Pie crust. A cook’s worst nightmare. I find pie crust is one of the most intimidating recipes for people to try. ‘Don’t overwork it!’, ‘It’s gonna be too tough’. This ends with my pie crust recipe. This recipe was given to me by one of my Grandmas and she swears by it. If you want to make a great homemade pie, you’ve come to the right place.

What you’ll need: (makes about 2 pie shells)
- 2 cups cold shortening. It must be cold.
- 5 cups of all purpose flour.
-  1 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 tbsp white vinegar
- place your egg and vinegar in a cup measure and add cold water until it comes up to 1 cup.

How you’ll do it:
- Preheat your oven to 350F. For par baking our pie crust. What does that mean? It means to prebake, to set our pie crust. This helps prevent soggy bottoms… uh, of your crust.
- Combine your flour, salt and shortening in a bowl. Now rub your shortening into the flour, rub your thumb into your four fingers. That is the motion. Do this quickly until the shortening and flour are pea sized. This is important. You want a visible distinction between your flour and shortening. This will allow your crust to be flaky.
- Now add your wet ingredients in your cup measure to your flour/shortening bowl.
- Gently bring this together with a wooden spoon. Don’t beat it like crazy, just form it into a ball and that’s it! If you overwork your dough, you will get a tough dough and nobody wants that.
- Wrap it up and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes.
- Flour your work area and your rolling pin. Now roll out your dough to the size of your pie pan. If your dough is soft and smooth if you touch it, then you are gonna get a great pie crust. Best tip for rolling out dough is to do forward rolling then turn your dough and do it again to form a giant circle. Gently move it over your pie plate.
- Cut your dough, leaving about 1/2 inch hangover.
- Pinch the dough with your thumb and first finger and press a U shape into the pie rim with your first finger on your other hand. Confused? With 1 hand use your thumb and first finger and press the rim, with your other hand use your first finger to push the dough into a U shape. Got it? Good. I keep saying I need to develop a rim crimper. What do you think? Good idea or what?
- After you’ve crimped your rim, you need to dock your pie. What in the heck is docking? It’s simply using a fork to create air holes in the bottom of your pie crust.
- That’s it your pie is done! But wait, now you have to par bake your pie crust. I like to fill my pie with some type of beans to press it done while I par bake it, but it’s up to you. You may want to line your pie crust with parchment paper and then fill it with beans, it’s up to you.
- Bake it for 5-8 minutes at 350F. Remove it and it’s par baked.

Now here are some tips for baking pies. If you have any, send them in! I need more, I’d love to have yours.

For Apple pies, a big problem is soggy pie. This tip comes from a Grandma. Of course! They make the best pies, right? She tells me to heat up a baking sheet on the baking rack so it’s hot before I add my pie. Then you simply place your pie on the hot baking sheet and your bottom crust will crisp up and prevent soggy pies.

Also, if you are using fresh fruits it’s often a great idea to coat them in corn starch or flour before adding them to your pie crust. Just a dusting, but it sops up that extra juice.

Happy baking. It’s the holiday season and I’m sure most out there are looking to get to some baking. This recipe is easy, you just need to be confident. Don’t let your pies push you around!

- m

Tags: christmas cooking, dessert, pie crust, recipe, sweet

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 7:10 AM and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.