Pie Crust Comparison

I have been on a quest to find a great pie dough recipe for quite some time. I keep thinking that maybe if I can find a great recipe, that making pie will be more enjoyable for me.  I still don't think I'm there.. but the taste testing has been pretty delicious!

I chose four recipes to test: Smitten Kitchen's All Butter Crust, Dorie's Good For Almost Everything Pie Crust, Cook's Illustrated Foolproof Pie Dough and Alton Brown's Pie Crust.  I had some helpful taste testers to judge the first three (SK, D and CI) and hubs and I gave Alton's a try a few days later.  Lots of thoughts to follow- let's get going.

 Smitten Kitchen: I always have high hopes for SK recipes, so I was excited to try her all-butter recipe. She prefers the old-fashioned hand-mixed method, so this one had a little extra elbow grease mixed in.  It came together nicely and was one of the easiest to roll out.  I used this dough for SK's Sour Cherry Slab Pie, which was the favorite pie of my taste-testers.  That could be because it had the highest crust to filling ratio, or because the crust was thicker.  Regardless, it was the flakiest and got the most compliments.

 Dorie: I was disappointed with Dorie for the first time here!  This was my least favorite of all the recipes.  It browned (read: burnt) too quickly in the oven and shrank back a lot during baking.  It looked so promising before it went into the oven.  I used Dorie's crust as the base for this Lemon Meringue Pie from Zoe Bakes.  This one was quickly taken out of the running.

 Cook's Illustrated: The CI recipe was the easiest to pull together and the least fussy of the four recipes.  The secret ingredient here was cold vodka in place of half of the usual water.  I used the CI crust for a double crusted Apple Pie- a good choice, since it was the easiest for me to roll out and work with.  More testers ate the apple pie than the cherry slab pie, but they still picked the SK crust over the CI crust.  I think this crust is a good choice, but not as flaky or buttery as SK.

Alton Brown: Our good man Alton has a very specific way to execute his recipes, doesn't he?  For this pie crust, he called for a spray bottle to add water to the dry ingredients.  I have to say that I'm not sure it made that big of a difference.  I used the AB crust for most of the Cherry Berry Hand Pies (I had some extra crust from the other recipes to use up as well).  It was a tasty crust, but I couldn't tell much of a difference between the CI recipe.

Lemon Meringue Pie: Dorie's crust, Zoe's filling and meringue
Cherry Slab Pie: SK's crust and filling

Brown Sugar Apple Pie (with one of my little pie birds!)
Cook's Illustrated Crust and filling from Pie

Cherry Berry Hand Pies: AB's crust with my own filling

Conclusions:
For me, I think the winner is definitely Smitten Kitchen.  It was the biggest crowd pleaser.  There were good points about Alton's recipe and the CI recipe, but my all-purpose pick is SK.  That being said, I think there are things you can do with any pie crust recipe to get the best results.

• Make sure your ingredients are COLD. That means your butter, your water, your flour, everything.  This is huge.
• Chill the dough in between steps.  This is time consuming, but helps the texture in the end.
• Only roll your dough once, if possible.  All of the pie doughs were difficult to roll out after the initial roll.  They became elastic and started to shrink back- that means tough crust.
• Use flour liberally while you're rolling to keep dough from sticking.
• Make sure steam can escape your pie, whether it's using a pie bird or just poking holes with a fork.
• Have fun and take it easy! I always make pie such a big deal, but it's really not.  It's fun and delicious and you should be smiling while you're making it.

I'm glad I finally dug in and did some pie research.  I'm no longer afraid of the pie, but I'll still probably employ the lazy pie techniques like the galette and slab pie.  It's just my way.  I hope this comparison was helpful to you if you've been searching for a recipe, too.

(Special thanks to my little helper! And by helper, I mean a giant mess maker. As if I don't make enough of a mess when I bake alone.. maybe he got it from me?)

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