Make The Flakiest, Buttery Pie Crust Recipe Every Time

Hi Bold Bakers! This is a time of year where we tend to make a lot of pies. But I want to ensure that you make the perfect pie every time, so I'm going to share with you my master recipe for pie crust. It's really, really easy. We're going to start out in a large bowl. We're going to add in our flour, salt, and icing sugar. Now the great thing about this pastry is that if you leave out the icing sugar, it actually turns into a savory pastry, so you can use it for any kind of savory baking that you like. Then just take a wooden spoon and mix all these ingredients together. Into our dry ingredients, we are going to add in some cold, cubed butter. Now when making pastry, you always want to use cold butter because it yields you a much better, kind of flakier pastry at the end. Now we're going to go in with our nice clean hands, and very quickly, we are going to rub the butter into the flour mix. And we're just going to do this until it resembles breadcrumbs. You don't want to spend too long doing this because if you do too much with your hands, it can actually make your pastry greasy. So just nice and quickly does it. Pastry making is such an important part of our baking, so I really hope that you nail this recipe. Okay, that's it. You see that it starts to turn a bit of a yellowy color. It just took a few minutes. And as you can see, there's some little lumps of butter and then there's some small lumps. This is exactly what we're going for. So in this bowl, I've got an egg, yolk, and some cold water. Now you just want to mix those two ingredients together. Now we add in an egg to our pastry because it makes it richer, but if you don't eat eggs, you can always just leave it out and add in more water instead. Once it's all mixed up, pour this mix all over your pastry. Then I'm going to go in with my fork and just start to bring it all together. Now every flour is different, every pastry is different, so you might need a little bit less or a little bit more water, but we're going to judge that in a few minutes. I'm going to go in with my hand now and try and bring the pastry together. Now just be very careful when adding in your liquid because you can always add a little bit more, but you can't take it out. You don't want to end up with a soggy pastry. So I feel my pastry is a little bit dry, so I'm going to sprinkle a tiny bit of water in there. And there you go, do you see that? Do you see how those few drops help to bring your pastry together? Now if you are no stranger to Bigger Bolder Baking, you know when it comes to making doughs, what we want is a nice clean bowl and our dough all in one piece. Now on the counter, I'm just going to form my pastry into a ball and flatten it out a little bit. And then I'm going to get some cling wrap and I'm going to wrap this guy off. Now when using pastry, you always want to put it into the fridge for a minimum of 30 minutes. The reason that we do this is because we want to get it nice and cold and we also want the gluten to relax. Once the gluten is relaxed, we'll be able to roll it. At this stage as well, if you don't want to use it straight away, you can pop it into the freezer for up to 8 weeks. Once your pastry has chilled, dust your surface. Now we are going to roll out our pastry. Roughly the thickness that you want is around a quarter of an inch when making any kind of a pie. So you get not too much pastry but just the right amount. This recipe does make one pie so if you want to multiply it out and also freeze some dough, then that will work really well for this recipe. When rolling out your pastry, turn it every few minutes just so you know it's not sticking to your surface. And if it is sticking, then gently pull it away and add a bit more flour. Now a very common problem to have when making pastry is that your pastry shrinks. And the reason that it does that is because there's too much water in it. Water evaporates when it gets hot so just imagine it evaporating and shrinking your pastry. So that's why I say be very careful when adding water. That's it. Our pastry is rolled. So now a really easy way to get it up, this is a good tip, is roll it on your rolling pin. See how easy that is? We're going to bring in our buttered pie tin. Then gently lay your pastry into your pie dish. This is the perfect amount of pastry for this pie dish. It is 9 inches. When you lay in your pastry, if there's any rips or any little bits that you want to just cover up, just pop a bit of pastry in there and nobody will be the wiser. Now you always want to leave excess pastry over your pie dish because you want to have something to work with. So I'm just going to go ahead and trim this a little bit. And any bits that you've trimmed away, save because you might want to make a nice little decoration for the top of your pie. Now a little trick just to finish off our pie nice and neatly, we are going to scallop the edges. So put your two fingers on either side and use one finger to pull up the pastry. It makes it look so elegant and nicely finished. Now when baking this guy, you want to follow the directions of the recipe that you're making. I am using this to make a chocolate chip cookie pie that is coming up this Thursday so make sure you don't miss that. And as always, I've got lots more Bold Baking Basics videos just like this one so make sure you subscribe to my channel.