I have struggled a long time to learn how to make a pie crust. I have tried a number of recipes and the best I could ever come up with was a dubious “Well, the filling is good.”
But finally I have found a technique which works for me – in fact I have reproduced the results 10 times. I am not sure the actual recipe matters. I think it is the method. I am going to continue to play around with ratios of flour to fat, but the method is the thing.
First, mix up your flour and salt. I used 2.5c white (Bob’s Red Mill organic unbleached, to be exact), 1/2c wheat flour, and 1/4 t salt. I might increase that to 1/2 next time. I also added 1tsp sugar, and I might double that next time, too.
Then grate in 1.5 sticks frozen salted butter. No doubt you could use unsalted or
Crisco or some other hard shortening. Grate some in, stir to coat the butter bits with flour, grate some in, stir.
It should look like this:
Then mix 1/2c Greek yogurt into 3/4c ice water:
Dump that into the flour all in one go and stir it with a fork. It will look like this:
It doesn’t make a ball. It’s just a mess. Now dump some of the mess onto your floured pastry cloth:
Then sprinkle some flour on top of that and put a piece of waxed paper on top and roll out the dough. You may need to uncover it and fold the dough over on itself a few times. Don’t be afraid to sprinkle more flour on it – wherever it sticks to the waxed paper is exposed butter. And pretty fast, it will look like PIE DOUGH! See?
Then put your raw filling in:
And then the top and into the oven:
Bake until bubbly! Et voila!!
