Flaky Pie Crust
Serves 1–2 Time prep: 30 minutes baking: 1 hour Difficulty 3/5 Ingredients 5 Steps 17
This recipe makes enough dough for one 23 cm (9 inch) covered pie. If your pie only requires a bottom crust, use half this recipe. However, for best results, make the full recipe. If only a single crust is required, make the full recipe and freeze half for later.
Ingredients
- 310 g (2 ½ cups) flour
- 6 g (1 tsp) salt
- 4 g (1 tsp) white granulated sugar (optional)
- 225 g (1 cup) cold butter
- 95 ml (⅓ cup + 1 tbsp) cold water
Steps
- Whisk flour, salt and sugar in deep bowl.
- Cut butter into small pieces. Add to flour mixture.
- Cut butter into flour with pastry blender or two butter knives until pea-sized pieces.
- Add cold water. Cut into flour-butter mixture with edge of rubber spatula until evenly moistened and holding together when pressed.
- Form dough into ball by hand, kneading in loose flour. Work quickly to avoid melting butter.
- Chill dough 10–20 minutes.
- Cut dough evenly in half.
- Roll each half on lightly floured board to cover 20 cm (9 inch) pie dish with about 2 cm (¾" inch) overhang.
Shaping
- Lay bottom crust in pie dish with no gaps between crust and dish bottom.
- Fill crust with pie filling.
- Place top crust on top, with equal overhang on all sides.
- Trim overhang to about 2 cm (¾" inch) all around.
- Working around pie, hold bottom and top overhangs together. Tuck combined overhang into dish behind bottom crust.
- Pinch ridge into decorative edge with forefinger and thumb of each hand, or press with fork.
- Brush top with milk. Sprinkle with sugar.
- Cut vents in top crust for steam.
- For fruit pie, bake on lower-middle rack at 220 °C (425 °F), 30 minutes to set crust. Then bake at 180 °C (350 °F), 30 minutes to cook filling.
Notes from the original
- Vegan crust: Use a hard vegan fat, such as margarine in place of the butter (used for the images shown above)
- Traditional crust: Use lard, which is less saturated than butter and produces the flakiest crusts.
- Top Crust Colouring: Brush on lightly beaten egg white to colour crust instead of milk.
- When baking two pies at once, rotate the pies 180 degrees at 15 minutes and 45 minutes of baking to ensure the crust does not burn due to its proximity to the oven walls.
Source. Adapted from “Cookbook:Flaky Pie Crust” by Wikibooks contributors, revision of 2025-07-13, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Changes. Steps rewritten into short commands. Introduction shortened. Wiki formatting removed. This adapted recipe is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Photo. 23-pies finished.jpg (author listed on the file page), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia. Resized; otherwise unchanged.