Leite's Perfect Pie Crust

By stancec44

The high-fat European-style brand produced a markedly flakier, more tender, and puff pastry-like crust than those made with regular butter. The leaf lard crust was as gorgeous as I remembered, puffing up in the oven and crumbling deliciously when it was cut. That characteristic faint bacon nuance was still there. Not so with the processed lard pastry, with a flavor veering closer to rancid than bacon.

Note, the recipe can easily be doubled for a double crust; divide the dough into two balls to form two discs before chilling.

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 10 tablespoons (5 ounces) unsalted butter, preferably a high-fat, European-style such as Plugra, chilled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces (or see Variations for a variety of fat to use)
• 2 to 5 tablespoons ice water

Details

Servings 1
Preparation time 15mins
Cooking time 75mins
Adapted from leitesculinaria.com

Preparation

Step 1

1. In a food processor, pulse together the flour and salt. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture forms chickpea-size pieces (3 to 5 pulses).

2. Add the ice water, 1 tablespoon at a time, and pulse until the mixture is just moist enough to hold together.

3. Form the dough into a ball, wrap with plastic, and flatten into a disc. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour before rolling out and baking.

It's easy—super easy since I used the food processor to pulse the dough very briefly thanks to the drizzle feature of the food processor (my slightly mature Cusinart has drip holes in the bottom of the pusher, which are like that extra set of hands when you want to add liquid very slowly while mixing). I cut the butter up and put it in the freezer for about 10 minutes to make sure it was thoroughly chilled since I didn’t want it too heat up when mixing. I also took a tip from Jenni Field to roll out the dough before between 2 layers of parchment paper on a flat baking sheet before chilling it, avoiding my usual pitfall of using too much flour and toughening the dough while rolling it out. This pie crust could work wonderfully as a single bottom or top crust. For a bottom crust, you could blind bake it. I used it on top of blueberries, and since it wasn't a sweetened pastry, I could control the amount of sugar completely, which I did with a brush of milk and then a sprinkle of colored decorating sugar. For a savory finish you might just do an egg wash. My pie baked for a bit over an hour at 375℉ till the filling was bubbling and the crust had a lovely color. You could probably get there sooner with 400℉ if that worked with your filling. Not only was this recipe a good problem solver for my modest pie, it was delicious AND it passed the second-day test—still rich and flavorful and the texture did not go soggy. I used Kerrygold lightly salted butter and omitted the salt in the recipe.