How to Make Perfect, Flaky Pie Crust Every Time

For years, pie crust has been my great culinary white whale. No matter which recipe I used, it slumped, fell apart when transferring to the pan or baked up flat and dense. I tried all sorts of tricks (like vodka), store-bought doughs—which, as a food writer, was embarrassing—and lots of mental gymnastics, subbing tart shells where I could and claiming I “liked cobbler more than pie anyway.” But there’s no substitute for a buttery, flaky pie crust, especially during the holidays. With the release of “Milk Street Bakes,” I knew it was time to finally master pie pastry.

Truth be told, it was all very anticlimactic. I followed two Milk Street recipes— Single-Crust Pie Dough and Flaky Pie Pastry—and had great success. Both quickly came together in the food processor, handled well, rolled out without much trouble and baked up nice and flaky without slumping during blind baking.

How? I certainly hadn’t become more wise in the ways of pastry. No, I owe my success completely and utterly to those two recipes and the ingredients and techniques found within them.

Chris Kimball’s Single-Crust Pie Dough is perfect for experts and beginners alike

Neither recipe is difficult—after all, I was able to make both of them without incident—but the Single-Crust Pie Dough has two clever ingredients that act as pastry training wheels, ensuring success no matter your skill level. But even seasoned home cooks will appreciate this dough.

After decades of pie baking, Chris Kimball was still searching for a pie dough that performed well when blind baked. Either the dough was dry and hard to roll out (but less apt to shrinking in the oven), or it rolled out fine, only to slump during pre-baking. Instead of fiddling with the type and amount of fat, flour and liquid, or adding ingredients like vinegar, vodka and baking powder, Chris asked baking expert Erika Bruce to please make a better pie crust.

And she did. The trick was figuring out a way to add moisture without increasing the amount of gluten formed; doughs need moisture for a supple texture, but water activates gluten, the protein in wheat that makes doughs tough. We found the solution in an unlikely baked good: Japanese Milk Bread.

The super-soft sandwich bread gets its moist texture and fine crumb from a technique known as the tangzhong method. A small portion of the flour is mixed with boiling water to make a paste that gets mixed into the rest of the flour and water to make the dough. The starch granules in the flour swell with water, binding it up so it adds moisture to the dough without activating extra gluten. (Once water is gelatinized into the starch molecules, there is no escape.)

We tried a simple paste of water and flour, but the results were a bit too sturdy and not flaky enough. So we turned to another, naturally gluten-free pantry item and made a paste of cornstarch and water, then heated it briefly in the microwave to create a gel. After cooling the gel in the freezer, we dumped all of our ingredients in the food processor and whizzed them together to form a dough. The water in the gel was trapped by the cornstarch, letting us to add moisture while preventing it from reacting with the proteins in the flour. This made for a tender, relaxed dough that’s easy to roll out and didn’t shrink when pre-baked. The addition of a little sour cream—which contains a gluten-weakening peptide called glutathione—made the dough even more supple and less likely to shrink.

After making this pie crust (and pairing it with the filling in our Maple Browned Butter Pie), I can confirm it delivers exactly what is promised—it’s easy to mix, rolls out like a dream, handles and transfers well, is plenty flaky and doesn’t slump in the pan when blind baked. (Watch Chris Kimball make it on Milk Street TV.)

But what would happen if I took off the training wheels—leaving the cornstarch in the pantry—and made the butter do its job?

This flaky pie pastry is all-butter, no problems

Our recipe for Flaky Pie Pastry doesn’t contain any cornstarch, sour cream, shortening, vodka, vinegar or anything other than butter, flour and ice water, with a little sugar and salt for flavor. What makes it different from other classic, all-butter pie crusts is how and when the butter is incorporated.

Cutting butter into flour does two things: It coats the flour with fat, which prevents it from absorbing moisture and activating the gluten, and it distributes the butter in little bits throughout the dough. These bits of butter melt during baking, leaving behind pockets that fill with steam, creating the flaky layers that make all-butter pie crusts so appealing.

This is where I normally fall apart, along with my pie dough. Keeping the butter in large pieces is what gives it those beautiful flakes, but the tradeoff comes when you go to roll it out. Leaving large portions of the flour unbuttered translates to a dough with stiff, crumbly portions, punctuated by big pockets of rapidly warming butter that stick to your rolling pin. Work the butter in completely, however, and you’ll get a supple pie dough that rolls out like a dream and doesn’t shrink, but without any flakiness.

We thread this particular needle by incorporating the butter in two stages. First, about a third is processed into the dry ingredients until very well combined—the flour should change color—then the remainder is pulsed in until reduced to pea-sized pieces. This ensures good integration of fat for better workability and tenderness and prevents the flour from absorbing too much moisture when the ice water is added; the larger bits of butter create flaky layers in the baked pastry.

To set yourself up for success, be sure your butter is well-chilled and don’t cut it any smaller than tablespoon-sized chunks before adding it to the flour. The food processor does its job quite well, making short order of the butter, and cutting it into tiny pieces before adding it to the flour could result in overworking the dough.

Once the dough is formed, it’s shaped into a rectangle, then cut into thirds. Those thirds are then stacked on top of each other and smushed down. This builds layers for even more flakiness. A metal bench scraper is a handy tool when working with the dough, but a wide metal spatula works, too. Round off the corners as best you can by wrapping it in plastic and rolling the dough on its side, like a wheel, to form a disc. Chill for at least an hour to let the butter harden and the gluten relax. Then it’s time to roll.

The best way to roll out pie dough

Pies are famously circular, and treating them as such will make rolling out your dough much easier. Rather than flattening it with straight, linear motions—which will create a rectangle instead of a circle—roll it out in an arc. But first, give it a few whacks with your rolling pin to soften the butter without warming it up.

Next, imagine your dough disc is a clock face and your rolling pin is the hand. Roll your pin in an arc, starting at 12 o’clock and sweeping down to 3 o’clock. Rotate the dough 90 degrees and repeat. This keeps the pressure off the center of the dough—so it won’t become overworked—and ensures it actually rolls out into a circle.

Finally, make sure the counter is well floured so the dough is always moving. Sticking can cause more gluten to develop, the enemy of flaky crust.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.