Day 2: PIE CRUST

Alright, we are in DAY 2 of our 7 Ingredients--7 Days--7 Recipes. Today the featured recipe is...

PIE CRUST!!!

Pie crust is great because you can use it for desserts, pot pies, breakfast pockets and who knows what else! I have a favorite go-to recipe for pie crust whenever we're having a pot pie for dinner or apple pie for dessert. This recipe is the best because it includes very few ingredients and makes a nice flaky crust.

Out of our seven essential ingredients that every kitchen should have, we are using four of the seven. This particular for flour, salt, egg and oil. Now it does also require vinegar, which is not one of the seven, but a little vinegar goes a long way for so many household DIYs. I may have to do a post JUST about vinegar one of these days. Stay tuned for that one.

Well shall we get into it? "Alright, alright, alright" (in my best Matthew McConaughey voice).

So today, I was in a bit of a rush and I let my handy dandy food processor do most of the work for me. If you don't have a food processor, you can totally do this by hand and be all the more toned for it. But sometimes people get ~~lazy~~, I mean more efficient and use inexpensive kitchen appliances.

So here is my food processor.

In it, I put 3 cups of flour.

1 cup of shortening.

and 1 tsp salt.

Now I know I said we are using oil, and you can. I like to use shortening, which is a solid oil, for pie. It saves my liquid oil for things like cake, brownies, frying foods, etc. Don't judge me. We all got our weaknesses.

I pulse those ingredients in my food processor until I get a crumbly texture that looks like cornmeal.

If you are doing this by hand you are just mixing in that shortening with a fork or pastry cutter until your consistency is like tiny peas. Sometimes, if I'm doing this without my food processor I just use my hands because I can get more done with my two hands than a regular size fork. Try rubbing it between your palms kinda like you would if you were warming up your hands...that works great too.

Next I'm going to grab a little bowl. In this bowl goes my single egg...

...one teaspoon of vinegar (Usually I use apple cider vinegar if I'm using my crust for apple pie. Apple pie, apple cider vinegar--it just makes sense.)

...and 1/3 cup of water.

Whisk it all together.

Now I'm going to take that liquid mixture and add it to my flour crumble just a little at a time.

So I'll pour in maybe 1/3 of the liquid, mix it as well as I can with the flour.

Then add another 1/3 and so on until I see it coming together. This is where I put my love all up in it and use by using my hands.

I want it to form a solid ball--not a crumbly ball. Once I start rolling it out, if it crumbles to pieces...well...it will be really hard to form into a pie crust. If it starts to get sticky and gooey on your hands, there's too much liquid. You may need to add a little more flour to dry it out a bit.

Then, I split it to make two equal balls and wrap them with plastic wrap until ready to use.

The best way I have found to roll out pie crust is by doing it between two sheets of plastic wrap. Unfortunately, they are not usually the width that I need them to be. In that case, I'll cut my bread bags up to make even larger plastic sheets. I buy a small box of bread bags because they are useful for so many things. I need to do a post about using bread bags as a kitchen hack.

Pie crust dough is very forgiving. So even if you don't have a size that you need, you can always tear pieces off here and there and add them between the plastic sheet, roll out again, and you can't even tell where the dough grafts were put in. Do this if you need to in order to get your pie crust the width you are wanting it to be.

Once it is the size I think I need, I'll lay my pie pan over it to double check. Looks good!

Now I remove the top plastic sheet and put that pie pan right in the middle.

I slip my left hand underneath the bottom plastic sheet and keep my right hand on top of the pie pan. Then, very carefully, I flip it over so the pie crust is on the inside of the pan.

If you do this too fast, it might cause the crust to tear. But too slow, and the weight of the crust being pulled with gravity will cause it to tear too. If it does tear, no worries, crust is forgiving remember? Just mash up any cracks together with your fingers. You can even add a scrap piece to patch up a hole or tear. No one will see it later anyway.

Next, cut your crust edges evenly all around the pie pan with a butter knife.

Once you're done trimming the edges, you get to do my favorite part...decorative edges.

There's something so satisfying in making what was once ugly, pleasing and appealing to the eyes.

Pinch the edges of the crust to make a nice, decorative, scalloped edge. I pinch with my thumb and index finger of my right hand and use the index finger of my left hand as somewhat of a guide.

Doesn't that look great? I bet yours will too!