Took me 4 tries to get pie dough right... the issue was my hands

I kept having my pie crusts come out tough and crumbly, and I figured it was the flour or the butter temperature. Turns out I was overworking the dough with my warm hands, no matter how cold the butter was. After 3 failed batches in one afternoon, I finally started using a bench scraper to cut the butter in and barely touched the dough with my fingers. That fourth batch took less than 20 minutes to come together and baked up flaky, exactly how I wanted. Even now I keep a bowl of ice water nearby just to cool my hands down before I handle it, sounds silly but it works. Anyone else have a simple fix like that that took them way too long to figure out?

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phoenixh7426d ago

The bench scraper trick is solid, but nobody talks about the humidity angle. If your kitchen is damp, flour soaks up moisture from the air and turns to glue before you even add butter. I started keeping my flour in the freezer for an hour before making dough on rainy days, and that alone fixed more of my batches than any hand technique.