To make a 9-inch Pie Crust, you’ll need:
- 1 Cup (138g) Happy Campers Easy Peasy Flour Mix
- 6 Tbsp chilled Coconut Oil, Regular Butter or Plant-Based Butter. To chill, put in the fridge for 30 minutes.
- 1 – 2 Tbsp Ice-cold Water
- ½ tsp Baking Powder
- 1 tsp Apple Cider Vinegar
- Pastry Cutter or Fork and Mixing Bowl
- Waxed Paper, Rolling Pin and 9” Pie Pan
- For pie-crust filling, here's our favorite pumpkin pie filling!
Steps
- Add Flour Mix and Baking Powder into mixing bowl and combine.
- Add chilled Coconut Oil or Butter and work it in gently with a pastry cutter or fork. The goal is to incorporate them together until the texture is like coarse sand. It’s okay if some pieces are larger – as big as peas is okay. Avoid overworking it and mushing it together.
- Pro Tip: The Mixing method is really absolutely crucial for Pie Making. Out of all baked goods, Pie Crusts are probably the most particular on how they should be mixed. Anybody else feels that way? The reason is that Pie Crust Mixing is somewhat counter-intuitive, because you actually do NOT want to mix the dough very much. If you mix it a lot, you will combine all ingredients thoroughly and this is actually a bad thing, because it will create a tough crust. You want the ingredients just barely come together. This creates that FLAKY crust that we’re all after. There is one kitchen tool that’s really really handy for Pie Crust – it’s a Pastry Cutter. It helps to cut the fat evenly and mix it with flour WITHOUT mushing the fat and thus hydrating with the flour (which results in that tough crust). It’s really the mushing of the fat that should be avoided as much as possible. By the way, the reason why the fat and water should be cold is that cold fat doesn’t mush nearly as easily as warm and soft (or partially melted) fat. You can make a good flaky crust just by mixing with hands or wooden spatula, but it’s a bit more tricky to avoid the mushing. Pastry Cutter is really quite handy here.
- Add Apple Cider Vinegar and 1-2 Tbsp of Ice-cold Water, just enough so the “coarse sand” dough can come together and loosely form a ball.
- Pro Tip #2: The dough really should be really really dry. That’s really how pie doughs are. It should just barely come and hold together. If you really feel that 1-2 Tbsp of water is too little, then go for 3 Tbsp, but that’s the absolute maximum. If the dough just won’t come together even with 3 Tbsp of water, give it a 10 minute rest at room temperature, let the fat inside soften up, then try to make the dough disk. If it’s still not coming together, give it another 5-10 minutes. Eventually, it’ll surely come together and form that loose ball.
- Transfer the dough to a sheet of Waxed Paper and create a round disk about half an inch thick with your hands.
- Place another sheet of Wax Paper on top and roll it out to about 10 inches to fit your 9-inch pan.
- Transfer the crust: simply remove the top layer of Wax Paper, place your Pan on it face-down and flip them over! It’s pretty easy to do and if the dough rips, you can easily patch it together once it’s in the Pan. No one will ever know.
- Peel off the (now) top layer of Wax Paper, use your hands to form it neatly into the Pan.
- Now your Pie Crust is ready to be filled with delicious Pie filling and then baked! The bake time will depend on the Pie filling you choose.