(upbeat music)
- Hey, bakers. John Kanell from Preppy Kitchen here. And today I'm going to
show you how to make the perfect pie crust every time. Throwing in all my tips and tricks, food processor, by hand, you will be able to make a great pie crust no matter what. Let's get started. I'm using a food processor for this, but you can do it by hand so easily. I'll explain how in just a few minutes. It's almost as fast, and you
get a really good result, too. 300 grams, or 2 1/2 cups,
of all-purpose flour right into the bowl of
your food processor. 1/4 cup of sugar. You could use a couple tablespoons if you want it less sweet. If you're making a savory quiche dough, just skip the sugar. 1/2 a teaspoon of salt. (slapping) That's it, okay, we're
gonna give this a whiz now. Now we'll whiz it up. Just pulse so it mixes
everything together. (whirring) I will sometimes give it a shake (rattling)
just to make sure. (whirring) Now it's time for the butter. Some people will use
shortening in their pie crust, and the advantage to that
is that you get a really, really flaky pie crust, but
I will not use shortening. It is a hydrogenated fat, and
I'm not living for that life. I will use plain old butter
and get a butter crust. I'm adding one cup, or 226
grams, of cold, cubed butter. Just toss it all right in there. It's a good idea to
cube your butter first, and then just keep it in the
fridge for when you're ready. That way it'll be nice and cold. So if you are making this by
hand without a food processor, which is what I used to do for years, just get your dry
ingredients in a large bowl, whisk them together,
then take your butter, freeze it, use a cheese grater,
and just grate your butter into the flour, mixing as you go so there's not a giant clump. And then when you're ready,
drizzle in your ice water, maybe vodka if you're using it too, and then just crumble it up. You can use a knife. You don't wanna make the butter too warm. Same steps afterwards
for working the dough. Okay, let's pulse this up a couple times. (whirring) Take a look. Not putting my fingers in
this death contraption. And you can see here I
have a crumbly mixture, like lentil-sized pieces
of butter, not pea-sized. If you want a really flaky pie crust, you would like to have giant
chunks of butter in there. But if you're gonna make
any kind of a pattern, a lattice, little stamped-out shapes, you wanna have a more uniform pie crust. Okay, now I'm gonna have 1/4 cup mixed in mostly with ice water, maybe
three tablespoons of ice water. But I'm taking some vodka (laughs). So the vodka will make
your dough come together, but it's not gonna hydrate the flour. So it'll just bake off when you're baking. You're not gonna taste any
vodka, nothing to worry about, and you're not gonna
activate the gluten as much. All right, so I'm gonna
drizzle this in while I pulse. (whirring) Okay, take a look. Look at this, now it's dough. Isn't that crazy? Don't keep adding water or
vodka to it (laughs), it's done. Okay, we're gonna roll this out now. Remove that blade and
set it aside carefully. (tapping) It's so sharp. All right, now we're gonna dump this out right onto our pastry mat. If you don't have a pastry
mat, you can work on a sheet of parchment paper, or even
directly on your counter, but it helps to have
something between your counter and what you're dumping out, because if it sticks, it's just annoying. Okay, like I said, this
looks like a crazy big mass of flour, but when you
squeeze it with your hands, it becomes pastry dough, it's so cool. All right, I like to
just use the pastry mat to bring it together a few times. And you're not gonna knead
it, but what you are gonna do is knead it (laughs), just once or twice. And don't worry if it seems crumbly now, because when you let
it rest in the fridge, it'll all even out. All those little specks of
moisture will seep together. There you go, you see? It just needs to be pressed. All right, and then just
flatten it out into a disc. Just collect all those
scraps that fell to the side. We're gonna wrap this in plastic. I'm just struggling with
this plastic over here. All right, wrap it well in plastic. You don't want it to be exposed
and dry out in the fridge. And now we're going to chill it. You can chill it overnight if you want. It's nice to step things out,
especially when you're busy. But at least give it, I would
say, an hour in the fridge. After your dough's
chilled out in the fridge for an hour to overnight,
we're gonna take it out and then let it come a little
bit back to room temperature. If it's super cold,
it'll crack right away. So it needs to be chilled through, but then brought back a little bit. Okay, so unwrap it. You can still see all
those beautiful specks of butter in the flour. Liberally sprinkle some
flour on the surface. You're gonna do this a couple times, because you do not want
your pie crust to stick. I'm also using a pastry mat again, because it lets me lift
things up, manipulate it, and I don't have to worry about anything. Sprinkle the top with
flour, get a rolling pin, and rub that with flour too. Everything will help. Now begin pressing, and as you do this, you can frequently move the dough around. You probably will get a crack. Don't worry about it. Just pinch it together and
everything will work out. Try to apply even pressure. It'll make things much
better for you in the end. And you don't have to roll
all the way out to the edge, because that makes the
edge a little bit thinner than everything else,
which is not what you want. A little more flour,
gonna flip it upside down. Look at all those
beautiful cracks (laughs). It's okay, don't worry. Pinch, pinch, pinch, and keep rolling. You can add some more flour to the top, just spread it around. The excess goes on your rolling pin. Don't rush this part, take your time. It's a little bit of kind
of a zen meditation for you. And I find that when you make pie crusts, if you start getting anxious about it and rushing steps, or kind of losing track of what you're doing,
