[Sca-cooks] Pie crust help!!!

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Huette von Ahrens:
>My problem is with soggy pie crusts.  I have
>been using exclusively the Pillsbury refrigerated
>pie crusts.  They are easy to use and taste like
>real pie crusts.  I have made two crust pies,
>one crust pies, and pies using pre-baked crusts.
>In every instance, no matter what I do or
>how I try to keep the filling from being too
>juicy, I still get soggy pie bottoms.  I am
>in dispair!  How do I make a juicy fruit pie and
>not get soggy pie crusts?  I am at my wit's end!
>Help!!!

In general, when you have a very moist filling, there are some things 
you can do to limit the damage. You seem to have tried some of them.

For one-crust pies, an at least partial blind baking seems to help, 
especially if you brush egg white onto the inside of the bottom first.

Mealy pie doughs tend to be more waterproof (all other things being 
equal) than flaky ones.

What, if anything, do you bind the fruit juices with? Some people 
make a pre-cooked filling with cornstarch or flour, or an uncooked 
filling with flour (my standard apple pie uses this method), while 
some European tart recipes even call for things like tapioca or 
arrowroot, or cake crumbs sprinkled with varying degrees of 
liberality on the bottom of the pie.

A good pan is pretty important. If it were up to me almost everything 
would be cast iron, but in general a good, heavy pan is best. The pie 
equivalent of the old thin-steel cake pans, the ones that begin to 
season black on their own after some use, seem to improve with age 
(possibly because as they season and develop a coating, they get 
thicker and heavier). You might actually try a black iron skillet: a 
bit on the rustic side, but it does a good job and helps bring heat 
to the crust, cooking it before it turns to roux in the pan. Or try 
using one of those oven stone or tile systems.

Try baking the pies on a lower oven rack: it's possible that either 
you're baking them too quickly and deceiving yourself a bit as to 
their doneness based on how brown they are, but in any case you may 
simply need to give a little greater priority to the bottom crust; 
what one of my culinary instructors used to call "giving it a little 
more sunshine" (usually when we'd take something black and smoking 
out of the oven, but nonetheless...). Obviously you don't want to use 
the bottom of the oven itself. Actually, this assumes a gas oven. If 
electric, I'm not sure if it would be the same.

Finally, the last, and possibly most important thing, is to 
understand what you've got, and that it is never going to be a 
brick-oven Neapolitan pizza margarita. In other words, liquids tend 
to travel down, and you're not going to get a really crisp crust no 
matter what you do. But, as I say, you can limit the damage.

Maybe you could give us a recipe or two and we could try to spot 
obvious sources of difficulty...

Adamantius