Pie crust truly is an art, and considering that pie is extremely important to my family, I’ve spent most of my holidays in the kitchen learning the secrets of my great-grandfather’s perfect crust. I will tell you right now that one of his big secrets was Crisco (aka hydrogenated vegetable oil), which is something that I will never knowingly consume again. When I transitioned to a “real food” diet, something had to be done about the family pie crust recipe. My dad reluctantly got on board and agreed to try making an all-butter crust. As it turns out, an all-butter crust is amazing! But the flaky texture of a Crisco crust was missing…enter LARD or CREAM CHEESE!
“What? You eat LARD?!” you say. Yes, I eat lard. In our home we actually try to figure out ways to add more lard to our diet. Lard is truly a traditional real food and is actually a nutrient-dense choice when you can get past the nutritional myth that it is bad for you (unless it’s from sick animals or has been hydrogenated).
Recently I discovered using cream cheese in pie crust and fell in love. While an all-butter crust is truly delicious, the use of lard or cream cheese really steps the crust up a notch and creates a perfect pie crust. Lard will make your pie crust a little more cookie like: crumbly, with thicker flakes and enough strength to support a liquid-based filling like pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, lemon meringue pie, chocolate silk, lemon chiffon, etc.. A cream cheese crust will give you a flakier, chewier crust that I prefer to use in fruit pies like apple, berry, or strawberry.
Step 1: Pulse flour and salt, slowly adding pieces of fat (butter, lard, cream cheese).
Use a food processor or a pastry cutter in a large bowl. With butter and lard (or all butter), you are going to pulse until your texture is like crumbs that hold together when you pinch them…like this:
At this point you will put your dough crumbles in a large mixing bowl and use your hands, a spoon or pastry cutter to mix in just enough iced water/vinegar (or liqueur) to pull the dough together.
If you use the cream cheese, the dough will be wetter and will most like need only a splash of the iced water/vinegar, or none at all, to pull the dough together. If you add to much liquid to your dough or overmix it, you will activate the gluten and lose all chances of a flaky pie crust.
Step 2: Compress your dough into a ball or disk, without kneading or overmixing, cover with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel and refrigerate for 2 hours.
The importance of this step is to re-harden the butter and/or fat in your dough so it melts and gets distributed evenly into the crust while it’s baking.
Step 3: Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface and use for a recipe!
I have a couple tips for this step, as pictured below:
- Place a towel under your cutting board (if you are using one) so it doesn’t move all over the counter.
- When it’s time to transfer the dough to the pie pan, roll the dough onto your rolling pin, then move it over the pan and un-roll it into the pan.
Step #4: Brush heavy cream on a crust topping 15-20 minutes before the pie is done baking.
This step ensures a perfectly golden, flaky, shiny result if you are using pie crust as a layer or lattice topping to your pie. You can also do this to the outer edges of your pie if it doesn’t have a topping, but it isn’t necessary. Don’t use an egg wash- that’s too much. Save that for pastries.
Perfect Pie Crust Recipe
Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups flour, plus extra for dusting, I use Einkorn Flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 cup butter, chilled, cut into small cubes
- 1/4 cup lard or cream cheese**, chilled, cut into small cubes (use more butter if lard or cream cheese is not desired), find organic lard here
- 1-2 tablespoons iced water and apple cider vinegar (or your favorite liqueur) evenly mixed
- *Heavy Cream (optional- see Step #4 above)
**As mentioned above, use lard for a stronger, more crumbly crust, and cream cheese for a flakier, chewier crust. If you don’t want to use either, substitute with more butter.
Pulse flour and salt in a large bowl or food processor (hand blended dough usually results in a better texture, but takes more work and a strong arm). Cut in butter and lard or cream cheese one piece at a time while pulsing the food processor, or by hand with a pastry cutter, until moist crumbs form that stay together when pinched with fingers. Transfer dough to a large mixing bowl (if necessary) add a few drops of the ice water/vinegar (or liqueur) mixture at a time while mixing, just until the crumbs pull together into a dough. Transfer dough to lightly floured surface and form into ball. Wrap in plastic wrap or a kitchen towel, flatten into a thick disk, and refrigerate for 1-2 hours until firm. Transfer chilled dough onto lightly floured surface and roll into large, thin disk, and bake according to your recipe.
oh this is WONDERFUL! I have been working on pie crusts for years, and have rarely found a recipe that actually works……….but this one is fabulous! We, too, try to incorporate real fats into our diet, and I am wondering if now I can duplicate my first success with this using coconut oil! Next pie crust coming up! Thanks a million for sharing–I will be linking this on my Blog, The Welcoming House, this coming week with holiday baking tips!
Blessings to you!
~Heather
Thank you Heather! Thanks for sharing, too! I think coconut oil wouldn’t work, but palm oil would. Coconut oil is oily, so it will probably separate poorly in a crust, but I’ve never really tried it so let me know if you do!
I have had great sucess sub’g coconut oil for butter in my pie crusts
Over mixing would be a problem as with other oils. I mix it til it has little coconut beads inside the flour and its everything we want in a perfect pie crust
I wish you sucess 🙂
is this recipe for a one or two crust pie? thanks!
