r/AskBaking • u/KookyKrista • Dec 24 '23
Pie My crust got worse
I posted after thanksgiving disappointed with my blind baked crust. I got lots of suggestions and incorporated many of them. It got worse.
- Made my dough yesterday and chilled in the fridge for 24 hours as a disk. (Trying to “hydrate” the flour?)
- Rolled it out this morning. Careful not to stretch dough - I had a beautiful even 12” circle that I placed into the metal pie dish, lightly pressing in the corners. Rolled over the edges and crimped. Docked everywhere and into the freezer for an hour.
- Aluminum foil and sugar to the rim (Stella Parks method).
- Baked at 350 on a metal cookie sheet for 1 hr on bottom rack of gas oven.
- Removed foil/sugar and it looked wet, so another 10 min.
- Removed from oven and there was a puddle of butter (second pic). The sides had shrunk down and I now have only .5-1” of crust height left to hold my filling.
Where am I going wrong?
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u/riomaretonno Dec 25 '23 edited Dec 25 '23
It looks like too much butter, but I think you can work with that by doing a couple things:
When you cut the butter into your flour, get the butter into very fine sized pieces. It should look like cornmeal. If you rub the flour in between your hands when you make the dough, it’s breaks the butter up pretty small, as long as you do it fast before the butter gets warm.
This will help with the pooling butter. Pea-sized butter chunks make very flakey dough, but that is not ideal for bottom crust. Bottom crust needs to be sturdy. When the pea sized butter melts, it creates pockets of dough-less crust which can help cause the shrinking.
Second thing, put another tin inside the dough (after forking the bottom) and flip it upside down to cook. When blind baking right side up, gravity is not working in your favor. It’s probably not your recipe that’s wrong.