Pie Crust

Pie Crust

This is a pie crust recipe that I’ve been fiddling around with for a bit.

Put 4 cups flour in a bowl. I grind my own flour, so I use 3 c. hard white wheat or kamut flour, and 1 c. soft white wheat. You can also use 3 c. all purpose flour and 1 c. pastry flour.

Add in 2 Tbsp sugar, 1 tsp salt, 3/4 tsp baking powder.

Mix so that the ingredients are well dispersed throughout the flour.

Using a pastry cutter, add in 1 1/2 c. shortening.

Continue to cut shortening until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

I use Spectrum organic shortening because it’s just palm oil. My grandma likes to use Butter flavored Crisco for her crusts, but there’s too many chemicals in it for me to use it around here. I’ve been in a pinch before and had to use butter. As long as the butter is cold, it will work just fine. One it starts to warm and soften, then it tends to mix more with the flour and forms more of a shortbread crust, rather than a pie crust.

To one egg, add 2 tsp apple cider vinegar. Add 1/2 c. cold water.

Carefully mix into dough. Don’t over mix or you will have tough dough.

Add more cold water as needed. It depends on the protein level of your flour as to how much water you will have to add. The higher the protein, the more water.

Dough should be soft, but not sticky.

Scoop out some dough, enough for one layer of pie crust, and pat it into a disk shape and place on a floured surface.

I generally use the pastry flour (or soft white) for rolling it out since it is a low protein flour.

When rolling out your pie dough, always start in the middle of the disk.

Roll away from you.

Pick up the rolling pin, and starting from the center, roll towards you.

Continue picking up the rolling pin at the end of each of each roll out, and starting from the center each time, roll in all directions until you have a large circle.

Carefully roll up dough and place in pie plate. Bake as directed in your recipe.

If you need a baked pie crust, pierce the crust with a fork in several places and bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

This recipe makes two double crust pies, or four single crust pies.

Roly-Polies