Hi Anja,
This recipe will probably be good for 2 crusts- it depends on the size of your pan and what you are using for the crust. Probably not a full double recipe if you are covering your pie with crust, too. Always freeze leftover dough!!
thank you roz! i’ll plan on a lattice crust, then. 🙂 i have standard 9″ pie plates. every year i make a burgundy pie… blueberry and cranberry. i’m just as content with lattice as i am with a full top. either way it is a divine pie. 🙂 then of course there’s pumpkin pie.
thanks also for the suggestion to freeze extra dough! brilliant!
Thanks Anja! Blueberry cranberry sounds incredible! I’m obsessed with berry pies- more than any other I think.
holler if you want the recipe. 🙂
Yes ma’am- I LOVE getting reader’s recipes!!! Share it right here in the comments if you’d like.
This may be a stupid question …. but where do I buy lard? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in a store.
Not a stupid question! Don’t buy lard at a local supermarket…it’s probably hydrogenated! Try a local farm, but you can also buy online here: http://www.grasslandbeef.com/StoreFront.bok?affId=165451
(That is an affiliate code- thank you for support!)
burgundy pie (blueberry cranberry)
1 pound frozen blueberries, thawed not drained (or 3 cups fresh)
2 cups fresh cranberries
1/2 cup sugar (i used rapadura)
zest and juice of one lemon
pinch salt
1.5 tsp cinnamon
3 T organic non gmo corn starch (or tapioca starch)
butter for dotting top of fruit before putting on crust
mix. place in unbaked pie shell. top with crust of choice (lattice, full with vents cut, whatever).
bake at 350 for about 55 minutes or until crust is deeply golden and pie is delightfully bubbly.
Thank you!!! Great recipe!
you’re welcome. enjoy it!
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Thanks for the recipe. I just tried making a pie crust with Einkorn flour, the Jovial brand, using about the same ratio of fat/flour and butter/lard, and the half water/half vodka trick… and the crust came out almost unworkable. The dough was super sticky and melty and pretty much fell apart when I tried to blind bake it. I tried another one using a higher flour/fat ratio… 2:1, with similar results… the crust crumbles into little bits, instead of forming flakes. Any idea what could be going wrong? I’ve made plenty of decent pie crusts with regular flour and butter/shortening, but I’d really like to be able to use einkorn flour if I can make it work. One thing I found interesting was that I barely had to use any liquid, the crust was coming together pretty well with just the fat… maybe more liquid would help to create some gluten to make it hold together better? Any suggestions would be great. Thanks!
Hey Dan. Thanks for commenting! I’m stumped. What does your dough look like at each point…comparing my pictures to yours? It sounds like when you did more flour (although your 2:1 ratio is HUGE) did it have little crumbles like my picture? You definitely want those crumbs, then you use the liquid to just pull the dough together. You actually don’t want to activate gluten like you would with a bread dough. It sounds like you did follow the recipe steps, but I want to make sure you refrigerated, too. I’ll make a batch again and see if I can figure out how you had these problems. Einkorn and regular flour work very similarly for me, so that shouldn’t be this much of a problem.
dang. the same thing happened to me, wrote a long comment and when I posted the page reloads but my comment isn’t there. strange.
hmmm, seems like there might be a limit on the length of posts perhaps… anyway, what’s the consistency of your lard at room temp? Does is stay pretty thick and solid, or does it get really melty and soft? I’m thinking maybe my lard has too high a moisture content. Maybe that’s impossible, I don’t know.
After more research… I think I need to use “leaf lard” instead of regular lard. Apparently leaf lard is more solid at room temperature so it holds up to being cut in to the flour without melting.
We made this pie crust and after adding only the lard to the flour/salt it was pretty wet. It seems like we have the same issue as Dan. We did use einkorn flour. So we just kept adding flour with the butter until it was closer to what your picture looked like. It definitely didn’t need any of the water/vinegar at that point. We just put it into the fridge so we still don’t know what the finished product will be like.
Oh, but we didn’t just use einkorn flour. We have einkorn berries that we grinded ourselves.
And instead of a food processor we pulsed it in the blender.
Would any of that affect it?
I’m going to make a batch following the recipe again and try to figure out the issue. (Thank you for commenting, I want to figure out the problem!! We make tons of pies throughout the year this way, so maybe there’s something I can’t see that is wrong with my explanation!) Using a blender will activate gluten so you will have a tougher crust that is “glue” like. Either use a pastry cutter by hand or use a food processor. 🙂
Have you tried using a whole grain flour? I don’t like using white anything.
I tried this recipe yesterday and it did not work out. When I rolled it out, it broke up. What is the key to getting your perfect dough using einkorn? I treated it like regular flour and clearly that was a mistake.
After mixing in the butter, it already looked damp enough not to need to add the ice water, so I didn’t.
Also, I chilled it for only about 15 min in the fridge because that’s what I do with regular wheat. Could that have been the problem?
Your pie crust looks so great. Please help!
Thanks.
Hey Tiffany. Which einkorn are you using- the white or whole wheat? Maybe that’s the issue people are having. I hope to get to the bottom of this!! Thank you for commenting!
Roz, you asked what flour Tiffany used- which are you using I think would be most helpful. I grind my own berries as well, and einkorn is not cheap, so I do not want to use the wrong kind. I tried to find out what “white” einkorn is and search came up empty. What is it and what do you use-TY!
According to Jovial’s (einkorn flour distributor) website, einkorn flour can’t absorb as much fat as can the higher gluten flours.
I saw a crust recipe in which they said to cut the fat by 20%
Hope that helps