drst:

OK Tumblr, hit me with your best pie crust recipes please?

Alrighty then:

Rich, melt in your mouth crust.  Makes enough for 1, 9″ crust.  Double the amounts if you want a crust on top, too.

1 C flour

2 T sugar

2 T softened butter

¼ C heavy cream

2 T canola oil

mix with a fork and light hand, until forms a slightly sticky ball (about 2 minutes)

lightly coat 2 pieces of parchment with cooking spray.  Place dough ball on sprayed side and cover with second piece of parchment. Roll into circle between the two sheets of parchment.  Put in fridge to firm up enough that you can manipulate it in the pie pan without it falling apart.

fill pie and glaze with a mix of ¼ C apricot preserves and 2 t water.    

Very rich (heavy cream, right?).  Unlike other recipes, takes a lot of abuse when mixing and still tastes good.  Best with fruit filling.  

If you’re making a pumpkin pie or other kind of custard pie, you may want to use a drier recipe.  Crust recipes aren’t much more than flour, butter, and water. Honestly, how well it turns out really depends on what you do with the ingredients more than what ingredients you use.   

No matter the recipe, the tricks to any good pie crust are: 

1. best quality ingredients you can afford
2. a pastry cutter, seriously.  I know they’re a pain in the ass to keep in your kitchen drawer, but the cheapo wire ones are the best.
3. a very light hand when cutting in the butter – press down to cut the butter into pieces and fluff up to spread it around while you turn the bowl to cut in the butter, quit just as soon as it looks relatively evenly distributed and you don’t have a lot of flour that isn’t incorporated.  It’s the small bits of uncut butter that make it flaky.  Think of it as if you’re making flour covered bits of butter that you’re going to layer on top of each other when you roll out the dough.  The butter melts during the cooking and leaves behind the teeny tiny pockets that makes the crust flaky.  So don’t mix things up too finely, or you won’t get a flaky, light crust.  
4. An equally light hand when mixing in the water – make a well in the dry ingredients, add the water to the well, scoop the dry ingredients a forkful at a time through the well while you turn the bowl
5. only add as much water as you think will hold everything together when you press it into a ball.  You can always sprinkle a little more water over it and keep fluffing with a fork until it looks right.  Try pinching about a teaspoon of it between your fingers and see if it holds together. If it holds together, stop.
6. Repeat after me:  do NOT overwork the dough.  Don’t overwork it when you cut in the butter.  Don’t overwork it when you mix in the water.  Don’t overwork it when you roll it out, and don’t overwork it when you pinch the edge of the crust together.  It’s like making biscuits.  The more you fuss with the dough, the tougher and blander it tastes.  My midwestern farmer grandmother’s pie crust looked like a crazy patchwork quilt, but it was the best tasting crust ever.  
7. glaze with milk and sprinkle sugar on the crust before you put it in the oven… yum.