Double Crust Pie Dough

I’ve tried and failed at making pie dough so many times that, now that I have a method that works, I desperately need to preserve it.

Pie dough seems to be the epitome of a-little-of-this-and-a-little-of-that cooking. A lot of recipes for pie dough seem maddening to me and I’ve just kind of wound up with one that works for me through a lot of trial and error.

I’ve arrived at an amount of flour that yields enough to make a double-crust pie. I’ve settled on a 2-to-1 ratio of shortening to butter. Shortening results in a nicely flaky crust and is easy to work with. I have just enough patience to grate one stick of butter but no more than that. I measure out a precise amount of water.

I also work the dough a little bit like a bread dough in order to get everything to hold together. Most recipes try to scare you into thinking you should only mix the ingredients until they just start to hold together. When I tried that, inevitably, my first attempt at rolling it out resulted in a mess that failed to look anything like a pie crust and I wound up scraping it together and kneading it like a bread dough anyway.

Ingredients:

• 450 grams (3 ¾) cups All-Purpose flour
• 14 grams (1 tbsp.) Sugar
• 14 grams (2 tbsp.) Milk Powder
• 2 tsp. Kosher Salt
• 8 oz. Cubed Frozen Shortening (16 tbsp. or 2 sticks)
• 4 oz. Grated Frozen Butter (8 tbsp. or 1 stick)
• 140 grams (½ cup) Ice Water
• 1 tsp. White Distilled Vinegar

Directions:

Step 1: Combine dry ingredients. Add one stick of grated frozen butter. Add two sticks of frozen shortening that have been cut into cubes.

Step 2: Massage the flour, shortening and butter together, breaking up the larger chunks of shortening until the largest pieces are pea-sized.

Step 3: Measure out the water and add an ice cube to it. Let that sit for about two minutes to let the water chill down a bit. Add to the flour mixture and mix until you have a cohesive dough. Divide into two disks, wrap in plastic and freeze.

Yield: 1,085 grams