Classic Single Pie Crust
We figure we can’t repeat too often our formula for the flakiest, most tender pie crust so here it is. The following formula is perfect for a single-crust, 8″ to 10″ pie.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour or 1 1/2 cups Pastry Flour Blend
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 4 tablespoons vegetable shortening
- 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold
- 3 to 5 tablespoons ice water
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour and salt.
Add the shortening, working it in until the mixture is evenly crumbly.
Add the butter to the flour mixture, and work it in roughly with your fingers, a pastry cutter, or a mixer. Don’t be too thorough the mixture should be very uneven, with big chunks of butter in among the smaller ones.
Add 2 tablespoons of water, and toss to combine.
Take it a step further
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Prebaking pie crust
Toss with enough additional water to make a chunky mixture. It should barely hold together when you squeeze a handful, though the remainder may look quite dry.
Shape the dough into a disk about 1″ thick, and refrigerate it for 30 minutes or longer this resting period allows the flour to absorb the water, making the dough easier to roll out. If you decide to let the dough chill longer than 30 minutes allow it rest at room temperature for 10 to 15 minutes before rolling, to allow the butter to soften up a bit.
Fill and bake your pie as directed in the recipe.
Tips from our Bakers
Why Does The Bottom Of My Pie Crust Not Cook
Maybe your filling was too liquidy. Maybe you were watching `Oh Brother Where Art Thou?` while baking. This is a tricky problem to fix, but hope is not lost. If its a fruit pie, try putting it back in the oven for a few minutes on the very bottom rack, thus putting the underbaked bottom closer to the heat source.
Homemade Pie Crust Step By Step
Hi hi! I am just popping in to share this ultimate guide to making your own homemade pie crust! Making pie dough from scratch can be a little intimidating, but I promise with this guide and a couple of steps, we will have you making your own perfect pie crust in no time at all.
Homemade pie crust is super easy to make once you get the hang of it. It is great to make in bulk and store ahead so that you have frozen pie dough ready to go whenever you need.
Pie dough that is easy to work with is a dream. It just takes a couple of sneaky extra steps to give you a super smooth, homogenous but flaky pie crust. It settles well into the pie pan, and gives a lovely sturdy bottom crust. This is the go to method that I have been using for years and the recipe that I use to make detailed lattices. It works great for blind baking, par baking, and for baking sturdy double crust pies.
This all-butter pie crust recipe can be used for all sorts of homemade pie recipes – single crust pies such as a pumpkin pie or a chocolate cream pie, double crust lattice pies, savory pies, slab pies, and hand pies to name a few. I use one base recipe, and then scale the quantity depending on what I am using it for.
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How To Make Pie Crust From Scratch
Posted by Erika | Jan 19, 2021
The secret to a great slice of pie is all in the crust! A buttery, flaky crust that holds its shape is key to pie perfection, and this step-by-step guide on how to make a pie crust will help show you how quick and easy it is to do!
The best thing about this easy pie crust recipe is that it uses staple ingredients you probably have on hand already: flour, salt, fat and water. Thats it! With these basic ingredients, you can make a buttery, flaky crust you can use with pretty much any filling.
Not only will we walk you through this easy homemade pie crust recipe, but well also share a few basic tips and tricks to help ensure you get great results every time. Weve also included a few of our favorite go-to pie recipes, perfect for trying out your new homemade pie crust!
The Benefits Of The Food Processor Method
So that’s all very interesting, but the real question is: Why should you care? How does this make forming pie dough any easier?
It does so in two ways. First off, this method completely removes the variability of a traditional pie dough recipe. By weighing out a given amount of flour and fat, combining them together until they form a near homogeneous paste, and then adding the remaining dry flour to that paste, you are very strictly defining exactly how much flour is used for gluten formation and how much ends up coated with fat. No more trying to visually judge whether the fat is properly cut into the flour. No more adding ice water a drop at a time until a dough is formed. The dough comes out the same, every single time.
Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik
The other key advantage is that your dough becomes much more pliable. The flour-fat paste formed at the beginning is much softer and more malleable than pure butter, which means that your final dough rolls out smoothly and easily with little-to-no risk of cracking like a traditional pie crust, even without the vodka.
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The Best Pies Start With The Best Crusts Learn How To Make Pie Crust From Scratch Using These Step
When it comes to baking pies, the most daunting part of the process is making the perfect flaky crust. After all, you want a great foundation to hold all those delicious fillings. But once you master the technique for how to make pie crust from scratch, you can whip up flaky homemade crusts that everyone will be talking about.
How Do I Keep My Bottom Pie Crust Flaky
Nobody wants a soggy bottom pie. My favorite trick for avoiding this is to always bake your pie directly on a screaming hot sheet pan. Put the pan in the oven when you start preheating it, so that it is super hot when you put your pie in. The heat from the metal will cook your pie from the bottom, creating a nice cooked and flaky bottom crust. This also serves the double purpose of catching any juices that may bubble over during the bake time.
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Use A Spatula To Incorporate Water
Your processed flour and butter are sitting there in the bowl of your food processor and you’re tempted to save yourself a bit of cleanup by just adding the water directly in there, right? Don’t do it! Sure, it’ll work out okay, but you won’t form nearly the same level of flakiness as you do if you incorporate with a spatula. Here’s what a crust made 100% in the food processor looks like:
Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt
Compare that to the crust I made with the spatula:
Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt
See the difference? By using the spatula to fold the water into the dough, you’re even more likely to end up with flaky layers.
