Johanna's Perfect Pie Crust

My dear friend Johanna is an excellent baker, on top of being the world's sweetest person and a really intelligent researcher and awesome friend.  Oh, sorry guys, she's taken.  But don't be sad, because I'm about to share with you the recipe she gave me and Drew for our wedding (along with a cute pie plate and dough cutter--how adorable is that?) that really makes one of the best pie crusts I've ever tasted.

Ingredients (1 pie crust):
-1 1/3 cups flour
-1/2 cup shortening
-1/2 tsp salt
-3-4 tbsp ice water

First, combine the flour, salt, and shortening in a bowl.  I used all purpose flour...seemed to work well.
 

I have learned to not be as afraid of shortening in the last several years.  When used right, it can be a very helpful substance.  I think the consistency scared me.  But I'm getting over it.

Okay, so you dump it all in there...

And the next thing is to use your dough scraper to mash the shortening into the flour.  This is made extra easy with the use of a pastry/dough cutter.  It looks like this.

The idea behind "cutting" is to chop up bits of fat (usually shortening or cold butter) into pieces so that as there are still little nuggets of solid fat in the dough.  As you bake it, the fat pieces melt and kinda form air pockets that are left behind where the fat nugget was.  That's how you get flaky crusts.  That's why this method is used for crusts, biscuits, and pastries, which are best when flaky.
 

If you don't have a dough cutter, you can use two knives and just criss-cross them through your dough, like you're guillotine-ing the shortening over and over again.  Hm.

Once you're done, you get what Johanna called a "pebble-like consistency".

Now, adding ice water.  I literally put ice cubes in a bowl with water to make it as cold as possible.  You don't want your shortening to start melting yet, you want a nice firm dough to start with.

After adding 3 tablespoons of water, see if you can form all of the dough into a ball.  If it's still too crumbly, add another tbsp and try again.  Do this one tablespoon at a time until you can form a ball of dough.  Or in my case, a some-what cylindrical lump.

Now, roll it out using a floured rolling pin, and you get something like this!

Put it in your pie plate and shape the ends like this.

I like to poke some holes in the bottom of the dough to release steam from between the dough and the plate.  Though flaky is good, you also don't want it to rise up too high and create volcanoes at the bottom of your pie. 

 

Now, if your recipe calls for an uncooked pie shell, you're all set.  If not, prebake the crust by lining the crust with parchment paper, adding pie weights or 2-3 cups of raw beans in the pie to keep the volcanoes from forming, then bake it for about 15-20 minutes at 350F.   Then you're ready to go!

Thank you, Johanna dear, for such a lovely recipe :) 

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For a printable version of this recipe, please click here.