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Forgive this long comment! I'm hoping it will be helpful. My daughter and I made three savory pies yesterday (we made beef pies, like a Cornish pasty--finely diced beef, grated potatoes and onions). Both my daughter and I make very good pie crusts--I have 50 years of experience--but we are often frustrated at the inconsistencies and the problem of just the right moisture to flour ratio to have dough that rolls out easily, is thick enough to work with and make nice fluted edges, and is both tender and flaky.

We followed this recipe and were thrilled with the results. Our "test kitchen" experiments in the process might be useful for responding to a couple of the comments here. 1.) Use very cold, unsalted butter as in the recipe. If you use salted butter for a pie crust, plus the recommended salt (or even reduced amounts or no salt) it will be too salty tasting for many people. 2.) We tried the full amount of sugar and also reducing the sugar. Even for a savory pie, we liked the full amount of sugar best. 3.) We used the full amount of water/vodka and also reduced amounts, to experiment. Yes, it looks sticky with the full amount, but remember that some of that moisture will go away in baking (that is the function of the alcohol.), so the extra is needed to have a moist,flaky crust, not a less moist, crumbling one. The extra moisture also allows for the use of extra flour in rolling, which is very handy. 4.) Chill this dough for several hours and work fast with it. The high fat content dough benefits from being very firm when you're starting to work. Otherwise you'll have a very soft dough that rolls out nicely but is difficult to pick up and place on the pie tin. (That is one advantage of a pastry cloth. You can pick the whole thing up and put it in the fridge for a moment to chill and firm, then go back to work on it.) This dough can be re-rolled easily without toughening, but still, work lightly. Use plenty of flour to keep it workable--we found it didn't dry the dough out or toughen it, as can happen with regular crusts. (The alcohol again) 5. This recipe gave us plenty of dough for easy rolling to the right size and with more than enough for a pretty fluted edge--no need for patching and no skimpy edges that need foil protection to keep them from browning too much. We chilled them about an hour before baking so the edges would keep their shape.

Taste test: All the pies were wonderful but the one made exactly according to the recipe--exactly--was voted the best by the taste-testers who didn't know how we had made them. Not much difference in any of them, but still, the exact recipe--full amount of liquid and sugar--was considered the most flaky, tender and flavorful. As a side note: Using a food processor made this very, very easy (We also followed the number of pulses as given in the recipe). But, it can be made without a processor if the same cutting and distributing motion is used to combine flour and fat. Baking at 325 degrees for about 1 1/2 hours cooked the meat and potato filling perfectly and produced a uniformly beautiful, golden brown and delicious tasting crust.

Try this recipe for your next pie and make it exactly according to the recipe, without fear. You can do it differently the next time if you want, but the first time, trust the recipe--developed by people with tremendous knowledge and skill and with a scientific not gimmicky reason for their suggestions--and I think you'll be very happy with the results.

Thanks, cjavel. I'll try that. Another thing that probably affected my results was I did not chill the dough prior to baking. I think if it's at room temperature it probably turns darker much sooner, as well as not being as flaky as it could've been had I put in the oven cold.

Could someone please recommend a temperature and time to bake this pie crust? I tried this pie crust today following the baking instructions from my rhubarb pie recipe which specified 30-minutes at 450-degrees. The crust turned out way too dark.

@tyronebcookin

That was actually a recipe that I developed here at Cook's. Completely our idea, arrived at through rigorous testing and thinking about the science of pie crusts! It took over a hundred individual tests before arriving at a solution that worked.

p.s. I do think it does have a buttery taste so next time I will use a bit less. I think this would be great for quiche too.

I won't make this pie crust again. I followed the directions and used the exact ingredients including unsalted butter. When I at a piece of my pecan pie, the butter dominated the flavor of the pie and the pie crust. My purpose in making a pie is to have the filling be the primary taste, not the crust. The pecan filling leaked out the bottom causing the bottom crust to be doughy. I feel that I wasted 1 1/2 cups of butter and 2 cups of fresh pecans. I made another crust with just shortening using my old standby recipe. It rolled out beautifully and handled far better than the CI crust. This pie crust recipe just wasn't impressive to me. Using vodka is a gimmick, not a tried and true ingredient, as shown by the hundreds of pie crust recipes available that don't use vodka.

Just googled and it said closed December 2007 :(

I have been searching all over trying to find where to get a coconut custard pie in NYC. You mention it above but then decline to name a place! please help!

I tried this recently, and chickened out once I'd added 3/4 of the vodka/water. It turned out perfectly.

I made this recipe at Thanksgiving. the dough was very moist and pretty hard to work with but I rolled it out between two sheets of waxed paper which worked pretty well. It was, by far, the flakiest pie crust I've ever made! I'm sure I'll make it again.

Yum, Grand Traverse Pie Company. My sister works there and will be bringing us some type of fruit pie for thanksgiving. My mom is the pie maker in the family and will be making pumpkin and cherry pies made with Michigan cherries of course. I have been watching and helping her bake pies for years but I have a long way to go before mine taste as good.

A Yura's update for Foodboy and everyone else. Yura is no longer making a ready to bake pie. It's very disappointing, but her fully baked apple pie is really good. I will miss that perfumed apple smell. Foodboy wanted to know about the Yura-partner split. I spoke to Yura and she said that she was only associated with the store at 92nd and Madison. I would stick to that location if possible. I haven't had anything at the 92nd and Third Ave. former Yura location, now called Corner, so I can't vouch for its food.

You do have the right number of pies, thank heavens. As one against coconut in general, I'd replace coconut custard with plain custard. Cherry-peach is an intriguing combination.