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Flaky Pie Crust

A pastry dough for pie crust made with pastry flour, butter, lard, salt, sugar, and ice water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Flaky Pie Crust

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Keep all ingredients as cold as possible.

  2. Sift the flour, salt, and sugar into a large bowl.

  3. Cut the butter and lard into small pieces and mix with the flour using a knife.

  4. Make a small hole in the mixture, pour in a little ice water, and stir lightly until moistened.

  5. Continue adding water and mixing until all the flour is moistened; you may not need all the water.

Laminate and rest

  1. Dredge a clean surface with flour and turn the dough out without further mixing.

  2. Roll the dough lightly into a long, thin sheet, folding the sides and ends as you go.

  3. Turn the dough and roll it out again, repeating the folding and rolling process four times.

  4. Cover the dough to keep it cold and exclude air until needed.

  5. For best results, refrigerate overnight before using.

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).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Pastry flour
Forms the structure of the crust when moistened and worked into dough.
Butter
Solid fat pieces melt in the oven, creating layers that make the crust flaky.
Lard
Solid fat that stays separate in the dough, producing tender, flaky layers.
Ice water
Moistens the flour without warming the fat, so the dough stays cold and workable.

The step that matters

Keep the dough cold and handle it lightly. Warm fat softens and blends into the flour instead of staying in pieces, and overworking develops gluten that makes the crust tough rather than flaky.

“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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