Pie Crust Recipe

Course Dessert

Cuisine American

Keyword pie crust

Prep Time 10

Total Time 10

Servings crusts

Calories 1383kcal

Author Emma Chapman

Equipment

box grater

Ingredients

2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup butter cold
⅓ cup ice water

Instructions

In a large bowl, add the flour and salt, stir to combine.
Use a box grater to shred the cold butter. This is the secret to the best flaky pie crust!
Add the cold butter to the flour mixture and mix together with your clean hands. The mixture will be crumbly, resembling small pebbles.
This should only take a couple minutes. Part of the goal is to touch/mix the pie crust dough the least amount possible as this will result in the flakiest crust. Overworking the dough can make it gummy or crunchy like a giant cracker.
Add the ice water and again use your clean hands to mix until a dough ball forms. Press the dough together, you do not need to knead the dough.
Divide in two and form small disks. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate until you are ready to use, or freeze if you are planning to use this much later.

Notes

Using a box grater, or cheese grater, to grate the cold butter is the best way to make pie crust IMO. But two other methods are using a pastry blender or food processor. For the pastry blender, cut the cold butter into cubes and then use the pastry blender to cut/smash it into the flour mixture. For the food processor method, you also cut the cold butter into small cubes and pulse with the flour mixture in the food processor. With both methods, I would then mix the cold water in by hand—simply because you really don’t want to overwork the pie dough.

For the ice water, I simply add ice to a glass mixing cup and then fill with water. When I’m ready to add the ice water to the recipe, I measure out what I need from this bowl so it’s truly ice cold when I add it to the dough.

This recipe will make two standard size pie crusts, a top and bottom. If you only need one, you can either try and cut this recipe in half OR you can make both and freeze one for use later.

You can refrigerate pie crust dough for 3-5 days. Freeze if you want to store it for longer.

Nutrition