Hey dudes, I'm Hilah.
Welcome to Hilah Cooking.
Today I'm going to show you how to make a homemade pie crust, and it's
not very hard at all.
It used 100 percent real butter, and it's light, and
flaky, and delicious, and it's perfect for all of your holiday needs.
All you need is four ingredients, flour, baking powder, ice water, and
butter.
Okay, I've got a cup of flour and I put it in a bowl, and I put it
in the freezer.
I want to get it really cold.
I also want to make sure that my butter is really, really cold, and a teaspoon
of baking powder.
And this is really going to help keep it light.
And I'm going to dice this butter up.
The reason that you want to get the flour cold is so that the butter doesn't melt
too fast.
The key to making a light and fluffy pie crust is when you're
cutting the butter in the flour, that's what I'll show you how to do it a second,
when you're cutting that in, what you're doing basically is getting
each little piece of butter coated in flour, and it's kind of like making
a little miniature, like a croissant on a microscopic level.
Then you've got all of these little layers of like butter and flour, butter
and flour, butter and flour, and then as it cooks, those little tiny butter
fragments melts and leave a little air pocket in the flour and that's
what's makes it light and fluffy.
Food science.
Okay, so now that I've got my little butter cubes in here, the first thing
to do is kind of use a fork to break up the cubes of butter and toss them
into the flour, and try to get each of these little cubes coated in flour,
and then we'll start to break it up a little more finely.
Now if you don't have a pastry cutter, which is a kind of a little weird
instrument that's hard to describe.
I don't have one.
You can use a fork or you can use a couple of knives.
But really I think the easiest thing to do is to get your little hands in
there, so wash your little paws, and then we're just going to start
breaking each of these little butter cubes in smaller and smaller pieces.
And as you break them into smaller pieces, drop them back into the flour so
it gets kind of coated up.
Now if you feel like when you're breaking your butter up, if you feel like
your butter is started to get real soft, like maybe your house is really
warm or maybe your body temperature is maybe hot, just kidding, please go
ahead and just put your whole bowl with the butter and everything in it,
just go ahead and put it back in the freezer or the refrigerator for five
or ten minutes and let that butter harden up, because you don't want melty
butter because that's not going to give you the flakiness.
You want the butter to melt once it's placed in the pie crust.
All right.
So I'm going to get a little bit more rough with this.
People talk a lot.
People are real worried to about overworking pie crust, and that is a
concerned, but not really until you add the water.
So there is this protein in the flower that's called gluten and that's what
makes bread chewy and it forms when you add liquid to it.
Until the liquid is added, you don't really risk forming the
gluten strands, so what you want to avoid when you're making pie crust,
because you don't want that chewy pie crust.
So as long as you keep it cold, go ahead and work the heck
out of it until you add the water and then you've got to be a little
careful.
Okay, so this looks pretty good.
I've got some bigger chunks and some smaller chunks, probably the biggest chunk
of butter I have here is about the size of a pea.
That's as big as you want to get.
The rest of it is a little bit more, hey butter, butter overboard.
The rest of it is a little smaller than that.
So let's see what that looks like.
Okay, so now I'm ready to add my ice water.
And what the recipe means when it says ice water is literally put
some ice in your water.
Again, because you want to try to keep it really
cool, so about a quarter cup.
But I'm just going to put in a couple of tablespoons to start off with.
And you can see it's starting to stick together in a little ball.
And a little bit more.
Okay, we're almost there.
We don't want to add too much water, because then
I would have to add more flour, and then it's kind of a mess, so just a
little at a time.
Okay, now see how it's all kind of balling up here,
that's good.
That's very good.
Now I'm going to form it in a ball, and wrap it into Saran Wrap and stick
it in the frig for a little bit.
Okay, now I'm ready to wrap it up in a little piece of Saran Wrap.
I don't know what the pioneer ladies did before Saran Wrap, but it really works good for this.
All right, and if you pat it out into a disk, it will help you when you
roll it later.
Okay.
All right now, I've got it wrapped up tight, and I'm
just going to put it in the frig for 20 or 30 minutes, and then we'll come
back and roll it.
All right, my friends, we're ready to roll.
All right, so I've got some flour here, and I'm just going to sprinkle
it liberally.
I'm using a nine inch pie pan, so that means I want to roll
out my dough to be about 12 inches across.
So let's get a big flour circle happening here.
It's about 12 inches.
Okay.
I'm going to have a little extra flour over to the side, so sprinkle
that, get my rolling pin, kind of powder my pin, also.
And then we'll start to roll.
Okay.
Now at the early stages, you want to make sure you're kind of picking it up
and redistributing the flour just to make sure that it's not sticking.
And you start in the middle and kind of push your
way out, and you can turn it to make it a little easier.
And just try to keep it as even as possible, so you end up with a pretty
round shape.
Okay.
This is almost big enough.
And you can see here on these little butter spots and that is great.
And every little butter spot now, they look like kind of big areas of butter,
but we're covering them with more flour as we roll it, so it's going to
be light and flaky.
Okay, and that is about the right size.
So now we're going to transfer.
The way to do that is kind of roll this real,
real lightly onto your pin.
Pick that up, put it over here.
Now I don'' want to kind of like stretch it in
there, I just want to kind of ease it in there like that.
You can see it's kind of dropping down into the, there we go.
Be gentle with your pie crust.
It's a baby.
All right.
Now I like to not bother with trimming all of this stuff and
just kind of roll it up onto itself.
But if you wanted to get a small knife, you could trim off all of this excess.
I like to leave a little thicker edge around the pie crust anyway.
There we go.
And then, if you wanted to make it a little fancier, you could kind of
pinch it like that and make a fluted edge.
All right, the fluted edge has been fluted.
Okay, so I, personally, am going to fill this with pie filling
and then bake it like this.
If you were making like a cream pie or something, you would want to bake
this at 425 for 10 or 15 minutes, prick the bottom of it with a fork so it
doesn't get all flaky.
That's if you wanted to do like a pre-baked pie
shell.
I rarely do that, so I'm probably just going to put some pecan filling in
here and then do that.
All right.
That's how you make a homemade pie crust.
Look at that.
Just like Grandma used to make.
All right.
Happy holidays.
See you.
I'm not going to taste this.