Pie Dough

This is a very nice all butter pie dough recipe. It's enough to make a single 9 inch wide pie shell. This type of dough is also called a shortcrust pastry in the UK, or pâte brisée in France. It works well in either sweet or savory pies or tarts, though it's not particularly sweet itself. I've adapted this from Claire Saffitz's pie dough recipe.

Ingredients

• 1 stick + 2 Tbsp (10 Tbsp total) unsalted butter, chilled
• 1½ C pastry flour, plus more for rolling out
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• ¾ tsp kosher salt
• ½ C ice cold water

Steps

1. Cut the butter up into 1 Tbsp chunks.
2. In a bowl mix together the dry ingredients.
3. Put butter and dry ingredients into the bowl of a food processor and pulse 2-3 times until butter is encorporated into the flour (pea sized pieces of butter).
4. Add 4 Tbsp of ice cold water into the food processor and pulse to incorporate. If the dough looks mostly damp you can continue, otherwise add another Tbsp of water and pulse a couple more times. You should be able to bring the dough togegther a bit like dry playdough at this point.
5. Bring all the dough together into a single mass and place the dough into a plastic bag, or wrap in plastic wrap. Make sure to scrap together any dry bits of dough in the food processor bowl, the dough will fully hydrate as it rests.
6. Refridgerate the dough for 2 hours.
7. Place dough on a lightly floured worksurface and let sit for a few minutes to warm up a bit.
8. At this point you can use the dough as is, in which case skip this step. For more flakyness roll out the dough into a rectangle about 4 inches wide and 12 inches long. Do a letter fold with the dough. Wrap it back up in the plastic and chill again for 30 minutes.
9. Gently roll out the dough to about ⅛ inch thick and 13 inches across. Roll it onto your rolling pin and then drap it over the pie dish. Press the dough down into the corners of the dish. You can crimp the edges for decoration.
10. At this point you can blind bake the crust, or fill it with something. Basically follow the rest of your other recipe.

Notes

• You can double this recipe if you need a top crust for your pie. Just split the dough into two pieces before rolling it out to the final size.
• I use pastry flour which is a low protein content flour to help reduce gluten formation. You can use AP flour if you want.
• There's the old vodka trick as well to help reduce gluten formation. Basically replace the water with chilled Vodka, which is only 45% water. The alcohol will cook out of the pastry.
• If you blind bake the crust, don't forget to use pie wieghts or dry beans to avoid air pockets from forming.