Carolyn's Top-Secret Magic Pie Crust Technique: Part 1

Today is a special episode of our series, in which we watch pie expert Carolyn Walters demonstrate her super-magic pie crust techniques, which she originally learned in person from renowned chef Madame Kuony in Milwaukee in 1981 and has been using to win local pie contests ever since.  If that isn't enough to establish pie-master credibility, here's a photo of her delicious rhubarb pie (of which slices were eaten so quickly that no photos of the whole pie remain):

Not convinced? How about a close-up of the incredibly flaky crust?

OK, now that we're all drooling, let's talk about how this sort of thing is done.

This is a two-stage process. Essentially, we'll start by mixing some flour and butter by hand. Once we have delicious little buttery flour globules, then we'll mix in the rest of the flour (and salt), add a little ice-water, and shape into a disc. 

First, the ingredients: flour, salt, butter, and ice-water. Our total amount of flour here is going to be a generous cup (with a rounded top, maybe 5oz or so?). However, in the first steps we'll only use half of that. We'll add the second half later.

Note that these instructions will be for one batch of crust. The rhubarb pie above would contain two of these (one for the bottom, one for the top)

It's also probably a good idea to roll out some plastic wrap smoothly on the counter and dust it with flour. We'll get to this in a moment but you'll want to have it ready beforehand.

We'll begin with about a half-cup of flour in a bowl. With a knife ("any knife will do", Carolyn says), we'll slice little wafers of butter into the bowl until the whole stick is in there.

Slicing the butter:

Now we'll have flour-coated butter slices.

The next step is fun. Press the butter and flour together with a pinching motion, like so:

You'l want to do this quickly so that the butter doesn't have time to warm up. Once all the flour is pressed together with the butter, you'll have a bowl of little butterballs, something like this:

Now would be a great time to pop the bowl in the refrigerator for 10-15 minutes so that the butter has time to get cool again.

Next up, the second step. Here are our ingredients for this half of the process: salt, ice water, and the other half-cup of flour.

First, we'll add the rest of the flour, and the salt (approximately a teaspoon) to the butter-flour mixture.

Stir this together so that the flour and salt get distributed. Now, we'll add approximately 4 Tablespoons of icewater. Carolyn started by adding three, then stirred until it was clear that not all the dough was quite wet, and added a fourth. You can use some judgment here: the main thing is that the dough gets just damp enough to shape with your hands.

Now, gather up the moist dough and shape into a ball:

You ought to be able to see at this point that the dough is marbled with little pockets of butter. This is a good thing. Slap the dough down on that floured plastic wrap and shape it into a disc. 

You'll want to do all this pretty quickly, so don't be overly perfectionist. "Be quick", Carolyn says. But you also want to keep the edges tidy so that when you roll it out later it'll stay together.

Now, wrap it up!

A last little bit of patting and shaping the wrapped disc before it goes into the fridge:

That's all for today! Tomorrow we'll demonstrate shaping the dough to the pie pan. Stay tuned.