Pie Crust Dough (Pâte Brisée: Part 1)

So one of the most important tools that I'm going to be using is a pastry cutter, or a pastry blender. Now I've been making pie dough all day so I've got a little bit of dough on my pastry blender already, which is perfectly fine. I'm going to get it dirty again in just a minute. But if you notice the construction of it. You'll see some in the stores that are a little bit flimsy. This is very sturdy, stainless steel, and these slots are never going to move, and that's really important when you're cutting in your butter because the ones that are flimsy tend to go around your pieces of butter, and we want this to cut straight through the butter and cut it into chunks. Just like a knife. So I'm going to start by pushing on the butter and twisting. Pushing and twisting. My butter is nice and cold, and that's super important that it stay cold, that all your ingredients stay cold. Because the way that pie dough is both flaky and tender is by some pretty cool chemical reactions that happen and part of that reaction that happens starts with the mixing process. And by keeping your chunks of butter cold and your chunks of butter in vary sizes, and we'll talk about that as well as I'm mixing this,  you're going to  create little pockets of air and steam is going to escape, and that's going to give you your flaky  texture in the oven.

All right let's talk about the sizes of butter. Now most recipes are going to tell you to blend your pastry dough until you receive a mealy, coarse texture with pea-size pieces of butter, which is great advice, and it's a great way to kind of figure out where you are in the steps and when you should stop, but we find a lot of the time if you follow those directions you've over mixed your dough. So right now I'm going to stop. And you can see, I've got some pretty large chunks of butter. And they're too large actually right now. But, we have water to add to this. And as we add water, we need to mix. And when we mix more we have a tendency to over mix the dough and overwork the dough, which makes it tough. So stopping at this stage and adding your water is going to ensure that your dough is flaky.