The Best Homemade Pie Crust For All Kinds Of Pies
I have said many times on this site that pie making isnt my favorite Up until about 5 years ago I wasnt even truly confident in making pie crust from scratch. I would sub in a graham cracker crust wherever I couldnot that theres anything wrong with that, but the two arent always interchangeable. So I would stress about making them, or I would buy pre-made crustswhich are fine in a pinch, but they just arent the same as homemade.
Then one day I decided to end the drama. Its a pie crust, which is really only a few ingredients and few easy steps. I dove into different pie crust recipes and tinkered around with the best way to make what I felt would be the perfect pie crust. And guess what? Turns out making homemade pie crust isnt as hard as I used to think it was. In fact, it is downright EASY if you have the right pie crust recipe.
So today Im breaking it down for you. If I can do it, you can too.
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The Secret To A Flaky Pie Crust
I use a little tip that my baking bestie Erin Mcdowell taught me – to laminate my pie dough after making it but before rolling it out for use. What this does it pops a few layers within the pie dough. This makes it homogenous and easy to work with but also still nice and flaky.
A flaky pie crust comes from developing thin layers of butter within your dough, so when you bake it, you get lots of little flaky layers in your crust. So you get the best of both worlds – flaky pie dough which is also super easy to work with. Here’s how you do this:
Grandmas Perfect Pie Crust Ingredient List
Simplicity is key! The best pies start out with a flaky, golden crust with no frills. This pie crust will bring your whole pie together with just pantry staples! Measurements can be found in the printable graphic or recipe card at the end of the post.
- All-Purpose Flour: All-purpose flour works great for acheiving a soft, flaky crust. It doesnt have a high protein content, so it will keep the structure nice and light. You can also use a low-protein pastry flour.
- Salt: You need a little salt to enhance the overall flavor.
- Shortening: This is needed for fat content. You can also substitute it with butter, margarine, or even coconut oil!
- Cold Water: This is used to moisten the dough. Be sure to keep it cold! Cooler temperatures is the secret to a nice and flaky pie crust.
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What Causes A Flaky Pie Crust
The melting point of lard is lower than butter, which means that more air and steam are released during the bake time. This gives a flakier texture in your pie crust, exactly what we want!
So why use butter at all? Because FLAVOR. Nothing tastes quite as delicious as butter. So the answer is to use both! I like to use 8 tablespoons of shortening to 12 tablespoons of butter.
Making Flaky Pie Crust Its About The Method
Whats more important than vodka is the way you combine flour and fat .
Remember that gluten is our enemy when it comes to pie dough? Well, Cooks Illustrated found that if you thoroughly mix part of the flour with the fat and make a flour-butter paste first, every particle of that flour becomes coated in fat.
Think of each particle of flour with butter raincoats. These raincoats make it very difficult for the flour to absorb water. In other words, it helps to prevent the development of too much gluten.
Then, you can add the remaining flour so the perfect amount of gluten develops. This means perfect pie crust, every time.
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How To Make The Perfect Pie Crust
Making a solid pie crust isnt difficult at all. All you need is a little love and attention to detail! Youre going to love it. Its better than anything you can get from the store!
S To Master Perfect Pie Crust
There are certain things that people tend to shy away from in the kitchen. Pie dough from scratch is often one of them. For many, it all just seems so mysterious& mdash how to achieve that perfect flakiness? Well, here are 5 tips to help you master that perfect no-fail pie crust.
After I started my baking business, , pie became a major focus of my day-to-day life. Its what I sold the majority of at the farmers markets, what people were most excited to order, and what Ive come to really love to bake the most. Its not quick to throw together like a simple drop cookie or a cupcake, but the slow steadiness of making a pie allows you appreciate it all the more.
So I wanted to take time-out today to tell you that you can make a flaky pie dough. Here are 5 tips we used at Marge to ensure that we get the perfect crust each and every time:
1.Your ingredients should be very, very cold. Yes Im speaking about your butter, but you should really even put your bowl of flour in the freezer as well and if youre using a pastry cutter, you can even throw that in the freezer for a few minutes, too. The colder the ingredients and equipment, the less risk there will be for the butter to melt or become overworked .
2. Secret ingredient: Use a dash of apple cider vinegar in your pie dough. Add 1 teaspoon to your current favorite recipe at the time in which youre adding your ice water. Vinegar helps prevent the formation of gluten which makes for a tough crust.
More Pie Crust:
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How To Roll Out Pie Crust
After the dough has chilled, start preparing your pie. Roll out the crust. Always use gentle force. You are not mad at the crust. When rolling dough out, always start from the center and work your way out in all directions, turning the dough with your hands as you go.
Turn, roll, turn, roll.
Roll the dough to fit a 9-inch pie dish. I typically roll the dough into a 12-inch circle so that there is enough crust to go up the edges of the dish and so I can trim and flute.
Do NOT be overwhelmed. I made sure to break everything down as detailed as possible. Be sure to read through additional tips and troubleshooting below. Let me know about your pie adventures!
- Total Time:2 hours, 15 minutes
- Yield:2 pie crusts
- 6 Tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled and cubed
- 2/3 cup vegetable shortening, chilled
- 1/2 cup ice water