I've had this baked pie crust recipe in my files for a while and hadn't planned on posting it since I already have a really good all butter pie crust recipe. But earlier this week I found myself a little short on butter and needed a good crust for the Harry's Roadhouse Coconut Cream Pie.
Silver Palate Baked Pie Crust
This butter and shortening crust recipe from The Silver Palate Cookbook saved the day. While the all-butter crust is wonderful, this recipe is also very good since the dough is easy to work with and bakes up nice and flaky. It's perfect for cream pies or any pie where you need an already baked pie crust.
Update: The high price of butter these days is even more reason to consider using a recipe with part shortening and part butter. This recipe only contains 3 tablespoons of shortening, but even saving 3 tablespoons of precious butter (which is sometimes $6 a pound) helps.
Recipe
Flaky Baked Pie Crust
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups unbleached all purpose flour (200 grams)
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
- 5 ½ tablespoons unsalted butter chilled (77 grams)
- 3 tablespoons vegetable shortening chilled (36 grams)
- ⅓ cup ice water or as needed
Instructions
- Put the flour, salt and sugar in food processor bowl and pulse to mix. Alternatively, you can just use a mixing bowl.
- Add butter and and shortening and pulse until the mixture is coarse but still has a few pea size pieces of butter or cut with a pastry cutter until coarse.
- Add two tablespoons of water at a time, pulsing to incorporate (or just stirring), until the mixture begins to clump together.
- Lay a sheet of plastic wrap flat on the counter and carefully empty mixture onto plastic wrap. Bring it together into a ball, then flatten into a disk. Wrap in plastic and chill for several hours or until ready to use. If you have a pastry mat, you can do this on the mat rather than directly onto the plastic.
- When ready to use, roll out crust and line a 9 inch round pie dish. Put the lined pie dish in the freezer for 30 minutes or keep chill for about an hour.
- Press a piece of foil or parchment paper over the frozen crust and weigh down with pie weights.
- Bake in a preheated 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes. Remove foil and weights and continue baking for another 15 minutes or until golden.
- Alternatively, you can use what I call the BraveTart method (from Stella Parks) and use sugar instead of pie weights. Cover the chilled unbaked crust in foil as above, but fill the foil with sugar instead of pie weights. Bake at 350 for about an hour. Let cool slightly, remove the sugar and foil.
Sue says
Good to know! As much as I dislike shortening I do like it in pie crust because I like it’s impact on the texture. I need to get better at pie crust recipes that use butter.