Easy, flaky Wham Bam Pie Crust recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to a flaky crust? ›

While butter, shortening, or lard make equally light and tender crusts, an all-butter crust will be flakier due to butter's higher water content: as the crust bakes the butter melts and its water turns to steam, creating thin, crisp layers (flakes).

What kind of flour makes the best pie crust? Well, not high-protein bread flour! Use that for your chewy bagels. What you want for pie is flour that yields a tender, flaky crust, which means medium-protein all-purpose flour or low-protein pastry flour.

The flakiness of a crust is a result of both the fat that you use and how much you work the fat into the flour before adding the water. Because of their higher melting temperature and unique structure, lard and shortening do make very flaky crusts.

As shortening is able to withstand higher temperatures and does not melt easily, it creates flaky and crisp yet tender pie crusts when used alone or in combination with butter.

Butter for flakiness and flavor, and shortening for its high melting point and ability to help the crust hold shape. You can use butter-flavor shortening if desired. If you want to skip the shortening, feel free to try this all-butter pie crust instead.

#2—Add cold water

Add the ice water gradually to the dough, about one tablespoon or so at a time, and stop when the dough is just moist enough to hold together when a handful is squeezed.

Crust dust is a 1:1 mixture of flour and granulated sugar. When baking a pie, especially a fruit pie, a couple of teaspoons of crust dust sprinkled into the bottom of the crust will help prevent the crust from becoming saturated with juicy filling as it bakes.

Fat equals flavour, and also helps keep crust light and flaky. To up my fat content, I use cream (or whole fat milk) instead of water in my pie crust. Also, don't allow too much gluten to form. Gluten causes pie crusts to become tough and dense, and that is definitely the opposite of what we're going for here!

The acidic properties of vinegar inhibit gluten, some will say. This theory proposes that once the water and flour are combined, gluten starts forming, causing the dough to grow tough. Adding an acid, the theory goes, stops the gluten in its tracks and rescues the crust from toughness.

Whether you use a food processor, a stand mixer, or your hands to incorporate the ingredients together, overmixing is a common mistake that leads to a chewy crust. It's tempting when baking to combine the ingredients completely, but the texture should resemble a coarse meal before adding your liquid.

What is a trick to making a good pie crust? ›

1. Use Very Cold Butter or Fat. Butter, shortening, lard, or suet—whatever fat the recipe calls for should be well-chilled and cut into small pieces to start with for the flakiest crust in the end. The fat in a pie crust must maintain some of its integrity in the dough to make the crust truly flaky.

But the one surefire way to make certain your pie's crust will be golden brown, crisp, and delicious — just as appealing as its filling — is to prebake it. That's right: bake the bottom crust first, before adding the filling.

With docking, the holes allow steam to escape, so the crust should stay flat against the baking dish when it isn't held down by pie weights or a filling. Otherwise the crust can puff up, not only impacting appearance but also leaving you with less space for whatever filling you have planned.

If your graham cracker crust turns out a little harder than you'd like, you may have added too much butter, which firms when chilled. You may have also packed the crust too hard when forming it in the pie plate. Pack the crumbs just enough that the crust feels firm yet not too solid.

The process of making a flaky pastry involves “cutting” one quarter of the total fat into the flour such as a pie dough till it forms what resembles coarse meal. Proper incorporation of the fat, in this step, provides flour lubrication and restricts or at least delays its quick absorption of added water.

Keep the dough ingredients cool

The key to standard pie crust is having pockets of fat surrounded by flour. But if that fat starts to melt and mixes with the flour, it can start to develop gluten, which can lead to a tough crust. To prevent this, keep everything as cold as possible.