Sunday Supper: Southern Pie Crust

Not long ago, a family friend sat down to a slice of pie. He is 87 years old and has eaten more pie in his life than most people will see in several lifetimes. He took one bite of the crust, paused, and said it reminded him of the way his grandmothers used to make it. The way it tasted when he was a young boy.

There is no compliment in a Southern kitchen that lands harder than that one. To be told that your cooking reaches back across generations and touches something that was made with real skill, real knowledge, and real care? That is not a small thing. That is the whole point.

The crust that earned that compliment was made with lard rendered at home, cut into flour by hand with a pastry blender that cost a dime at a thrift store, found buried at the bottom of a tote of random kitchen utensils. The cutter is from the 1940s, sturdy and simple, and it has never once produced a bad crust when used with patience, cold hands, and the understanding that less is always more where pie dough is concerned.

This column is about how to make that crust. The fillings will follow, but they are secondary. A great filling in a mediocre crust is a missed opportunity. If you offer a great filling in a great crust, that is what people remember for the rest of their lives.

Why the Crust Gets Forgotten

Somewhere along the way, the pie crust became something to be tolerated rather than celebrated. Refrigerated pre-made crusts appeared in grocery stores and found their way into kitchens that had been making their own for generations. Recipes began describing the crust as a vessel for the filling rather than an equal partner in the finished pie. Whole cookbooks are dedicated to fillings, with the crust reduced to only a little more than a paragraph.

This is a mistake that compounds itself over time. When nobody teaches the crust, nobody learns it. If it’s not a learned skill, the skills will erode over time. When the skills erode, the pre-made version starts to seem reasonable. And then an 87-year-old man takes a bite of a properly made crust and remembers something he had not tasted in decades, and the distance between what we settled for and what we are capable of becomes very clear.

Making a good pie crust is not complicated. It requires simple ingredients, cold fat, cold hands, and the discipline to stop working the dough before the impulse to keep going wins out. Overmixing ruins a crust, and it does so decisively. The moment the fat is incorporated, and the dough just comes together, your work is done. Everything after that point makes it worse.

The Fat

Fat is what makes a pie crust flaky, tender, and flavorful, and the fat you choose determines the character of the finished crust more than any other ingredient.

Home-rendered lard is the gold standard, and it has been since Southern women were making pies long before anyone reading this column was born. Rendering lard at home – cutting pork fat into small pieces, cooking it low and slow until the fat liquefies and the solids (cracklings) separate, then straining and cooling the pure white fat – yields a clean, mild-flavored fat with a composition that creates an exceptionally tender, flaky crust.

The work of rendering it is part of what makes it matter. When you have put that effort in before a single cup of flour has been measured, the reward of the finished crust is something you feel as well as taste. Store-bought lard is a reasonable substitute and is widely available, but it has been processed in ways that strip some of the fat's character. Home-rendered lard tastes like something made with intention.

Butter produces a crust with a rich, distinctly buttery flavor and beautiful golden color. Cold butter, cut into small cubes and worked quickly into the flour, creates distinct layers that puff and separate in the oven. Many bakers swear by a combination of butter and lard: the butter for flavor, the lard for tenderness and flakiness. This is a legitimate approach and produces an excellent crust.

The non-negotiable requirement for butter in pie crust is the same as it is for biscuits – it must be very cold. Warm butter blends into the flour rather than staying in distinct pieces, and the flakiness depends entirely on those distinct pieces melting in the oven rather than before it.

Shortening was the dominant choice in American pie-making for much of the 20th century, and the crusts it produces are tender, reliable, and consistent in a way that more temperamental fats are not. All-vegetable shortening has a higher melting point than butter or lard, which means it stays solid longer during mixing and produces a crust that is easier to handle and less prone to problems in a warm kitchen.

The tradeoff is flavor. Shortening is neutral to the point of near-invisibility, producing a crust that is structurally sound but less interesting than what lard or butter produces. For a baker who is still learning the technique and wants a forgiving fat, shortening is a sensible starting point.

Whatever fat you choose, keep it cold. If the kitchen is warm, cut the fat into pieces and put it back in the refrigerator for thirty minutes before you start. Some bakers freeze their fat, then grate it directly into the flour with a box grater. The principle is always the same: cold fat, worked quickly, touched as little as possible.

The Tool

A pastry blender is a handle with several curved metal blades or wires that cut fat into flour by pressing and rocking through the mixture. Most hardware stores, kitchen shops, and sometimes the bottom of thrift store totes carry them. The one in this kitchen came home for ten cents and has been making crusts ever since with the same reliability it presumably had in whatever kitchen owned it in the 1940s.

Good tools do not require an expensive price tag. They require the right design and the right use, and a well-made pastry blender from eight decades ago outperforms a flimsy modern version at any price. If you are without one, two butter knives held together and drawn through the mixture in a scissoring motion will accomplish the same thing. A food processor works but requires vigilance. But fair warning: it can overmix a crust in seconds, and stopping at the right moment demands attention the machine cannot provide on its own.

Whatever tool you use, the goal is the same: incorporate fat into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs, with some pea-sized pieces remaining. Those pieces are what become the flaky layers. Stop before the mixture looks uniform. Uniform means overworked, and overworked means tough.

The Method

Here is the basic crust for a single nine-inch pie shell. Double it for a double-crust pie.
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon cold lard, butter, or shortening
• 3 to 4 tablespoons of ice water, added one tablespoon at a time

Whisk the flour, salt, and sugar together in a large bowl. Add the cold fat and work it in with the pastry blender, pressing and rocking through the mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs with some larger pieces remaining. Do not rush this step, and do not finish it. Stop while there are still visible pieces of fat in the mixture.

