Pastry Cutter Pie Crust

Pie crust doesn’t have to be intimidating. In fact, this pastry cutter pie crust method will make you wonder why you haven’t been baking pies more often!

How to make “pie” a bigger part of your menu

When most people think of pie, they think of a special holiday dessert, a welcome gift for a new neighbor, or a rare treat after dinner. “Pie” and especially the crust we’re going to make today, can be so much more!

• Dinner Pot Pie: There are so many savory recipes out there for chicken or beef pot pie. A delicious, flaky pie crust is the foundation for this meal.
• Quiche: Quiche, which is one of our customer favorites at the Flour Barn, can be breakfast, lunch, or dinner! In addition, you can change the fillings to make it different every time.
• Pie for Dessert: Of course, berry pies, lemon meringue pies, pecan pies, and apple pies all begin with a lovely pie crust.
• Homemade crackers: This pie crust recipe doesn’t have to be finished as a pie. I have made this dough, cut it into cracker size pieces, docked it with a fork, and sprinkled with salt. Voila! The most delicious crackers. Top them with jam and guests will “ooh” and “aah”!

Why use a pastry cutter pie crust method

There are so many methods for making pie crust, and they can all create great pie crusts. I use a pastry cutter (also known as a pastry blender) because it delivers consistent results every time.

• No Big Equipment: Sometimes I just want to keep equipment to a minimum. This is one of those times. I’m able to store this small tool in a drawer. In the bakery, we use a commercial mixer with a cutter blade, and when you need bulk pie crusts, it’s perfect. But in my home, this pastry cutter is both effective and enjoyable to work with.
• Keeps Ingredients Cool: I have made pie crusts using my hands many times. However, in the summer months when my house is warm, touching the dough only encourages the fats (butter, shortening, lard) to soften too much. The pastry cutter doesn’t do that.
• Minimizes Gluten Development: The pastry cutter blade cuts gluten strands and prevents too much overdevelopment of gluten. Why does that matter? Because too much gluten makes a tough pie crust, so stick with me on this. (Sounds a little scientific? I know but I’ll explain this as we go along.)
• Easy to Clean: Without a doubt, you can make pie crust with a food processor or even a stand mixer. However, when you’re done, you have quite a mess to clean up. The pastry cutter is just so simple to clean, or you can just put it in the dishwasher.

What is Gluten Development and Why it Matters to Pie Crust

All-purpose flour contains two types of protein. These proteins, when we add water, and stir or mix them, turn into gluten. In turn, gluten forms elastic strands that give our pie crust a bit of structure and keep it from just crumbling apart. However, too much gluten development, like the kind we want in baguettes or things like bagels, make a pie crust tough. So, when I say, “minimizing gluten development,” I’m talking about discouraging too much structure in our pie crust. We actually want to keep the gluten strands short rather than long, to ensure a tender crust.

The pastry cutter helps to minimize gluten development by physically cutting the gluten strands, but also by limiting the tendency to “stir” the dough once we add water. I have found in my class that “newbies” to making pie crust do better with a pastry cutter for this reason. That will become clearer as we progress with the recipe.

Equipment for the Pastry Cutter Pie Crust

• Large stainless steel bowl: A large bowl will work for pie dough as well as so many other things. Bonus: it’s big enough to double your recipe if you want to make some ahead!
• Pastry blender: In pie class and in my home, this pastry blender is the one we use. Simple, but effective.
• Pastry cloth and roller sock: This set includes everything you need for rolling out your pie crust.
• Pie plate: Glass pie plates are great because you can observe whether the bottom crust is browning adequately. Avoiding a “soggy bottom” is our goal.
• Kitchen scale: I always include this in my equipment recommendations because I use it for EVERY baking recipe I make. This is the scale we use in the bakery. I have one in my home kitchen and it’s just so handy.

Ingredients for the Pastry Cutter Pie Crust

flour

For this crust recipe, we will be using all-purpose flour. If I’m grinding wheat for another recipe, I’ll sometimes replace a quarter of the all-purpose flour with fresh whole wheat flour. It’s a little hardier tasting, which works well with apple or pecan pie. However, whole wheat flour does absorb water a little differently, so if you’re new to pie crust, I recommend starting with straight all-purpose.

