(relaxing music)
- Hey guys, it's Tessa
from handletheheat.com,
where I love to share sweet treats
with a sprinkling of baking science,
and today I'm showing you
how I like to roll out pie dough.
Now, making pie dough usually
takes less than five minutes,
and if you're interested
in my Best Ever Pie Dough recipe,
then be sure to check out
the link for that below.
But when it comes to
rolling out pie dough,
shaping it, getting it
into your pie plate,
and having it bake up beautiful,
well, that's a whole other story.
So today, I'm going to be showing
my tricks for rolling out pie dough easily
to avoid cracks, to avoid
the butter in the pie crust
turning into a melted mess,
and to have the most beautiful pie
to impress all of your friends and family
this holiday baking
season and year around.
So let's go ahead and get started.
Now, I already made my pie crust.
This is my Best Ever Pie Crust recipe.
I made it yesterday and chilled it
in the fridge overnight.
You can make pie crust up
to three days ahead of time,
the dough at least.
Then now, I'm letting it
sit at room temperature
until it's nice and malleable.
I actually like to go a step further
and take my instant read thermometer
and stick it in my pie crust
to see just how cold it is.
So right now, it's still in
the 40 degrees Fahrenheit,
which is too cold to roll it out.
It will be too brittle
and not malleable enough.
So I like to wait until it
starts to hit 60, 65 degrees,
and start to roll it out that way.
Now, if you're like me
and you live in a hot climate,
I live in Phoenix, Arizona,
my kitchen's usually pretty warm.
Maybe your kitchen's just warm
because you had the oven on all day.
A trick to keep your
pie crust nice and cold,
because remember, we want the butter
to be cold throughout the entire process
that you're working with the pie dough.
If it gets to warm,
not only will it get melty
and sticky and make a mess,
but that melted butter will reduce
the flakey texture that we want
in the final baked pie crust.
The colder the butter is,
the more flakey texture you have,
and the neater and
prettier pie crust will be.
So I actually like to use a marble slab
to roll out my pie crust on,
because it stays cold.
However, if you don't have one of these,
you can also ice your counter tops.
Let me show you how I like to do that.
So what I do is I grab two freezer bags,
and I fill them with ice
and a little bit of water,
and I actually set them
down on my work surface
that I plan to use to
roll out my pie crust.
I let them stand here for
about five to 10 minutes,
or until the counter is cold to the touch.
That's really going to help my pie crust
stay nice and cold but not frozen
to the point where it's brittle
and it can't be rolled out,
and not too warm to the point where
it starts to melt and create a mess.
Okay, so now that my work
surface is nice and chilled,
I'm gonna set these aside.
The favorite tools that I love to use
to make rolling out pie
crust quicker and easier
are definitely of course, a rolling pin.
I prefer a French style rolling pin,
I think it's easier to work with.
Use whatever rolling pin you prefer.
Then I also love to use a flour shaker.
I actually use this,
or they're also called
powdered sugar shakers.
I love to use this to easily and quickly
flour my work surface.
You'll also want to flour the dough itself
and your rolling pin.
Lastly, I love to use a bench scraper.
These cost less than five dollars
at most kitchen stores,
and this makes maneuvering
and moving about the pie crust super easy
because as you'll see,
keeping the pie dough moving
as you're rolling it
out is super important.
So I'm gonna go ahead
and unwrap my pie dough.
It's been sitting out at room temperature
for a little while now,
so it's much more malleable than it was
when it was straight out of the fridge.
Gonna dust that with some flour,
and then just start slowly rolling it out.
So I give it a roll,
then I turn it a quarter turn,
and then keep doing that until
it starts to flatten out.
Now, you wanna keep the pie dough moving
in quarter turns like this,
because not only does this help you
create an even layer of even thickness
as you're rolling it out,
but it also helps you to
prevent the pie crust,
the pie dough, from sticking
to the counter anywhere,
and tearing or ruining the entire pie
once you go to lift up the dough
and move it onto your pie plate.
Now, the other thing I like to do
is just use the palms of my hands
to kind of work the edges of the pie crust
so that I'm preventing any major cracks
from developing.