Add the ice water one tablespoon at a time, tossing with a fork after each addition. The moment the dough holds together when you press a small amount between your fingers, stop adding water. Turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and press it into a disk. Do not knead it. Do not roll it yet. Wrap it in plastic and refrigerate for at least 1 hour and up to 2 days.
Cold resting time is not optional.

The water needs to be distributed evenly through the dough, the gluten needs to relax, and the fat needs to firm back up after the warmth of your hands. A crust rolled out immediately after mixing is harder to handle and less tender than one that has rested. Please build the rest time into your plan and don't skip it.

Roll from the center outward, turning the dough a quarter turn after each pass rather than rolling back and forth over the same spot. Back-and-forth rolling develops gluten and toughens the crust. Quarter turns keep the dough moving and the thickness even. Roll to about an eighth of an inch thick, transfer to the pie pan by draping the dough over the rolling pin, and ease it into the pan without stretching. Stretched dough shrinks in the oven.

Crimping and Blind Baking

Crimping the edge seals the crust, keeps it from sliding down the sides of the pan during baking, and signals to everyone at the table that someone took time with this pie. A simple fork crimp pressed around the rim is clean and reliable. A finger crimp, pressing the dough between thumb and forefinger to create a fluted edge, is the classic Southern finish and takes about three minutes to learn.

Blind baking, which means baking the crust partially or fully before adding the filling, is required for any pie with a custard or cream filling that sets in the oven, and for no-bake fillings that go into a fully baked shell. To blind-bake, line the chilled crust with parchment paper, fill it with dried beans or pie weights, and bake at 375 degrees for 15 minutes. Remove the weights and parchment, then bake for another five to ten minutes, until the bottom looks dry and just barely golden. For a fully baked shell, continue until the crust is golden brown throughout.

For a double-crust pie, the bottom crust goes in raw, the filling goes in, and the top crust goes on and gets crimped to seal the edges. Cut vents in the top to let steam escape. Brush with a light wash of egg beaten with a splash of water for a glossy, deep-brown finish.

The Fillings Worth Making

A crust this good deserves fillings that respect it. These are the ones that belong in a Southern pie shell made with home-rendered lard and a ten-cent pastry cutter:

Chess Pie
The most purely Southern pie filling in existence: eggs, sugar, butter, a little cornmeal, a splash of vinegar, and vanilla. No fruit, no chocolate, no embellishment. Just a custard that sets into something silky and rich with a crackled top, tasting of butter and sweetness in a way that is almost impossibly simple and almost impossible to stop eating. It is the filling that most honestly lets the crust speak, because there is nothing else in the pie to compete with it.

Sweet Potato Pie
The Southern answer to pumpkin pie, and the better answer as far as this column is concerned. Roasted sweet potatoes, mashed smooth and seasoned with butter, warm spices, and a little brown sugar, produce a filling with a depth and earthiness that canned pumpkin cannot replicate. Make it in the fall when the sweet potatoes are fresh from the garden or the farm stand, and serve it slightly warm with unsweetened whipped cream that does not compete with the filling.

Chocolate Pie
A cooked chocolate custard filling, made from cocoa, egg yolks, whole milk, sugar, and a little cornstarch, poured into a fully baked shell and topped with meringue or fresh whipped cream. Rich in the specific way that chocolate custard is rich, which is to say completely and without apology. Use good cocoa. The filling is simple enough that the cocoa quality is immediately apparent.

Peach Pie
For late summer, when local peaches are at their peak, and the idea of turning the oven on is almost more than the heat will allow, but it's worth it. Fresh peaches, sliced thick, tossed with sugar and a little flour to thicken the juices, topped with a crust that traps steam and lets the fruit cook into something that smells like the season itself. A lattice top is the traditional choice and worth the extra ten minutes it takes to weave.

What Makes it Worth the Effort

Pie crust made from scratch with good fat, proper technique, and a tool that has been doing this work since the 1940s is not complicated. The ingredients are humble. The method is straightforward. Nothing about it requires talent that cannot be learned in an afternoon.

What it requires is the willingness to do it, to not reach for the refrigerated roll, to take the lard out of the jar where it has been sitting since the last time you rendered a batch, to find the pastry blender in the drawer and use it the way it was designed to be used. It requires the discipline to stop mixing before instinct says you're finished.

An 87-year-old man can taste the difference between a crust made this way and every shortcut taken since. His grandmothers knew something that got lost somewhere between their generation and ours, and it is not gone. It is just waiting to be picked back up.

A dime's worth of tools and a jar of homemade lard. That is all it takes to make something that reaches back across eight decades and tastes as it belongs there.

Rendering Lard at Home

Rendering lard at home is a straightforward process that produces a fat far superior in flavor and texture to anything sold commercially. Ask a local butcher for leaf lard, which comes from around the kidneys and produces the purest, most neutral-flavored lard, ideal for pastry. Back fat works well and is often easier to source.

Cut the fat into small pieces, place in a heavy pot or slow cooker with a small splash of water to prevent scorching, and cook on the lowest possible heat for several hours until the fat has fully liquefied and the remaining solids are golden and crisp. Those solids are cracklings, and they deserve to be eaten warm with a little salt while the lard cools.

Strain the liquid fat through a fine mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth into clean glass jars. Let it cool at room temperature until it turns from liquid gold to creamy white, then refrigerate or freeze. Home-rendered lard keeps in the refrigerator for several months and in the freezer for up to a year.

The effort is modest. The reward, as any 87-year-old friend who grew up eating pies made this way will tell you, is considerable.

What pie does your family make from scratch? Do you render your own lard, or use butter or shortening? Is there a crust technique or a specific tool that was passed down to you? Has anyone ever paid you a compliment on your cooking that stopped you in your tracks? Email larder@mcobserver.news or message us on Facebook.