bad things can happen. So I wanna end up with
about 1/4 of an inch all the way around. Notice I'm changing the direction that I'm rolling in as well. A little bit more flour. And this is the nice thing
about the pastry mat. You can just pick the whole thing up, and it really helps you. All right, that's great. Now to lift this up, you can
either fold it into quarters, or I like to roll it on my pin. Let that pastry mat give you a head start. Now here's your dough, ready
to roll into whatever you want. I'm using, of course, a pie crust. Roll that back in, try and center it. For this step, I'm gonna press in, because I don't wanna
stretch the dough out. If you start stretching your dough out when you manipulate it, it
can shrink back more easily, and you're not gonna have
the pie shape that you want. It'll be a bit shrunken. You can do whatever
edging detail you like. I'm gonna do a really, really basic one. Just gonna trim the excess pie
dough off with some scissors. So this is actually fine. If you want, you can fold
the pie crust in on itself, and then do that pinching with
your thumb and two fingers. That's the classic edge. However, this glass pie
form is so slippery, and has really steep walls, actually. So I learned the hard
way that if you do that and bring the pastry all the way in, there's a higher probability it'll slide down during bakin'. Bakin'? Baking. Even if you do all the right steps. So what I'm gonna do is kind of a cheat. I'm gonna hold my thumb out,
and then press in like this. So I'm gonna get a nice
kind of rustic edge, but the pie will still be
clinging to the glass edge, and won't slide down as easily. Just repeat that all the
way throughout your pie. This is great because you
can bake the pie shell up, it'll look kind of pretty,
and hold everything in there. But if you're making a
lattice top for an apple pie or a blueberry pie, then you're gonna want a different edge, most likely. This looks pretty good to me. It's gonna go into the freezer. But first we're gonna do a
little bit more prep work so that we can toss it
directly into the oven right as soon as it's chilled properly. Trusty sheet of parchment paper. Gonna fold this up. Does not have to be exact, so don't worry. Okay, so from the edge
here, now I have my circle. I'm just gonna frill the edges a bit. Now we can place this
directly into our pie shell. Look how pretty that is, perfect. If you're making a no-bake pie, like any kind of a
mousse, a curd, whatever, you're gonna wanna
blind bake the pie shell and then bake the pie shell completely. When you do that, you need
to give it some support. So I have my paper here to protect it, but we're gonna add in this
whole little heavy-duty aluminum foil contraption that I made. And it just pops right in. I filled it with beans. You can use pastry weights as well. I actually have some. I have no idea where I put them. Sad, but beans work too. And anyways, what's gonna
happen is after this chills in the freezer, you're gonna bake it. But just press that foil
up against the edge. If you're using a fresh sheet,
just crumple it in carefully, and then have it go right to the edge. We're ready to freeze this. So you can freeze it
overnight if you want, or for as little as 30 minutes. So my pie crust has been
baking for 15 minutes at 425, and you can see the crust is nice and, you know, it's coming
along, it's not melty. Perfect. Now we're just going to
remove our very hot (laughs), very hot foil here, and
take our paper out too. I whipped up a really quick
egg wash with a tablespoon of cream and one egg, just
mixed in a small container. You can use milk if you want instead. And we're just gonna
brush the entire surface with the egg wash. Doing this will make it
nice and golden brown and give you a pretty sheen as well, but it also protects the
crust and helps it maintain its crispness, even if you're
adding in a wet filling. It's like a little barrier to protect it. So I like to get the edge really well, 'cause that's what you're gonna see. And it needs to be pretty, right? So dock the bottom, just
pierce it with a fork. This will help steam escape. If you get little rips in the bottom, no one's gonna see 'em, it doesn't matter. Now we're gonna baby our
pie crust by tinting it. You can buy little pre-made metal rings to protect your pie shell, but for me, they always are the wrong
size, and it doesn't work out. Foil just works better. So measure out some foil, fold it in half, and gently create a ring. We're gonna fold in, and
this will protect the edge so it doesn't burn while
the rest of the pie crust gets that nice golden
color and really crisps up. If you don't tent your
pie crusts, you'll get a blackened (laughs), really, really dark, almost bitter-tasting edge while the rest of it is nice and perfect. So tenting makes a big deal. Place this onto a baking sheet. Hopefully it's not too slippery. And we're gonna bake this
again for 10 to 15 minutes at 425, then reduce the temperature to 375 and continue baking. You can rotate your pie
crust as well if you want. And then we're going to be checking it at 10 minute intervals
to see how golden it is. Wow, that was so easy. Look how nice, look at
this beautiful color. You can use it for any
no-bake pie filling. It is going to be just
so crunchy and delicious. But before I say goodbye, I
wanna show you what happens when you don't support
your pie crust properly. Ugh, this is one of the
test batches from yesterday, and it looks okay from
this one little angle. But look at this sag. It's because it wasn't well supported. I actually took the
tin foil out too early. If you like this recipe, use
it to make my chocolate pie. It's an airy, rich,
just silky chocolate pie that'll blow your mind,
and you could also use the same recipe to make
my apple hand pies. They're little mini apple pie cookies that are just full of caramel, apples, crunchy pastry, and they
will blow your mind. If you like my videos,
hit that like button and subscribe, and I'll see you soon.
