Marie Callender’s makes a great frozen chicken pot pie.  When you cook it in a conventional oven, as I do, the instructions demand wrapping the edge of the crust in a strip of aluminum foil.

This is easy to do, and I’ve always followed the directions before.  On the other hand, it takes two strips of aluminum foil to achieve, given the circumference of the pie and the width of my aluminum foil.

I decided to run a controlled experiment: what would happen if I wrapped only half the crust in foil?  Would the two sides be indistinguishable, rendering the extra 20 seconds of foil-wrapping effort unnecessary?

Yeah… that step turns out to be rather important.  Half the edge of my freshly baked chicken pot pie is now deliciously flaky.  The other half is in my garbage can.