Note: Basic dough for sweet and savory pies. Makes two bottom crusts or one covered pie.
Ingredients:
1¾ sticks (196g) unsalted butter, divided
70g frozen, 126 chilled
1 tablespoon (12g) Red Wine Vinegar ½ cup (118g) Cold Water 2¼ cups (333g) All-Purpose Flour
2¼ teaspoons (6.5g) Kosher Salt ½ tablespoon (6.5g) Granulated Sugar
Directions:
Cut the butter into ½-inch cubes. Freeze 5 tablespoons (70g) for 20 minutes or overnight; chill the remaining butter in the refrigerator until ready to use.
Stir the red wine vinegar into the cold water and set aside.
Combine the flour, salt, and sugar in the bowl of a food processor and pulse 5 or 6 times to combine.
Add the chilled butter and mix for 25 to 30 seconds, until the mixture resembles coarse meal.
Add the frozen butter and pulse 15 to 20 times, until the butter is in pea-sized pieces.
Add 6 tablespoons of the vinegar water and pulse 6 times. The dough should start to look crumbly. Test the dough by squeezing a small amount in the palm of your hand. If it easily holds together, it is done. If not, add ½ tablespoon of the vinegar water and pulse 3 more times. Repeat this process as needed until the dough holds together.
Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface and knead together until smooth; dough should never come together in the food processor.
Divide the dough into 2 equal parts and roll each into a ball. Flatten the balls slightly and wrap separately in plastic wrap. Let the dough rest in the refrigerator until ready to use, at lease 20 minutes but preferably overnight.
Final Notes:
For a blind bake, at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes
The baking temperature and times depends of the filling, but pies are the commonly baked at 400°F (200°C) for anywhere between 25 minute to and hour. Follow your filling recipe's baking directions.
About the recipe, from The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie:
While vegetable shortening pretty much guarantees a flaky crust, the result is flavorless and leaves a pasty aftertaste. Once you learn the technique for a flaky all-butter pie crust, it's no problem to make a flaky and flavorful crust every time.
At the pie shop, we use red wine vinegar. I like the bright, earthy flavor, and the intense color leaves little doubt that you remembered to add it to your dough water! Apple cider vinegar and distilled white vinegar work fine too. Do not use balsamic.
There are two things you must do to make a great and flaky all-butter pie crust and one thing you must not do. First, you must mix the flour and the butter so that small pieces of butter get coated in flour. This creates small pockets of butter in the dough. When you roll the dough, these pockets are flattened and stretched, creating thin sheets of butter surrounded by flour. When the dough is baked, the butter melts, leaving empty spaces between sheets of dough. Steam from both the moisture in the melting butter and the water in the dough separates the sheets and creates flakes. Second, you must limit the growth of long gluten chains in the dough. Gluten is the protein in wheat flour that forms long stretchy strands when it is mixed with water. Some of these strands are essential; your dough would break apart without them. However, too many strands make the dough tough and hard to work with. To counteract this, we add a little vinegar to the cold water before mixing it into the pie dough. The acid in the vinegar helps cut the gluten strands down to a manageable size. Third, you must not overwork the pie dough. Working the pie dough twists and tangles the gluten chains, making the dough though and elastic. Perfectly fine pie dough can be ruined by overworking. This is also why we let the dough rest after kneading and rolling. Resting allows the gluten strands to relax, and makes the dough easier to roll and less likely to shrink in the pie tin. Be forewarned that no amount of resting will fix dough that has already been overworked.
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