Pie: Crust or Bust!

I've always been somewhat offended by the phrase "easy as pie" because after fifteen years of pie-making, I'm still on a seemingly endless journey for the perfect crust recipe/technique. Pie-making has never been easy for me, so I couldn't help but muse over the fact that whoever came up with that obnoxious phrase must have been somebody who never once tried their hand at actually making a pie. However, I can't help but wonder if perhaps the cliche holds and I'm just incompetent. I've tried everything from an all-butter crust and minimal handling to incorporating vodka, which did nothing for the texture but made eating the monstrosity of a pie at least a little entertaining.

The closest I've come to making a light and flaky crust came when I combined the technique offered up by America's Test Kitchen and Betty Crocker's basic pie crust recipe, which is nothing more than flour, salt, shortening, and water. The recipe is nothing special, and it can be modified to suit your needs by adding any number of spices appropriate for the filling of your choice. But the technique, when explained in scientific terms of course, seemed to make all the difference. According to Test Kitchen, and I think we all agree here, the goal in making a "good" pie crust is producing one that is light and flaky. The only way to achieve this, they say, is to avoid forming long gluten strands (those things that make bread oh-so-yummy). Hence the golden rule of making a pie crust: don't over-handle the dough! Unfortunately, even the slightest amount of handling once the recipe is combined will produce these gluten strands, which makes pie crust dense and difficult to handle (i.e. crust that springs back as soon as you roll it out). To prevent this from happening Test Kitchen suggests modifying the way a typical crust is mixed to help avoid the formation of long gluten strands. Ordinarily, recipes call for cutting in half the fat (be it butter or shortening or a combination thereof) until you're left with a mealy texture and then cutting in the second half until you have something resembling peas (always with the peas!). Test Kitchen instead cuts in all the fat with half the flour first to encapsulate each grain of flour with a little fat, and then they add the rest of the flour. The theory is that the "fattened" flour won't be able to form gluten strands, and you'll be left with a crust that is light and flaky even after over-handling. They call for then adding enough of a water-vodka mixture to hold the dough together, but I find the vodka affects the flavor in unpalatable ways. But their technique has been the key for me in at least producing a somewhat reliable crust.