Pie Crust Dough (Pâte Brisée: Part 2)

In this cooking class video, discover the utensils, cooking techniques, and ingredients you need to make pâte brisée: pie crust dough.

Video Transcript

So let's get that started. I'm going to put my pastry blender down and grab a tablespoon. I'm going to start with about 3 tablespoons of water. And I'm using ice water. Ice water is really important because it will help keep the butter cold and the other ingredients cold.  You never want your butter to come to room temperature. Okay and the dough's kind of coming together, it's starting to. You can see it's changing its texture a little bit. We still really big chunks of butter. I'm going to add another 2 tablespoons of water. All right, so I added a little more water, and I think I'm just about there. So let me stop for a second, and I'm going to show you what I mean. So if we look at the dough, you can see I've got some really beautiful varying pieces of butter. So I've got my nickel size and I've got my dime and I've got a little bit of everything in between. And it's okay if there are pieces that are smaller than a dime, just as long as it's not the majority. Variety of size when it comes to your fat is the key. All right, so we've got our varying sizes of fat, but you can see I still have a lot of dry crumb in the bottom of my bowl, and too much dry crumb, which means I need about one more tablespoon of water, and then it should be perfect.



So this is the point where you know that it's almost time to stop. So you've got your nice chunks of butter that are of varying sizes, and you also have a majority of dry crumb on the bottom, and that's what you don't want. So one tablespoon of water should do it. Okay I'm just going to kind of mix that in and get the dry pieces off the bottom of the bowl. I'm going to do a couple more pushes with the pastry blender, and right now it's absolutely perfect.



Now what I'm going to do here is gather my dough together because it needs to rest in the refrigerator. Now I prefer to let it rest overnight because that will give you the maximum amount of hydration in your flour. You can rest it for as little as 30-45 minutes in the refrigerator if you really need to use it right away, but the best results will be if you let it rest overnight. All right, so I'm gathering all the pieces of dough and even that pieces that seem you know kind of crumbly, and getting those all off the bottom, putting them into the mess, and kind of gently patting them together. Now I'm going to wrap this in parchment paper--you can also wrap it in plastic--and let it rest in the refrigerator, and like I said overnight is best but you can also do it for as little as 30-45 minutes if you need it right away. So let's get this into the fridge and I'll show you how to roll it out.

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