I have been trying two or three times a year since probably 2020 to make delicious all butter pie crust from scratch. There have been many, many rather miserable failures, but this summer, I think I finally figured it out.
Ingredients
- 180 g all purpose flour
- 25 - 50 g sugar (less for savory pie, more for sweet pie)
- Pinch of salt, a little more if the butter is unsalted
- 113 g cold butter, cubed
- 30 g ice cold water
- 30 g vodka, chilled in a freezer overnight
Instructions
Whisk the flour, sugar, and salt together until combined. Add the cold cubed butter straight from the refrigerator. It is imperative that the butter is very cold.
Wtih your fingers, smash each of the cubes of butter so they turn into little planks. Once they are all smashed, begin working some of the butter into the flour, but do not work it all in. There need to be some bigger chunks of butter still left so that the crust will have visible, flaky, buttery layers. If you work it all in, you will have made a bad English scone, not American pie crust. This is the hardest part to get right in my opinion, and some trial and error is probably inevitable. You want some of the butter totally worked in, some little pieces (like the size of peas?), and a few bigger pieces (like the size of almonds?).
Once the butter is properly incorporated, add the ice water and the freezing cold vodka. The vodka is nice for a couple of reasons. First, vodka remains a liquid in the freezer, and so it really helps with keeping everything cold (which again, is imperative). Second, the vodka doesn’t hydrate the dough quite as much as straight water does, and a good portion of its volume bakes off. This is good because less water means less gluten development means the crust stays tender and delicious.
I kind of toss the dough around with a soup spoon to incorporate the liquid without too much agitation to avoid as much gluten development as possible. At this stage, it will look like crumbly crap but just trust the process. Try squeezing the dough together a bit. If it holds its shape, you’re good to go. If it still falls apart a bit, add a teaspoon of ice water at a time until it will hold its shape, incorporating the water gently with the spoon after each addition. It’s also imperative not to add too much water because the texture will be all wrong if the dough is too hydrated.
Shape the dough into a disk. Make sure it’s round because if it’s not and you go to roll it later, you’ll roll a not-round-dough-blob into a not-round-pie-crust. Wrap the dough tightly with plastic wrap and chill at least an hour before rolling it out. The chilling is not optional because as it sits, the water in the dough diffuses evenly and coats all the little flour specks or something. Also, by the time you’re at this stage, the dough is starting to warm up too much which is the kryptonite of pie crust.
At this stage, you can leave it in the fridge for up to a couple days or even freeze it for several months. When you go to roll it out, just let it sit out at room temperature for 5 or 10 minutes because if you try to roll it out fresh out of the fridge, it will probably crack very badly around the edges.