Apple Pie - How to Make Pie Crust Dough

Petra Cox: I am Petra at Moms Pies Bakery in Occoquan, Virginia and now we are going to make an all butter crust for an apple pie. First of all, youll need pastry flour you can also use all purpose flour just use a table spoon or so less. You need two-anda-half cups and a good thing to keep in mind, when you are measuring flour for baked goods is to keep it loose in the measuring cup and so that you are not putting too much in there, it can make whole lot of difference if its too packed in.

So, we are measuring right into the food processor there, one, two and a half cups and then we are going to need a table spoon of sugar it doesnt need to be too sweet, the sweetness is going to in the filing. A tea spoon of salt and to that you need to add about two sticks of butter. The butter is chopped up into probably about a table spoon size pieces, two sticks is half of pound of butter. This is unsalted and the saltiness will come from what you have just measured in there. So, this has been chilled in the freezer, so that its not too soft when it is mixed in with the flour, otherwise it becomes a kind of soft sticky dough, which is the opposite of what you want with a pie crust dough.

Your butter has been kept in the freezer for probably about an hour after chopping it up, so that its pretty much frozen butter. So, you can just pose with the food processor. Generally, you look into breakdown the butter without really emulsifying it, you want it to be in little pieces and just get into smaller and smaller pieces, so that it integrates with the flour and the other ingredients.

Alright. Now, all the butter has been chopped up into pretty even sized pieces and mixed in with the flour and so its all kind of integrated in there. Now, it just needs a few table spoons of really ice cold water to be added while its processing, to bring the dough together.

So, we have here a glass of ice water and I am just going to take the water, table spoon at a time and add it in to the dough. So, you can keep the machine on one, two and you can see the dough is slowly starting to form. Three table spoons there four, might get a little stuck and you just kind of shake it around in there because the dough is kind of getting heavier and its hard for the blade to move it around. Then we put four, and theres five.

So, this has barely come together into a dough. It has still some crumbs in it, you dont want to mix it to the point where it becomes a sort of sticky dough, you can feel. If flour is mixed too long, it kind of forms these gluten proteins and thats what makes the dough sticky and elastic. You want this to be buttery and you want it to not stick to your fingers, when you are making it.

So, at this point you can put your dough in a bowl and you can kind of format into one big piece and at that point you can chill in the fridge for probably about two hours and then it will be ready to roll and thats how you make the dough for a butter crust pie.