Pie Crust???

With it being the holiday season, I thought about making my pie crusts AGAIN...  and I just want to crawl away to the commissary and buy some premade...  I HATE making pie crust...  Yes it is true, this super mom, and Martha Stewart as I have been called has her kitchen nightmares!!!

So here are a few tricks I have learned:
Shrinkage?  When you put the effort into making a homemade pie crust for a Caramel Banana Cream Pie or other recipe that calls for a prebaked crust, it can be very disappointing if the crust that you worked so hard to make shrinks and gives your pie a less-than-perfect presentation. There are two ways that pie crusts can shrink and a couple of things that you can do to prevent it.


Pie crusts can shrink away from the bottom of a pie plate when you’re pre-baking the shell if you don’t put pie weights inside of the crust. Pie weights can be anything from a set of ceramic balls designed to be pie weights to a big batch of dried beans that are poured into a parchment-lined pie crust; pie weights are anything that will hold the pie crust down while it “sets” in the oven. This typically happens with pastry crusts and you don’t need to use pie weights for graham cracker or crumb crusts.

Pie crusts can also shrink away from the sides of a pie plate, giving a crust a very uneven appearance and creating openings for filling to sneak into and make the crust soggy. This shrinkage can’t be solved with pie weights because it is primarily the result of not resting the pie dough enough. Just like when you are baking bread, gluten develops when you work with pie dough. Rolling out the dough and working with it to fit into your pie plate tightens up the gluten, and if you bake it straight away, that tightness will result in the crust shrinking and becoming tougher during baking. To prevent this type of shrinkage, rest the pie dough for about 5 minutes after you roll it out onto your work surface and before you press it into your pie plate. Once it is in the pie plate, put it back in the fridge (or leave it on the counter if your kitchen is very cool) to rest for about 15 minutes before baking. This resting gives the gluten time to relax and will help keep your crust from shrinking during baking.

How to make a flaky crust?
Pie crust is typically made with just a few ingredients: flour, water, salt and fat. The fat is usually butter or shortening, and occasionally a little bit of sugar or cinnamon makes its way into the crust for flavor. It’s a simple recipe and it should be simple to make, but the reality is that it can be tricky to make a perfectly flaky pie crust. That said, it certainly doesn’t have to be tricky.


Butter is the ingredient that makes pie crusts flaky. When the pie crust bakes, the butter melts into the dough and two things happen. The fat from the butter tenderizes the dough, making it tender, and the water in the butter evaporates, creating a little air pocket in the dough, making it flaky. You need that puff of air from escaping steam to create flaky layers, and this is why all butter recipes are the best for other super flaky recipes, such as puff pastry and croissants. Shortening and lard are solid fats that make crusts tender, but do not add flakiness because they do not have the water content that butter – which is about 80% fat and 20% water – does.

When you cut in the butter, whether you’re working by hand or pulsing your dough in a food processor, you want your dough to be sandy and have pieces of butter about the size of a large pea still in it. Larger pieces of fat in the crust will result in a flakier texture. For this reason, it is good to stir in the water in the recipe by hand, rather than adding it into a food processor where it could become overmixed. Don’t use too much water or the dough will become tough, so add it in gradually.

Practice makes perfect (unless you are me, then NEVER stop practicing) when it comes to pie crusts, but using a recipe that is mostly butter, or all butter, is going to get you the flakiest crust every time.