for al times in the yere, and how they ought to be dressed, and serued at the table, bothe for fleshe dayes, and fyshe dayes, has a recipe for a short paest for tarte:

To Make Short Paest for Tarte - Take fyne floure and a cursey of fayre water and a dysche of swete butter and a lyttel saffron, and the yolckes of two egges and make it thynne and as tender as ye maye.

1553 - From the English translation by Valoise Armstrong of the 1553 German cookbook Kochbunch der Sabina Welserine, includes a recipe for pastry dough:

To make a pastry dough for all shaped pies - Take flour, the best that you can get, about two handfuls, depending on how large or small you would have the pie. Put it on the table and with a knife stir in two eggs and a little salt. Put water in a small pan and a piece of fat the size of two good eggs, let it all dissolve together and boil. Afterwards pour it on the flour on the table and make a strong dough and work it well, however you feel is right. If it is summer, one must take meat broth instead of water and in the place of the fat the skimmings from the broth. When the dough is kneaded, then make of it a round ball and draw it out well on the sides with the fingers or with a rolling pin, so that in the middle a raised area remains, then let it chill in the cold. Afterwards shape the dough as I have pointed out to you. Also reserve dough for the cover and roll it out into a cover and take water and spread it over the top of the cover and the top of the formed pastry shell and join it together well with the fingers. Leave a small hole. And see that it is pressed together well, so that it does not come open. Blow in the small hole which you have left, then the cover will lift itself up. Then quickly press the hole closed. Afterwards put it in the oven. Sprinkle flour in the dish beforehand. Take care that the oven is properly heated, then it will be a pretty pastry. The dough for all shaped pastries is made in this manner.

Historians have recorded that the roots of pie can loosely be traced back to the ancient Egyptians. The bakers to the pharaohs incorporated nuts, honey, and fruits in bread dough, a primitive form of pastry. Drawings of this can be found etched on the tomb walls of Ramses II, located in the Valley of the Kings. King Ramses II was the third pharoh in the nineteenth dynasty. He ruled from 1304 to 1237 B.C. After years of the tombe being looted and weathered, great amounts of effort are in progress with the hope of returning the tomb to a somewhat presentable stage.

Historians believe that the Greeks actually originated pie pastry. The pies during this period were made by a flour-water paste wrapped around meat; this served to cook the meat and seal in the juices.

The Romans, sampling the delicacy, carried home recipes for making it (a prize of victory when they conquered Greece). The wealthy and educated Romans used various types of meat in every course of the meal, including the dessert course (secundae mensea). According to historical records, oysters, mussels, lampreys, and other meats and fish were normal in Roman puddings. It is thought that the puddings were a lot like pies..

The Roman statesman, Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.), also know as Cato the Elder, wrote a treatise on agriculture called De Agricultura. He loved delicacies and recorded a recipe for his era's most popular pie/cake called Placenta. They were also called libum by the Romans, and were primarily used as an offering to their gods. Placenta was more like a cheesecake, baked on a pastry base, or sometimes inside a pastry case.

The delights of the pie spread throughout Europe, via the Roman roads, where every country adapted the recipes to their customs and foods.

Animated pies or pyes were the most popular banquet entertainment. The nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence . . . four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie," refers to such a pie. According to the rhyme, "When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing. Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the King." In all likelihood, those birds not only sang, but flew briskly out at the assembled guests. Rabbits, frogs, turtles, other small animals, and even small people (dwarfs) were also set into pies, either alone or with birds, to be released when the crust was cut. The dwarf would emerge and walk down the length of the table, reciting poetry, sketching the guests, or doing tricks.

13th Century - A Tortoise or Mullet Pie was in the 13th century cookbook called An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the Thirteenth Century, translated by Charles Perry:

Tortoise or Mullet Pie - Simmer the tortoises lightly in water with salt, then remove from the water and take a little murri, pepper, cinnamon, a little oil, onion juice, cilantro and a little saffron; beat it all with eggs and arrange the tortoises and the mullets in the pie and throw over it the filling. The pastry for the pie should be kneaded strongly, and kneaded with some pepper and oil, and greased, when it is done, with the eggs and saffron.

14th Century - During Charles V (1364-1380), King of France, reign, the important event at banquets was not dishes of food but acts such as minstrels, magicians, jugglers, and dancers.

