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Dessert

Plain Pie Crust

A simple pie crust made with flour, shortening, salt, and ice cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Pie Crust

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine flour and shortening.

  2. Work the shortening into the flour until well mixed.

  3. Add salt and mix in ice cold water gradually until the dough holds together.

Roll and bake

  1. Roll out the dough quickly and avoid overhandling.

  2. Bake the pie crust as soon as it is prepared.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the crust together as it bakes.
Butter, lard, or clarified drippings
Coats flour particles to create tenderness and flakiness by keeping layers separate.
Ice cold water
Binds the flour and fat into dough while keeping the fat cold and firm.

The step that matters

Roll out the dough quickly and avoid overhandling.. Working dough too much develops gluten, making the crust tough, and warm fat softens and blends into the flour, losing the flaky layers that give pie crust its texture.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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