Making the dough

Pie dough has four ingredients, and the texture of the crust depends on how the fat meets the flour. Gisslen calls the professional procedure the rubbed dough method: the fat is rubbed into the dry ingredients, and the liquid is mixed in afterward. Fat coats the flour and keeps it from forming gluten with the water. Fat left in pieces flattens into layers when the dough is rolled and melts in the oven, leaving pockets between sheets of dough. Gisslen keeps dough near 60°F while mixing, because warm fat blends into the flour too quickly and cold fat is too firm to work. King Arthur uses ice water so the pieces of fat stay cold and intact.

The textbooks divide the result into two doughs. In flaky dough the fat stays in visible pieces; in mealy dough it is worked in until the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal, which gives a shorter, more tender crust that takes up less water and resists soaking. Gisslen recommends mealy dough for bottom crusts and flaky dough for tops. The authorities do not agree on the size of the pieces. Gisslen and the Kansas State University text put flaky dough at the size of peas or hazelnuts. King Arthur’s 2017 guidance puts flaky dough at walnut halves and gives pea-sized pieces to mealy dough. Milk Street’s piece on the subject argues that tenderness and flavor have nothing to do with pea-sized butter.

The choice of fat is also contested. The University of Kentucky’s extension publication states that shortening and lard have more shortening power than butter and produce a flakier, more tender crust, while butter gives richness. King Arthur’s 2018 guide holds that every common fat works and that the choice is one of flavor; it pairs butter for flavor with shortening, whose higher melting point keeps a crimp from slumping. A King Arthur post on dairy-free crusts describes shortening crusts as mealy and short rather than flaky. Gisslen calls lard an excellent fat for flakiness that food service seldom uses.

Water is where the sharpest disagreement lies. J. Kenji López-Alt’s Foolproof Pie Dough, first published in Cook’s Illustrated in November 2007, replaces half the water with vodka, and America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe instructs cooks not to substitute extra water because alcohol does not activate gluten. Andrea Geary of America’s Test Kitchen later found that López-Alt’s vodka-free, all-butter version for Serious Eats baked up just as tender and flaky, which she attributes to the method of processing part of the flour with all the fat into a paste. PJ Hamel’s 2018 King Arthur guide reports that vodka makes a silky dough that is easy to roll but a crust no more tender or flaky than an ice-water crust, and that an all-vodka dough can fall apart.

Stella Parks of Serious Eats rejects the premise behind much of this caution. She argues that gluten gives pastry its strength and should not be feared, uses equal weights of flour and butter, adds water at exactly half the weight of the flour, and flattens the butter and folds the dough for layers. The French technique of fraisage, which King Arthur traces to Julia Child, smears the butter into thin sheets with the heel of the hand; in King Arthur’s comparison the fraisage crust shattered more than a conventionally mixed one.