Pate Brisee

From Simply Recipes

I hate store-bought pie crusts. Blech. They just don't taste very good. I don't make very many pies though, so I've never made my own crust. Until now...and it's really easy! It's not so easy that I still might buy the occasional frozen crust if I was in a bind, but it's easy enough to make your own crust even among the hubbub of Thanksgiving.

Ingredients:

• 1 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling
• 1 stick of unsalted butter, very cold, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 1/2 tsp. salt (I accidentally used 1/2 Tbsp. -- oops. Didn't seem too salty though.)
• 1 and 1/2 tsp. sugar
• 2 to 4 Tbsp. ice water, very cold

Directions:

• Put the butter in the freezer for at least 15 minutes (preferably longer) so that it becomes fully chilled.
  Add the flour, salt and sugar to a food processor and pulse to mix.
• Add the butter and pulse 6 to 8 times until the mixture resembles a coarse meal with pea size pieces of butter.
• Add water 1 Tbsp. at a time, pulsing until mixture just begins to clump together. If you pinch some of the crumbly dough and it holds together, it's ready, if not, add a little more water and pulse again. Mine needed ~2 Tbsp. of water.

• Remove dough from foor processor and shape into a disc. There should still be bits of butter in the dough. Sprinkle the disc with a little flour on all sides. Wrap the disc in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
• Remove the crust from the refrigerator. Let sit at room temperature for 5-10 minutes.
• Sprinkle some flour on top of the disk. According to the recipe, the dough is supposed to be able to roll out, but mine wouldn't, even after I added a ton of flour. Instead, I just pressed the mixture into the pie plate. Came out fine.
• Bake the pie as directed. I made pumpkin pie.

Yes, that really is how much whipped cream Cory puts on his pumpkin pie.

Verdict:
MUCH better than store-bought! Nice and flakey, mild in flavor, good compliment to the creaminess of the pumpkin pie. People weren't exactly raving about the pie crust, but that's not really the point now, is it?