Pie Crust 101 in King Arthur Flour Test Kitchen

hi my name is Susan Rita and we're here at King Arthur Flour where we run the baking Education Centre and the Baker's hotline the holidays are coming up and I can tell you that on the Baker's hotline where we answer baking questions the biggest issue that people have after baking with yeast is learning how to make a good pie crust a lot of people are afraid of it we call that pie anxiety so today I'm going to show you how to make a two crust pie and it's a lot easier than you might think and with some of the tricks that I'll show you I'm hoping that you won't be afraid of it anymore so the first thing we need to do is measure out our flour it's very important that you have the right amount of flour so that you don't have a dry crumbly crust flour when it gets shipped has a tendency to get compacted every time it lands on a counter it settles down so what's in your bin can be kind of heavy the right way to measure flour is to take a scoop and you want to stir it up a little bit make it a little bit fluffy put some air into it sprinkle it into your measuring cup and then use the straightedge to level it off so a properly measured cup of flour should have four and a quarter ounces that's how much it should weigh if you just dig into this bin and pack it down this cup of flour is going to weigh almost twenty or thirty percent more than that one does so that is where your baked goods can have way too much flour in them and they can be heavy and dry and crumbly so measuring is very important this pie crust uses three cups of flour I already have one already measured so here we go we're going to measure the second that's two and here goes the third three cups of flour we're going to take a teaspoon and a half of salt mix that in very lightly first I'm going to put in the shortening and this has been in the refrigerator so it's a little bit cold you don't have to be too terribly fussy a lot of recipes in a lot of places that you'll see so everything must be absolutely cold it's better than not but I wouldn't get too hung up on it now I'm going to work this shortening into the flour with a pastry cutter a lot of recipes that you'll read say cut the fat in until it's the size of peas and in this case for the first half we're going to go just about there so that's cut in pretty finely so if you can see the way that this looks it's got a little bit of lumps but nothing really really big now the next thing that we're going to be putting into this is the butter and we're going to put in four ounces of butter one stick and to make our lives easier I'm going to take a bench knife and I'm just going to my bench knife is now done a big part of the work for me I'm just going to scoop all this up toss it right in now I'm just going to get in here this is a nice Mud Pie kind of thing to make there is always the Mud Pie factor in cooking if you like to get your hands into things this is a great recipe to start with I'm just going to separate all these pieces of butter and toss them around get a little flour onto them now that the butter is in here I'm going to use my favorite tool just a little bit to cut it into chunks now when we teach people here at the baking education center to make pie we very often have to walk around in the classroom and tell people step away from the pie crust because when you're nervous about something you have a tendency to work it too much you either stir it too much you want to handle it too much because you're afraid you're not doing it right that's where pie anxiety comes in what you want to do with this I'm going to just take these pieces of butter and squish them to b-flat I'm not going to cut this up into little teeny tiny pieces I want the butter to still be in much bigger pieces because this is where the flakiness is going to come from in your pie dough now a lot of people would say you got to be kidding you really want it to look like that that's not going to make pie you're going to have big melted pools of butter or you wait you just wait now comes the water and the water you do want to have cold a lot of people get very afraid of this they're afraid they're going to put in too much water and it's all going to be a big soggy mess doesn't have to be remember when you're cooking you can always add more but you can't take things out so it's always good to sneak up on these things a little bit at a time we're going to put between 4 and 6 ounces of water into this recipe so I'm just going to put it in a little bit at a time and see how the dough behaves depending on what the weather is like flour can be like a sponge sometimes it needs more water sometimes it needs less in this case we've had a very wet soggy summer so I don't want to add too much water I'm going to put the water in about two tablespoons at a time you can go one tablespoon at a time if you're nervous about it and we'll just take a little bit longer I'm just going to distribute it around the bowl toss it around okay that is that's the one that got me close to where I want to go feel how this is okay now I'm feeling some wet spots and as you can see the dough hasn't really come together this is where I depart from a lot of advice you're going to see in recipes in this you can consider it your secret to make you a great pie crust maker this mess has both wet and dry business in it I'm going to take all of this and I'm going to dump it right out on a piece of parchment paper or wax paper and I'm going to sort of arrange it in a bit of a line now this is a really wet spot and obviously that's a really dry spot how do I get this all mixed together without overworking it and make it really