Fat

You have several choices for which fat to use in your pie crust…

Lard: Lard makes a wonderful pie crust. However, it’s not always easy to find the good kind of lard, leaf lard, readily available in the grocery store. I have found the more readily available lard to have a strong (not pleasing) smell, and I can taste it in the crust. If you can find leaf lard, it has a higher melting point than butter so it won’t soften as quickly and can be easier to work with as a result.

Shortening: Whichever brand you choose, shortening can also make a lovely pie crust. In fact, I grew up watching my mother use 100 percent shortening and her pies were delicious. Like lard, it won’t soften as quickly as butter. In addition, shortening allows for more defined fluting on the edges. However, it lacks the extra flavor you get from butter.

Butter: Like shortening, butter is easily found in the grocery. It has the flavor advantage for sure, but it can melt or soften quickly so you may feel a bit hurried on a hot summer day.

My solution: I use half butter and half shortening because I want the best of both worlds!

Salt

Just plain old table salt will do. My recipe calls for a little more salt than some, but I think it just makes a great tasting crust!

Water

The water should be ice cold. Just like our skin gets dryer in certain environmental conditions, so can flour. Some days we have to add more water to our flour mixture than others. As a result, we’ll always add water, a couple tablespoons at a time, until it looks adequately hydrated.

The Pastry Cutter Pie Crust Method

• First, you’ll mix the flour and salt using your pastry cutter. No need to use another utensil.
• Second, you’ll “cut in” the fats using the pastry cutter in an up and down motion. Continue cutting the fats into the flour until all your pieces of butter and shortening are pea sized or smaller.

• Next, add ice cold water, drizzling a little at a time, until there’s very little free flour on the bottom of the bowl. With each addition of water, you’ll use the pastry cutter in the same up and down motion to incorporate the water.
• Finally, dump the dough onto the counter and form into dough ball. Divide into two pieces using a scraper or a knife. Form each piece into a disc and wrap in cling wrap. Place in refrigerator and allow to rest for at least two hours, or up to three days.

Rolling Out the Dough

• When you’re ready to roll out the pie dough, remove from the refrigerator and allow to sit for about 30 minutes. Because this dough is made with butter, you must be patient and wait for it to be soft enough to roll out. If it’s too cold, it will crack when you roll it out. So just give it a little time to soften.
• While waiting, get your pastry cloth ready. This cloth, along with a pastry roller sock, was given to me as a wedding gift 32 years ago, and I still have the same one! I always use it to roll out my pie dough. When students use this in my class, they say that rolling out the dough USED to be the most frustrating part–until they used this cloth. You have to use it to see how life changing it can be for pie crust! Embed the cloth with plenty of flour, then roll your sock covered pastry roller across it to flour the sock. Now, you’re ready to go! I’ve included a video to show how easy it is to use.
• Start by hitting the crust disc with your roller and turning it and hitting it again just to get the disc softened a bit and start the circle formation. Roll the dough, turning it 90 degrees occasionally, to keep it from sticking, until the dough is approximately 1/8 inch thick and big enough to exceed the pie plate’s edge by two inches. This extra dough will give us enough to create a nice edge whether we’re making a double crust pie or a blind shell.
• Using your rolling pin, roll the dough up onto it and transfer to the pie shell, carefully. Gently, encourage the dough to fill in the pie shell. Trim the edges, if there’s excessive dough. Finally, leave one to two inches for folding over, if it’s a filled fruit pie, or decorating, if it’s going to be an open pie like pecan. Again, this will be clearer in the video.

Notes

• Freezing ahead pie dough: You can store your dough discs in the refrigerator for up to three days wrapped in cling wrap. In addition, they freeze well for up to three months, wrapped in foil. Simply move them to the refrigerator the night before you want to roll them out. You may still have to allow them to sit out at room temperature to soften a bit before rolling.
• Freezing pie shells: When I learned to do this, it changed my holiday planning and entertainment planning dramatically. It allowed me to make multiple pie shells ahead of time, to minimize the work as holidays approached. You do have to use foil disposable pans because they are lightweight and stackable. Once you have several made, you simply stack them together, unbaked, up to 8 pie shells, and wrap them in cling wrap. You can keep them up to 3 months in the freezer.