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Dessert

Plain Pie Crust

A simple pie crust made with butter, flour, salt, lard, and ice water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine flour and salt.

  2. Cut in lard or drippings until mixed.

  3. Add enough ice water to form a dough.

Laminate and roll

  1. Flour a surface and roll out the dough.

  2. Spread with butter, dust with flour, fold, and re-roll.

  3. Repeat until all butter is used.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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
Forms the structure of the dough when mixed with water.
Lard or drippings
Cut into the flour to create fat pockets that make the crust tender and flaky.
Butter
Adds flavor and fat layers that separate into flakes during folding and rolling.
Ice water
Hydrates the flour to bind the dough while keeping the fat solid.

The step that matters

Keeping the fat cold while laminating. Butter and lard must stay firm so they stay in separate layers. If they soften and blend into the dough, the layers are lost and the crust becomes less flaky. Chilling the dough between folds helps keep the fat solid.

“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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