I am Petra at Mom's Pies Bakery in Occoquan, Virginia and now we are going to make an all butter crust for an apple pie.
First of all, you'll need pastry flour, you can also use all purpose flour, just use a tablespoon or so less. You need two-and-a-half cups and a good thing to keep in mind, when you're measuring flour for baked goods is to keep it loose in the measuring cup so that you're not putting too much in there, it can make a whole lot of difference if it's too packed in.
So, we're measuring right into the food processor there, one, two and a half cups and then we are going to need a tablespoon of sugar. It doesn't need to be too sweet, the sweetness is going to in the filing and a teaspoon of salt and to that you need to add about two sticks of butter. The butter is chopped up into probably about a tablespoon size pieces, two sticks is half a pound of butter. This is unsalted and the saltiness will come from what you've just measured in there.
So this has been chilled in the freezer, so that it's not too soft when it is mixed in with the flour, otherwise it becomes a kind of soft sticky dough, which is the opposite of what you want with a pie crust dough. The butter has been kept in the freezer for probably about an hour after chopping it up, so that it's pretty much frozen butter.
So, you can just pose with the food processor. Generally, you look into breakdown the butter without really emulsifying it, you want it to be in little pieces and just get into smaller and smaller pieces, so that it integrates with the flour and the other ingredients.
Alright. Now, all the butter has been chopped up into pretty even sized pieces and mixed in with the flour and so it's all kind of integrated in there. Now, it just needs a few tablespoons of really ice cold water to be added while it's processing to bring the dough together.
So we have here a glass of ice water and I am just going to take the water, table spoon at a time and add it into the dough. So you can keep the machine on, one, two and you can see the dough is slowly starting to form. Three tablespoons there, four, might get a little stuck and you just kind of need to shake it around in there, because the dough is kind of getting heavier and it's hard for the blades to move it around. Then we put four, and there is five.
So, this has barely come together into a dough. It has still some crumbs in it. You don't want them to mix it to the point where it becomes a sort of sticky dough, you can feel. If the flour is mixed too long, it kind of forms these gluten proteins and that's what makes the dough sticky and elastic. You want this to be buttery and you want it to not stick to your fingers, when you're making it.
So at this point, you can put your dough in a bowl and you can kind of format into one big piece and at that point you can chill in the fridge for probably about two hours and then it will be ready to roll and that's how you make the dough for a butter crust pie.
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