Butter Pie Crust

I wonder if my next blog post will be about a pie? Maybe I am just going to have an uncooked glob of piecrust sitting in my fridge for a month until it begins to grow green specks? Only time will tell. I used a recipe from epicurous for my piecrust. As a novice pie maker, I made it exactly as directed. Well, actually I divided the ingredients in half because I only need one piecrust.

When my family makes pies, we use lard. As we only make pies at thanksgiving, we have a block of lard sitting in the pantry for a year. I don’t know what how long you can keep lard before chucking it, but I am only going to make a single pie. I was not going to by lard for a single pie.

The ingredients for a piecrust are 1 ¼ cups all purpose flour, ½ tablespoon sugar, ½ teaspoon salt, ¼ cup butter, and 3 tablespoons of ice cold water.

I whisked the flour, sugar, and salt.

I diced the cold butter into pea size bits and added them to the dry ingredients.

I like using my hands because the thought of cutting the butter in with knives seemed tedious. I mashed the butter and flour mixture together until I had coarsely crumbled bits.

Some people might lose sleep thinking about pie fats. If you suffer from pie fat anxiety, let me help you out. Lard makes a tasty, tender crust. Shortening makes a pretty crust with a nice, light texture, but the flavor is subpar. Butter is makes a tasty, flaky crust. Butter has a healthy amount of water, while the shortening and lard are just fat. Most people like a crust with at least some butter. For more pie fat info, go to the pioneer woman or baking bites.

I added the cold water and mixed. I eventually used my hand to gather all the bits into a nice disk of dough.

I wrapped the dough up in plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge. This dough needs to rest in the fridge for at least two hours. I have already used this crust in a pie, and it's good.  It was easy to work with, and the crust was flavorful.