How to Make a Pie Crust for Less Than $2

As somebody who loves to bake from scratch and I think it's quite thrifty, it breaks my heart when I see people buying store-bought pie crust around the holidays. It's never as good as homemade and it's really expensive. For example, in stores Marie Callender pie crust is $3.12, Pillsbury pie crust is over $4. It's crazy. Today I'm gonna show you how you can make an amazing homemade pie crust from scratch for under $2. And I want you to stay tuned until the end of this video because I'm gonna give you some great pie tips all the way throughout. So just so you know, the prices that are given are actually based on the average price of ingredients across the US right now. So we're gonna make this pastry in my food processor. You can also make it by hand, that's no problem at all. Let's talk about our first ingredient, all-purpose flour. Now for this pastry, we're not using a pastry flour, we're using all-purpose flour. And the thing about it is that it's bleached, not unbleached. Bleached flour actually absorbs liquid better, it absorbs less liquid, and then also it gives you a finer crumb, there's less protein in bleached flour. So what you get with a pie crust is a lovely, delicate, flakier pie crust. The cost of flour for this recipe? Only $0.23. Next up, our butter. Now let me tell you a little bit about the butter. European butter is always best when you have a recipe that is so high in butter content. European butter is higher in fat. It also is cultured. Now what cultured butter means is that it's fermented. Now we love things that are fermented around here, like bread, no-knead doughs, whatever it is, it just gives it much more flavor. So European butter is best, but this is the more expensive ingredient, so do whatever works for you. For best practices when it comes to pastry making, make sure that butter is really lovely and cold when it goes into your pastry. For salted versus unsalted, I'm going to leave that up to you. Some people like it a little bit extra salty. I kind of go a little bit salty, but if you want to hold off on the salt a little bit, then use unsalted butter. The price of butter for this recipe? $1.03. Now our next ingredient is a little bit of powdered sugar. Now we use powdered sugar in pie crust and not granulated sugar because the granulated sugar won't dissolve. This just disappears right into your ingredients, so this is perfect. So obviously this is a sweet crust now, but if you want to do a savory crust, just leave the sugar out, that is totally fine. The price of the powdered sugar for this recipe? Just $0.02. Next up is salt. Now salt is super important in pastry making. It really elevates the flavor. If you leave out salt, your pastry can end up being a little bit flat and unbalanced. So even if this is a sweet crust, we still want some salt in there. And that little bit of salt in there costs $0.01. Now all we have to do is pop on our hat. We want to blend this up until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs, it only takes a few seconds. A few seconds, and this is what you get. Lumps of butter, some big, some small. We don't want to blend this up too much, we want that butter to stay nice and cold and intact. Ok, so let's talk about the wet ingredients that are going to bring this pastry together. In this bowl I have an egg yolk. Now egg yolk is fantastic to add into pastry because it adds extra richness, it's extra fat which means flavor, and it adds extra color also. So I really like to add an egg yolk in there. The best thing about it is the price of an egg yolk is just $0.23. And with the leftover egg white, do not waste it, hang onto it for meringues or other baking recipes. So into our egg yolk we're going to add in a little bit of water. Now I do caution you about adding too much water into pastry because it can make your pastry very doughy and tough and it can also make it shrink once it's baked. So we're just going to add a few tablespoons in there. The best thing about water is that it is $0.00. Ready to go. On with our lid. I'm going to turn back on the machine. I'm slowly going to add in the liquid just until the dough comes together, then I'm going to stop. There we go, just once it comes together, stop the mixer. If you need a smidge more liquid in there, then add it in. But this came together lovely. What we want to do with the pie crust is always let it rest for at least 30 minutes to let the gluten relax, let the flour hydrate, and then it will be perfect for rolling. So I'm going to take this now and pop it into the fridge. So our pie crust is nice and chilled, flour our surface. We want to roll it out bigger than our 9-inch pie pan. The rule of thumb is to roll it to around a quarter of an inch thick. That's a good thickness, not too thin, and not too thick also. And try and keep it round. And if it splits or tears in any spot, just stick it back together. So this feels good and it looks good to me, but a way to tell before moving it is just take your pan, and we have a nice big border around an inch around, so this is perfect. Now an easy way to transfer a pastry without breaking it, is roll it over, carefully, over your rolling pin. Just like that. Do you see that? Then we're going to bring in our pie pan, and unfurl it, I suppose is the word, over the pie pan. Do you see that? Nobody's freaking out, nobody is worried about their pastry breaking. You just very gently move it over the pan. Once you lay it in, just press your pastry into the edges of the pan. Now at this point we're just going to go with a knife and trim off the really big parts. So we want to tidy this up now and make it look like a professional pie. So here's what we're going to do, we're going to crimp the edges and get them ready. So we're going to take our two fingers, and this finger, I suppose this is your index finger, and we're going to move around the pie pan, push the pastry, and create these little dents. Sometimes this technique takes a little bit of practice, and if you need to tidy it up at the end, that is no problem. And there you have it, a homemade pie crust completely from scratch, totaling $1.52. Way cheaper than any store bought pie crust, and way better. This is a fantastic recipe that you can use for any of my pies. What you can do now is you can keep it in the fridge, or you can keep it in the freezer and use it for my traditional pumpkin pie, my pecan pie, my apple and cranberry pie, my chocolate chip pie, the pies are endless. Head over to BiggerBolderBaking.com for lots of ways to use this pie crust.