How to Make Flacky Pie Crust

Bringing the people behind our food to life. Hi, I am Catherine and today I am going to be teaching you how to make pie crust. So we are going to start with two-and-half cups of flour, to which we are going to add one-and-a-half teaspoons of salt. I am just going to give that a little bit of a stir. Now, we are going to cut a half-a-cup of butter into small pieces. Just make it easier to cut that in with the pastry cutter, and we are going to add a half-a-cup of shortening. So now, we are going to take our pastry cutter, and cut all of this into the flour. So it's really important that your butter and your shortening are cold. Just take them out of the refrigerator right before you begin. We want to make sure that we don't overwork this but that we get it to about these pea sized chunks. It doesn't have to be very uniform. You want those kind of bigger pieces of butter in there to amount, that gives it that nice, flaky texture when it's baked. So we are pretty close to having about the right texture here. So now, we want to add a half-a-cup to three-quarters of a cup of ice water just to make sure that you don't actually get any ice chunks in there. The ice water is important to prevent the butter from melting. We want it to melt when we actually put the pie into the oven. So another trick is especially if your hand, if it's a warm day, if your hands are really warm, you can actually just dip them into the ice water to get them nice and cool before starting to work with the dough. So again, you want to work quickly and not knead this dough too much. So this recipe is actually for a double crust. You just want to make two, and two bowls out of it that you are then going to roll out. Okay, so that's good. You can see how this is actually kind of flaking in my hand, that's about the texture that you want this to be at. Before rolling them out, you are actually going to want to put them into the refrigerator for a short period of time. It allows the gluten to sort of relax, and it will make them easier to roll out. So now, we are going to get some flour onto our surface before rolling out the dough. Now, we are going to take one of our bowls and just kind of flatten it out a little bit, and actually just kind of flip it over to get flour in both those surfaces, and even get a little bit on the rolling pin, and then just start rolling from the center out. If it feels like it's sticking, just put a little bit more flour on your rolling pin. Now, you can just fold it over a couple of times, and fit it into the pie pan. So it's important to not stretch it, just kind of fit it in there, and cut off the excess, and then just kind of fold the ends under. Now, you can use your fork just to press the edges down. So now, your pie is ready to be filled, and once you are ready to bake the pie, you put it into the oven at 425 degrees for about 10 or 15 minutes just to have that high heat to really melt the butter and then lower it down to about 350, and continue baking the pie for maybe around to half-hour just depending on what you have filled the pie with, and keep an eye on your crust, on the sides of your crust if you only have the bottom layer, and if you have the top layer also, you are going to want to definitely keep an eye on it, and make sure that you don't burn the crust and you can actually cover it with tinfoil to prevent that from happening, and that's it.