Pie Crust Cookies - The Recipe Critic (2024)

FAQs

What is the best flour for pie crust? ›

Flour: For a tender crust, choose a low-protein flour. Pastry flour, with a protein content of about 8-10%, ranks between all-purpose flour and cake flour. All-purpose flour works just fine for pie crusts, while cake flour might lack enough protein to form a workable, elastic dough.

I like to use pastry flour because it contains less gluten than all-purpose flour and therefore creates a more tender crust, but all-purpose flour will work just fine if that's what you have on hand. The “2” is fat. Butter is the most common type of fat used, but other solid fats will work as well.

In pie crust, you don't want gluten to form so you don't want to mix too much and overwork the dough. For a flaky crust, cut the butter so that chunks of butter about the size of walnut halves remain.

If too little water is added, you'll notice the dough is dry and crumbly when you try to roll it out and handle it. You want the dough to clump together, but not feel overly sticky.

All-Purpose Flour: The Versatile Choice

If you're looking for a safe bet or are new to cookie baking, all-purpose flour is your go-to option.

Adding more flour is always an option, but add too much flour and your dough will end up like a cracker—not a pie crust. Remember: The more you mix your pie dough, the tougher it becomes. To keep the mixing to a minimum, try rolling out your dough between two pieces of parchment paper.

“My preferred fat for pie crusts will always be butter. To me, it is all about flavor, and no other fat gives flavor to a crust like butter does. Other fats, even though they have great pros, lack flavor,” De Sa Martins said. “The more flavorful the butter, the more flavor your pie crust will have,” Huntsberger added.

Water, however, is absorbed much less easily into flour proteins when the temperature is colder. That's why purists recommend cold ingredients, cold equipment and marble boards. Keeping the butter cold also helps when making short crust pastry because it doesn't melt into the flour when you are working it in.

Non-chilled crust is fairly crumbly and less smooth, which makes it harder to roll out and means it may not look as polished. It will brown more quickly and the final product will likely be tougher, heavier, and more doughy – none of those in a bad way. It will likely have a more intense, butter flavor.

Why do you put butter under a pie crust? ›

Butter plays a key role in creating the delicate flakiness of the pie crust, and only if the butter is incorporated correctly and COLD when it goes into the oven. Tip: Cut the butter into cubes and place in the freezer 10 minutes before you need to incorporate it into the dough. This way it will be ICE COLD.

Unlike water, alcohol does not contribute to the formation of gluten, the network of proteins that can cause a crust to turn leathery. Because the alcohol burns off quickly in the oven, drying out the crust, we could add enough vodka to keep the dough wet and extremely supple.

Though the science is sketchy, a few professional pie bakers swear that it improves the texture of the crust, and they wouldn't dream of making pie dough without it. (Others swear by similarly acidic ingredients like lemon juice.) The acidic properties of vinegar inhibit gluten, some will say.

Bleached flour works well in recipes like cookies, pancakes, waffles, quick breads, and pie crusts. Meanwhile, unbleached flour is better suited for puff pastries, eclairs, yeast breads, and popovers.

Pastry flour has a little bit less protein in it than AP flour, about 2–3% less. Less protein is beneficial to flaky pastry products like: biscuits, pie dough, sweet pastries, quick breads, short doughs and pancakes. If the recipe includes a chemical leavening agent, baking soda or powder, pastry flour is appropriate.

Pastry Flour

It strikes the perfect balance between flakiness and tenderness, making it the go-to choice for pie crusts, tarts, and cookies.

All things being equal,” she says, “there's more fat per ounce of shortening than butter, and because shortening has a higher melting point than butter, it's more forgiving to work with, so it might give the appearance of more tenderness.” But any pie crust should have enough fat, no matter the source, to produce a ...