Dairy-Free Buttery Pie Crust Recipe + Cinnamon Roll Pinwheels (2024)

FAQs

What are 2 disadvantages of using all butter in pie crust? ›

The additional moisture in butter contributes to tough pastry dough if overworked during mixing, and the low melting point of 94°F allows the fat to melt into the flour as it is worked, changing the texture of the finished crust.

Some bakers use milk or buttermilk in their pie crust. Thanks to their milk solids, both will help crust brown and add a bit of tenderness. But the classic liquid in pie crust is water — ice water, to be precise.

Why does butter leak out of my pie crust? If a lot of butter is leaking from your pie crust, that means that the dough was too warm when you put it in the oven. It's important to keep butter cold when making your pie crust dough and to keep your pie dough cold right up until the moment it goes into the oven.

If the butter is too warm, it will combine too well into the flour, making the dough hard to work with and the final crust tough or cracker-like. If you've had problems with your pie crust recipe, chances are the butter's to blame. Here's how to keep it under control: Start with cold butter, straight from the fridge.

Once a fat like butter is added to bread dough in large quantities, it coats those glutenin and gliadin proteins, resulting in shorter gluten chains. As fat coats those proteins, it can also delay yeast's consumption of sugar, making for a slower rising dough; but this also makes for a more robust flavor.

A: First, don't just reach for more flour—too much extra flour will make the crust tough, and won't treat the real problem, which is that your butter is too soft. I recently read in Weller's cookbook A Good Bake that it should take no more than one to two minutes to roll out a pie crust.

You can certainly use ice water instead of milk, but I like the richness of the whole milk. You can even experiment with half and half or buttermilk – I've used both. Don't be tempted to add more liquid than the recipe calls for. The dough should be just moist enough to hold together.

About this method: Dairy is a classic pastry wash. The natural lactose sugars gild the crust with a golden hue, and the more fat the milk has the deeper the color you'll get. What you won't get is as high a shine as egg washes give you. As with oil, this wash is easy to apply, but also easy to over-apply.

In order to ensure that the finished crust is super flaky, pie crust always starts with cold butter. That way, the butter will remain in solid chunks in the dough that evaporate into layers during baking. Good!

Why use ice water in pie crust? ›

Tips for Making Perfect Pie Crust

Work with cold ingredients. Chilled butter and ice-cold water will help keep the dough flaky. When the crust is baked, pockets of butter release steam, creating flaky layers.

But there are two much more important perks to using vinegar: it provides a little insurance against overworking the dough. And, that splash of vinegar will keep your dough from oxidizing and turning gray. Fresh All-Butter Pie Dough with vinegar (right) and without (left).

Butter pie crust has the most flavor out of the three fats. This pie crust bakes up nice and golden brown, with plenty of flaky layers.

The pros: Butter has the best flavor. A butter pie crust forms light, lofty, flaky layers while it bakes. The flakiness comes partially from the water content of butter, which evaporates as the pie bakes and turns to steam, separating and puffing up the layers in dough.

Use Very Cold Butter or Fat

Butter, shortening, lard, or suet—whatever fat the recipe calls for should be well-chilled and cut into small pieces to start with for the flakiest crust in the end. The fat in a pie crust must maintain some of its integrity in the dough to make the crust truly flaky.

The cons: Butter can be harder to work with than lard or shortening because of its lower melting point, so the dough temperature has to be just right. If it gets too warm, it will be too soft to handle and will tear easily. Butter is a firmer fat, so if it's too cold, your dough will be more difficult to roll out.

However, since butter has a lower melting point than margarine, baked goods made with butter may spread more during baking. This can result in cookies that are flatter and wider than intended. To prevent this from happening, it's important to chill the dough before baking.

Too much butter in your baked goods would give them different texture (flat, greasy..).

Despite the great taste of butter, some bakers don't like to use it for pie crusts because it's difficult to handle. “Butter is harder to work with than shortening because it melts at a lower temperature,” Huntsberger said. It can be hard to get a flaky pie crust with butter if the butter isn't handled very carefully.