Pie Crust

I meant to include a recipe and technique for crust in the last post on pies but time escaped me.  So, here it is.  I’m not a fan of vegetable shortening and good lard is hard to find so I use an all butter dough.  The flavor is great and you can add some flakiness to it with your technique.  I use the basic recipe from The Baker’s Dozen Cookbook although I must confess that I tend to eyeball the amount of butter (we get ours in irregularly shaped balls from the farm) and the water.  The recipe calls for 1 cup AP flour, 2T sugar, 1/4 t salt, 8T cold butter, 2T ice water.  I use a food processor for dough because it’s faster, easier and comes out better.  My personal method is to process the flour, sugar and salt to blend.  Then I add the butter and pulse 2-3 times.  I don’t have an exact size for the blended butter, everyone says that it should look like cornmeal or peas but mine tends to be somewhat irregular.  I would say that no lumps should be larger than a pea.  The butter should be well coated with the flour and not too small, if you can't see the lumps you've gone too far.  The I drizzle in the water and pulse the machine 2-3 times to blend.  If it doesn’t come together I add some more.  I stop when the dough looks like a mass of coarse little balls.  It will not be fully blended and there should still be some loose flour in the bowl.  At this point I dump it out onto the counter and fraisage ( smear the dough across the counter with the heel of my hand, to flatten the layers of butter)  Try not to add any extra flour during this process, just use the leftover from the bowl.  Depending on how the dough feels I do it once or twice.  If you’re afraid of toughening your dough, just do it once.  This adds flakiness to your layers, finishes the mixing process and brings the dough together.  Form it into a ball and dust it with flour.  Roll it out immediately and put it into your pan.  Chill it for at least an hour before baking to relax the gluten.  You can prepare the filling while the dough rests.  Use as you would any pie dough.  Double the recipe for two crust pie.