Pie Crust

The trick is butter. Regardless of the recipe, the ingredients, the methods, the trick to making something delicious is probably butter. Real butter. Nothing else melts, hardens, fattens, cuts, greases, fries, or burns quite like butter does. And so, for a delicious pie crust, use butter. And because pie is a comfort food, a simple food, and such an excellent showcase, I thought a good place to start this public, online dump of my food experiments and trials would be pie crust.

Start with cold butter. You want little chunks of butter to melt during baking, and cause flaky pockets of goodness in the crust. To make two crusts, I cut 16 tablespoons of unsalted butter into 2.5 cups flour and a little bit of salt and sugar until the mixture gets grainy and chunky.

Add some cold water, mash it all together, and refrigerate for a bit.

Don't handle it too much, but enough so that it makes a solid crust. And don't worry about making it too pretty; it won't be.The edges will sink, and burn, and will be puffy and misshapen. But it will taste delicious.

This recipe is adapted from the Joy of Cooking, from my mother's disdain of shortening, and from my own love of butter and lazy cooking style.