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>> This video is to demonstrate how to make pie dough.
Pie dough is -- there are two varieties of pie dough, flaky and mealy.
Flaky, I cut the butter or fat shortening up into pea or almond-sized pieces.
Mealy, you continue to break it up until it looks like cornmeal almost.
So we have our flour and our pieces of cold butter -- oop [background noise] and our salt.
[Background noise] And all you do is using your fingers, break the butter up into little
bit smaller pieces.
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And then once it's there, you toss it with the flour and you just keep breaking it up
in the flour.
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>> Flaky pie dough, the idea is that you alternate layers of dough and fat, and then as it bakes
it kind of forms these layers of flakiness as the butter releases its moisture and puffs
the dough up a little bit.
Mealy dough, you would continue to break it down into much smaller pieces, and that because
more of the flour and butter are mixed it creates a barrier against moisture.
So when you have a very moist pie it's a good idea to use mealy dough, so for fruit pies
and so forth.
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So we're almost at the flaky dough stage, just a couple of bigger pieces to break up.
You can see, it doesn't take very long at all.
It's really easiest to do this by hand.
You want to use cold butter when you do this, so that it doesn't melt in with the flour
too quickly.
So you can see the chunks of fat in there and that's what you're looking for, for flaky
dough.
If I wanted to make mealy dough, I would keep going until it all looked kind of like that
where you have just little pieces of fat in with the flour.
At this point, we have to add our cold water.
You could add an egg, you could add some milk.
Milk makes a richer pie dough, but it's more likely to burn.
You can add some vinegar which helps to make it a little less likely to fall apart.
[Background noise] So I start with 2 ounces of cold water.
We want to keep our pie dough at about 60 degrees.
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>> Flaky dough needs a little bit more moisture than your mealy dough does, but you don't
want it wet.
If your pie dough gets wet you're going to develop too much gluten, and that will make
a tough pie dough.
I think I'll add a little bit more water but, not much.
[Background noise] So now I'm going to need the dough together.
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>> You don't want to knead the dough too much because as you knead, you develop gluten,
and gluten of course will make a tough pie dough.
But you need enough gluten there to hold it together and hold the filling.
Once you have your dough coming together you want to smooth it into a nice smooth disc.
Any cracks in the dough when you go to roll it out will become bit large cracks, so you
want to smooth them out as much as possible before refrigerating.
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In good flaky dough you should actually be able to see the chunks of butter in it.
You can use shortening for a pie dough but it doesn't taste as good.
Once you have your pie dough in a nice smooth disc, you wrap it in plastic wrap and you
refrigerate.
You want to refrigerate them minimum of two hours, and refrigerate overnight after four
days, and you can take it at this point and put it in the freezer for three to four months.
The pie dough has had time to chill in the refrigerator, and so we unwrap it.
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>> You need a decent amount of flour on your table, on the actual dough itself, and your
rolling pin.
You don't want to put too much flour because then it'll make the pie dough too thick, but
you need enough so that it won't stick.
As you roll the pie dough out you roll from the center out, and keep making quarter turns.
As you make turns you adjust your flour.
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>> If you don't keep turning it -- you end up with square pie dough or other oblong type
shapes.
And also, when you got to take it off the table it doesn't come off, so very important
we keep adjusting the flour and moving the pie dough.
Pie dough should be rolled very thin 1/8th to 1/16th of an inch.
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>> And
rolling from the middle out ensures that your middle doesn't end up thicker than your ends.
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>> So I take my hand and I kind of just go over the dough to make sure that it's even,
and then I use my rolling pin to pick the dough up and then move it over to the pie
pan.
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>> All that rolling does activate the gluten a little bit, so you want to let it rest for
a minute, and then once it's rested you're going to trim your edges, and I lift up so
I get a nice bit on the ends.
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>> The pie dough scraps cannot be reworked, they'll get too tough, but you could use them
to cover the top of the cobbler.
You can use them to make chicken and dumplings.
You could take them and toss them with cinnamon sugar and bake them into these little cookies.
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>> So from here, there's a few different ways you can crimp your edges.
You can squeeze between your two fingers and so forth, or you can crimp the edges this
way.
Make sure you crimp it outwards, it's easy to crimp them in.
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>> You want to make sure you don't have any scraps overhanging, because those will fall
off in the oven and burn.
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>> From here, you want to dot the bottom of the pie pan.
You can use a fork or the end of a spoon or a little paring knife.
[Background noise] We dot the bottom so it doesn't bubble up in the oven.
[Background noise] Now you want to place it in the refrigerator, another 20 minutes just
to chill it, so it won't shrink when you go to bake your pie, and then fill it if you
were par baking or blind baking your pie.
After the 20 minutes you fill it with foil and then fill it with pie weights or dry beans,
and bake it until the crust is cooked and take them out.
If you're baking it from -- if you don't need to blind bake then, you just put your filling
in and put it right in the oven, and it's ready to go.