The chefs entered into the fun by producing elaborate "soteltie" or "subtilty." Sotelties were food disguised in an ornamental way (sculptures made from edible ingredients but not always intended to be eaten or even safe to eat). In the 14th to 17th centuries, the sotelty was not always a food, but any kind of entertainment to include minstrels, troubadours, acrobats, dancers and other performers. The sotelty was used to alleviate the boredom of waiting for the next course to appear and to entertain the guest. If possible, the sotelty was supposed to make the guests gasp with delight and to be amazed at the ingenuity of the sotelty maker.

During this time period, the Duke of Burgundy's chef made an immense pie which opened to the strains of 28 musicians playing from within the pie. Out of the pie came a captive girl representing the "captive" Church in the Middle East.

15th Century - At the coronation of eight-year old English King Henry VI (1422-1461) in 1429, a partridge pie, called "Partryche and Pecock enhackyll," was served. This dish consisted of a cooked peacock mounted in its skin, placed on top of a large pie.. Other birds like partridges, swans, bitterns and herons were frequently placed on top of pies for ornament and as a means of identifying the contents.

1626 - Jeffrey Hudson (1619-1682), famous 17th century dwarf, was served up in a cold pie as a child. England's King Charles I (1600-1649) and 15-year old Queen Henrietta Maria (1609?1669) passed through Rutland and were being entertained at a banquet being given in their honor by the Duke and Duckess of Buckingha. At the dinner, an enormous crust-covered pie was brought before the royal couple. Before the Queen could cut into the pie, the crust began to rise and from the pie emerged a tiny man, perfectly proportioned boy, but only 18 inches tall named Jeffrey Hudson. Hudson, seven years old the smallest human being that anyone had ever seen, was dressed in a suit of miniature armor climbed out of a gilded pastry pie stood shyly on the table in front of the Queen and bowed low. Hudson was later dubbed Lord Minimus.

Hudson would remain with the queen for the next 18 years, serving as the Queen's Dwarf, where he became a trusted companion and court favorite. His life after being a court favorite were just as interesting. He was kidnapped by pirates twice, in 1633, his portrait, along with Queen Henrietta Maria, was painted by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641), the famous 17th century painter, and then he spent the next quarter-century as a slave in North Africa.

16th Century - In the English translated version of Epulario (The Italian Banquet), published in 1598, the following is written on making pies:

To Make Pie That the Birds May Be Alive In them and Flie Out When It Is Cut Up - Make the coffin of a great pie or pastry, in the bottome thereof make a hole as big as your fist, or bigger if you will, let the sides of the coffin bee somwhat higher then ordinary pies, which done put it full of flower and bake it, and being baked, open the hole in the bottome, and take out the flower. Then having a pie of the bigness of the hole in the bottome of the coffin aforesaid, you shal put it into the coffin, withall put into the said coffin round about the aforesaid pie as many small live birds as the empty coffin will hold, besides the pie aforesaid. And this is to be at such time as you send the pie to the table, and set before the guests: where uncovering or cutting up the lid of the great pie, all the birds will flie out, which is to delight and pleasure shew to the company. And because they shall not bee altogether mocked, you shall cut open the small pie, and in this sort you may make many others, the like you may do with a tart.

17th, 18th and 19th Century

English women were baking pies long before the settlers came to America. The pie was an English specialty that was unrivaled in other European cuisines. Two early examples of the English meat pies were shepherd's pie and cottage pie. Shepherd's pie was made with lamb and vegetables, and the cottage pie was made with beef and vegetable. Both are topped with potatoes.

1620 - The Pilgrims brought their favorite family pie recipes with them to America. The colonist and their pies adapted simultaneously to the ingredients and techniques available to them in the New World. At first, they baked pie with berries and fruits pointed out to them by the Native Americans. Colonial women used round pans literally to cut corners and stretch the ingredients (for the same reason they baked shallow pies).

1700s - Pioneer women often served pies with every meal, thus firmly cementing this pastry into a unique form of American culture. With food at the heart of gatherings and celebrations, pie quickly moved to the forefront of contests at county fairs, picnics, and other social events. As settlers moved westward, American regional pies developed. Pies are continually being adapted to changing conditions and ingredients.