Because I iced down my counter,
it's going to keep the
pie crust nice and whole,
the pie dough, so that I don't have to
return it back to the
fridge if it gets too warm.
Now, if that does happen to you,
if you notice that the
butter is getting melty,
it's sticking to your rolling pin,
sticking to the counter,
immediately take your pie dough
and pop it in the fridge
until it's nice and chilled again.
You really want to make sure
that you're keeping the butter cold
the entire time that you're
working with pie dough,
all the way until it goes into the oven.
Now, if you notice that your pie dough
is springing back at all,
and if it's not staying rolled out,
that probably means
that it needs to relax,
that the gluten needs to relax.
So you can go ahead and return
it to the fridge covered
for about five minutes, up to 30 minutes,
and that relaxation period
will actually help for
the pie dough to roll out
and not spring back.
As you're rolling it out,
you can see in my pie crust,
just how big the chunks of butter are.
A lot of pie recipes will
say to make the dough,
you want the chunks of
butter to be about pea size,
but I find that is way too small.
What that does is it allows the butter
to get warm really fast
and again, like I keep repeating,
we really want the butter
to stay nice and cold.
So I find that the bigger
the chunks of butter,
the colder they stay,
and then you get those pockets
of extreme light crispy flakiness
that's so delicious in pie crust.
So as the pie dough gets
bigger in circumference,
as you roll it out,
it becomes more difficult
to keep it moving,
that's where the bench
scraper comes in handy,
and if at any point,
you feel stickiness on the
surface that you're working on,
you can go ahead and sprinkle
some flour underneath
to make sure that it stays
nice and maneuverable,
it doesn't get stuck anywhere.
Okay, so now I rolled the dough out
to about a 13 inch circle
for my 9 inch pie pan.
The way I'm going to get it onto the pan
is I'm actually going to roll the dough
up and onto my rolling pin,
and then unroll it onto my pan.
If you notice that there's
an excess amount of flour
on your pie crust at all,
you can actually use a pastry brush
to wipe off all of that excess flour
so that you don't end up with a pie crust
that tastes super floury.
Okay, I'm just going to grab my pie pan,
and then gently unroll it onto the pan.
The reason we roll out a circle
that's much larger than the
actually diameter of the pan
is because you never want
to stretch your pie dough
in order to have it fit on the pan.
If you have to stretch the
pie dough to fit in some way,
it's likely going to spring back
to its original size as it's baking.
So I'm just gently
pressing it into my pan.
If you have any cracks or tears
or weird looking pieces,
you can just use your fingers
to kind of smoosh them back together.
Then I'm going to actually
cut off the overhang
with a pair of scissors.
You don't want to have too much dough
at the edges of your flute,
or the top of the crust.
Even, no matter how you
end up decorating it,
whether you crimp it our flute it,
if you have too much at the top,
it'll generally be too heavy,
and then your crust at the top will shrink
or it'll fall of the sides of the pie pan.
So we're gonna trim
off most of the excess,
and I'm actually going
to fold it under itself
to create a nice, even edge.
If you have any weird pieces here,
that's where you can
kind of press them down
and make them look pretty again,
but it definitely doesn't
have to be perfect.
No matter what your pie
ends up looking like,
it's going to be absolutely delicious
because you're making it
with a homemade pie crust,
and nothing compares to that.
Now at this point, you
could crimp the edges
with the tines of a fork,
or you can flute them,
and I'm gonna show you
quickly how to do that.
My pie pan already has
kind of a guide here,
so I'm going to use that.
Basically what you do is
you just take your thumb
and your index finger
and then another finger
from your other hand,
and push like this to
create that flute shape.
Then this will actually go in the fridge
while my oven preheats.
There you have it, we have our pie crust,
it's ready for either blind baking,
which I have instructions for
on my Best Ever Pie Crust recipe post,
which I'll link to below,
or you can fill it and proceed
with the pie recipe that you're making.
I really hope you found
this video helpful.
If you did, be sure to
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where I send out new
recipes and baking tips
every single week,
and I'll see you in a another video soon.