Flaky Yogurt Pie Crust Recipe: Worthy of Your Favorite Pie Filling (2024)

FAQs

What is the best flour to use in flaky pie crust? ›

What kind of flour makes the best pie crust? Well, not high-protein bread flour! Use that for your chewy bagels. What you want for pie is flour that yields a tender, flaky crust, which means medium-protein all-purpose flour or low-protein pastry flour.

Vegetable Shortening

As shortening is able to withstand higher temperatures and does not melt easily, it creates flaky and crisp yet tender pie crusts when used alone or in combination with butter.

While butter, shortening, or lard make equally light and tender crusts, an all-butter crust will be flakier due to butter's higher water content: as the crust bakes the butter melts and its water turns to steam, creating thin, crisp layers (flakes).

Cornstarch as Pie Filling Thickener

Cornstarch is faster-acting than flour and forms a smooth, relatively clear filling. Just be aware that too much cornstarch can create a slimy texture.

Adding more flour is always an option, but add too much flour and your dough will end up like a cracker—not a pie crust. Remember: The more you mix your pie dough, the tougher it becomes. To keep the mixing to a minimum, try rolling out your dough between two pieces of parchment paper.

“My preferred fat for pie crusts will always be butter. To me, it is all about flavor, and no other fat gives flavor to a crust like butter does. Other fats, even though they have great pros, lack flavor,” De Sa Martins said. “The more flavorful the butter, the more flavor your pie crust will have,” Huntsberger added.

Vegetable shortening (Crisco) is the easiest to make. It has a higher melting point than lard or butter, and when making pie crust, keeping ingredients cold is paramount. That firmer texture will make it easier to get it worked into the flour without developing too much gluten.

Butter plays a key role in creating the delicate flakiness of the pie crust, and only if the butter is incorporated correctly and COLD when it goes into the oven. Tip: Cut the butter into cubes and place in the freezer 10 minutes before you need to incorporate it into the dough. This way it will be ICE COLD.

In pie crust, you don't want gluten to form so you don't want to mix too much and overwork the dough. For a flaky crust, cut the butter so that chunks of butter about the size of walnut halves remain. The chunks of cold butter create the layers in the dough.

What is the secret to a great pie crust? ›

Cold butter is the key to flaky crusts. Do not skip this step. You must put your butter in the freezer to get it nice and cold. Many people do not like working with frozen butter, but it makes all the difference in the world when you create your pie dough.

The acidic properties of vinegar inhibit gluten, some will say. This theory proposes that once the water and flour are combined, gluten starts forming, causing the dough to grow tough. Adding an acid, the theory goes, stops the gluten in its tracks and rescues the crust from toughness.

Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes, or up to overnight. Tip: Chilling hardens the fat in the dough, which will help the crust maintain its structure as it bakes. And the short rest before rolling relaxes the dough's gluten, helping prevent a tough crust.

Rule #1: Keep The Fats and Liquids COLD

We want the butter cold so when the cold butter hits the hot oven, the water inside the butter rises and evaporates quickly, creating a perfectly layered and flaky crust.

I like to use pastry flour because it contains less gluten than all-purpose flour and therefore creates a more tender crust, but all-purpose flour will work just fine if that's what you have on hand. The “2” is fat. Butter is the most common type of fat used, but other solid fats will work as well.

The amount of gluten in strong flour helps bakers produce more chewy, light, and structured baked goods. On the contrary, flour with a lower gluten content, such as cake flour or pastry flour, will produce a tender and less structured product that can easily crumble which is easier on the digestive system.

Flour- Flour forms the structure of the pastry. Soft plain flour (low gluten content) used in shortcrust to give a short crumb. Strong plain flour (high gluten content) used in flaky/rough puff pastry to give the pastry its elasticity.

Pastry Flour

Falling between all-purpose and cake flour, pastry flour is also made from soft wheat, but with a 7–9 percent protein content. It produces both the tender crumb and flaky texture that is desired in most pastries. It should not be used for baking bread because it has too little gluten.