Rev. George Acrelius published in Stockhold in 1796, A Description of the Present and Former State at the Swedish Congregations in New Sweden, where he describes the eating of apple pie all the year:

"Apple-pie was used all the year, the evening meal of children. House-pie, in country places is make of apples neither peeled nor freed from the cores, and its crust is not broken if a agon-wheel goes over it!"

A Pie of Sweetbreads was one of George Washington's, the first President of the United States, favorite pie recipes, which are taken from Martha's Historic Cook Book, a possessions of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Martha Washington (1731-1802) was an excellent cook and the book features some of the dishes that were prepared by the original First Lady in her colonial kitchen at Mount Vernon. Following is the modern-day version of the recipe:

Pie of Sweetbreads - Drop a sweetbread into acidulated, salted boiling water and cook slowly for 20 minutes. Plunge into cold water. Drain and cut into cubes. Stew a pint of oysters until the edges curl. Add two tablespoons of butter creamed with one tablespoon of flour, one cup cream and the yolks of three eggs well beaten. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Line a deep baking dish with puff paste (dough). Put in a layer of oysters, then a layer of sweetbreads until the dish is nearly full. Pour the sauce over all and put a crust on top. Bake until the paste is a delicate brown. This is one of the most delicate pies that can be made.

1800s - Whenever Emperor William I of Germany visited Queen Victoria (1819-1901) of England, his favorite pie was served. It contained a whole turkey stuffed with a chicken, the chicken stuffed with a pheasant, the pheasant stuffed with a woodcock.

1880-1910 - Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), a.k.a. Mark Twain, was a big fan of eating pies. His life-long housekeeper and friend (she was with the family for 30 years), Katy Leary, often baked Huckleberry pie to lure her master into breaking his habit of going without lunch. According to The American Heritage Cookbook, Katy Leary said in her book on Mark Twain:

She ordered a pie every morning, she said, recalling a period in which Twain was depressed. "Then I'd get a quart of milk and put it on the ice, and have it all ready - the huckleberry pie and the cold milk - about one o'clock. He eat half the huckleberry pie, anyway, and drink all the milk."

During a trip to Europe in 1878, he felt nothing but disdain for the European food he encountered. He composed a list of foods that he looked forward to eating on his return to the United States. In his 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad, he wrote: "It has now been many months, at the present writing, since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one--a modest, private affair, all to myself. I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me, and be hot when I arrive. . ." On his long list of foods was apple pie, peach pie, American mince pie, pumpkin pie, and squash pie. He also had a recipe for English Pie:

RECIPE FOR NEW ENGLISH PIE - To make this excellent breakfast dish, proceed as follows:
Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough. Work this into the form of a disk, with the edges turned up some three-fourths of an inch. Toughen and kiln-dry in a couple days in a mild but unvarying temperature. Construct a cover for this redoubt in the same way and of the same material. Fill with stewed dried apples; aggravate with cloves, lemon-peel, and
slabs of citron; add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.

Main Types of Risk : Slips, trips and falls

Managing the Risk

Main Types of Risk : Manual Handling

Managing the Risk

Type of Risk : Machinery

Managing the Risk

Type of Risk : Hazardous Substances

Managing the Risk

Main Types of Risk : Burns and Scalds

Managing the Risk

Type of Risk : Health Problems

Managing the Risk

 The National Association of Master Bakers, (21 BladockStreet, Ware, Hertfordshire, SE12 9OH) and The Federation of Bakers, 20 Bedford Square, LONDON, WC13 3HF) also produce specific guidance for the bakery industry.

Are you struggling to make the perfect pastry? Or do your cookies crumble and your cakes collapse?  It may not be your fault. If you live and bake 2,500 feet (762 meters) or more above sea level, you get to blame everything on the altitude! Often more frustration than fun, baking at high altitude can be a challenge or a total disaster, but at least you are not alone. Professional and home bakers struggle with this in as many as 34 of the 50 United States, parts of Canada, Mexico, South America, and Europe, plus other mountainous regions around the globe. If you have never heard of these problems, you probably live at or near sea level, though you might have wondered why mountain dwellers around the world make flatbreads (Mexican tortillas, for example). But ask anyone who has moved from Boston to Boulder how their cakes turn out and, if they are honest, they'll tell you the name of the best bakery in town.

Read further for the science behind this as well as for a variety of tips and ideas to assist you.

The Science behind High Altitude Baking: