Baking – How Does a Hot Water Whipped Pie Crust Work

There are two keys to this. First, work right on the pie and start in the middle. Second, fold strips back to make it easy to do the over/under.

This picture, from http://localfoods.about.com/od/preparationtips/ss/latticepiecrust_8.htm, is kind of the aha! moment for me. Fold half of the vertical strips back, lay a horizontal strip, unfold the folded strips and fold the ones that weren't, repeat.

Trim extra length from the strips, and use eggwash to glue them to the bottom part of the pie, where it comes up at the edges.

You'll have extra dough what with the trimmings and all - just use it to make a freeform gallete or the like. If you have no extra pie filling, use jam, or butter/brown sugar/raisins. Way less trouble than trying to make exactly the right amount of dough for the lattice.

There is no way to know what they meant when they said "homogenized" - this really sounds like marketing-speak.

But if you are trying to whip shortening with water, you will need emulsifiers. I could imagine that the Spry already had them in. The "With cake improver" sentence in the can also points in this direction, as cake improver often contains lecithine.

You can try normal vegetable shortening. If it does not whip but stays separated from the water (it will probably break up into tiny droplets swimming on the surface under the mixer, but if you let it sit around for a few minutes, they will start coalescing into larger droplets, with the tendency to join into a single oily layer on top of the water), then throw it out and make a second batch, but add an emulsifier to the water first. Lecithine, xanthan, or guar will all work. Then you will get a really whipped shortening, something of a poor man's hollandaise. Work this with your flour.

You must be aware that while the crust made this way will be tender, it won't be flaky. A flaky crust is flaky because it is made from two different textures, the flour-fat mixture and the flour-water mixture, and they separate each other in sheets after kneading. If you mix the water and fat into a whip first, you will not get any flakes. You will get a shortbread crust, which is fine - it tends to be the standard pie crust in continental Europe. But if your goal is flaky, then you should follow the traditional cutting method, Kenji's easy flaky method, or the traditional boiling method.