tough I'm going to take this piece of parchment paper and I'm literally going to fold the dough over on itself kind of magic already what I'm doing while I do this is redistributing the water and getting the dry parts to pick up some of the water from the wet parts and that's still a pretty crumbly bit of dough which tells me that I still need to add some more water and now here's your other secret weapon instead of adding water onto this and making more wet spots my secret weapon here is the mystery so that means that the extra water is very evenly distributed 1/2 and all these crumbly bits now become part of the dough I'm going to just turn this 90 degrees and I'm going to give this extra crumb leanness a shower the other thing I'm doing as I fold this is creating layers all those big squares of butter that you see right in here that's a flake in the making we've almost got this where we want it we're going to give this last little crumbly bit a bit of a spritz fold everything in one more time I love that it's magic it's so nice okay so now I have a nice collection of pie dough now if you're going to make a two crust pie and this is enough dough for two crusts I usually divide this a little bit unevenly because the bottom crust has to go down one side of the pie pan across and up the other side so that bottom piece needs a little bit more dough than the top piece so I'm going to take my bench knife and divide it about 6040 and then I'm just going to take each chunk of dough and Pat it into a nice round circle later on you'll be happy that you did this because if you're going to roll something into a round circle it is much easier if you start it as a round shape so as I Pat this all the way around we're going to wrap these disks of dough in plastic and then we're going to chill them for about half an hour as you can see the dough has come together fairly pretty nicely the water has had a chance to redistribute itself the flowers had a chance to rest and relax so I'm going to take a piece of parchment paper you can use wax paper to that's fine I'm just going to sprinkle it lightly and then I'm going to sprinkle the top of the dough very lightly next I'm going to take an all-purpose plastic bag and I'm going to cut up one side and across the bottom you can use wax paper for this too and I cut up one side and down across the bottom and this is going to go on top of my dough I like food storage bags better than plastic wrap because it's a little bit heavier and it tends not to shift around quite as much now I'm going to roll this dough from the center to the outside you don't want to go back and forth across your pie dough because that's going to make it tough so I'm just going to press down the nice thing about the plastic is I can see exactly where I'm going at all times and I'm going to turn this whole sandwich a little bit and work from the center out and since we started with a nice round edge as you can see when I roll this pie dough out I don't have any big desert cracks going on don't be afraid to pick it up and make sure that it isn't sticking to the bottom I'm just going to straighten out paper underneath how big do you need this to be you need your pie crust to be one to two inches bigger than the outside of your pie pan because the dough has to travel down one edge cross the bottom back up and you still want a little bit extra - flute the rim for decoration so this is close it's not quite there yet it's going to give a little bit more in all directions that's I like it okay that is about where I want it to be before you put this in here it's a good idea to spray the bottom of the pan just a little tiny bit because when you spray the bottom of the pan it makes it much easier to get the first slice of pie piffle now how do we get this over here you can roll it on top of a pin but I find this method makes it much easier because I just do this simple enough now I missed as you can see I'm off just by a little bit now that the dough is where I need it to be I can trim it and make sure it's even all the way around I'm just about right in this spot but this spot it's got a little too much so just as simple as taking some scissors and making sure the edge is nice and even now this guy is a little bit on the shy side as far as the amount of dough that's there so we're going to give it a little bit extra take some of that extra put it right here and tuck it back in and once the dough is fluted you're not going to know that that's there now there are million ways to finish the top of a pie some you the first thing to do though no matter what you do is just take this edge and tuck it in all the way around the outside edge and this little extra bit of dough on the edges is what you're going to work with - flute okay now I'm almost I'm almost finished I'm going to just put a little flour on my hand so that I don't stick to it and I'm just going to pinch the dough to make a nice pattern you can on a different kind of pie pan you can take your two knuckles you can just use that and help yourself this way you can press it down with the fork but this is pretty simple now this pie shell should rest in the refrigerator so that the butter and the shortening in it can firm up so while this is in the refrigerator we'll make our filling and get ready to get our pie in the oven

Channel: How2Heroes

Views: 433,923

Rating: 4.7715683 out of 5

Keywords: Crust, King Arthur Flour (Business Operation), Pie (Type Of Dish), Flour (Ingredient), Food (TV Genre), Cooking, Baking (Industry), pie crust, Recipe (Website Category), How-to (Website Category)

Id: uAmbGRqzAKE

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 15 2014