Why a Pastry Chef Ditched Shortening and Food Processors for Flaky Crusts

Compiled by the editorial desk with reference to the original baking tutorial and the author's personal experience.

A home baker who previously championed a quick, food-processor pie crust has reversed course, now advocating for all-butter dough made by hand. In a follow-up to last year's Pie Crust 101 tutorial, she details why she has abandoned shortening and the food processor in favor of a more traditional, hands-on approach that she says yields superior flakiness.

The baker, who runs a popular baking blog, admits her views have evolved after making roughly a dozen more doughs in the past year. While she still recommends the original tutorial for beginners, her new tips target those ready to refine their technique. The key, she argues, is understanding how butter behaves in dough and why overworking it ruins flakiness.

Why Butter Wins Over Shortening

After two years of incorporating shortening into her crusts, following advice from Cook's Illustrated and Ina Garten, the baker has returned to an all-butter recipe. Her reasoning: flavor and texture. Shortening, she notes, lacks taste and has an unappealing, mysterious quality. More importantly, she realized that once you truly master dough technique, the type of fat matters less. Butter, she insists, is the superior choice for a flavorful, flaky crust.

This shift is notable given the widespread recommendation to use a fat blend. But her experience suggests that with proper handling, all-butter dough can achieve the desired flakiness without compromising on taste.

The Case Against the Food Processor

In a contentious break from common practice, she now advises against using a food processor for pie dough. Her testing shows that a hand-held pastry blender consistently produces flakier results. The problem, she explains, is that food processor instructions typically call for pulsing butter into flour until pea-sized, then adding water and pulsing until just combined. This often breaks down the butter further, leading to overworked dough. By hand, it's harder to overmix, giving you more control.

She also points out a practical downside: the food processor requires washing multiple parts, especially burdensome for those without a dishwasher. A bowl, pastry cutter, and a few measuring tools are all that's needed for the manual method.

Visible Butter Equals Flaky Layers

The single most important rule, she emphasizes, is to avoid breaking down the butter too much. If you can't see flecks of butter in the final dough, you'll lose flakiness. When these butter-speckled doughs bake, the butter melts, creating tiny pockets, and steam from the butter's water content lifts those pockets to form flakes. This is the same principle behind puff pastry.

Keeping the butter cold is crucial to preserving those visible bits. If butter warms and softens before baking, it loses its ability to create steam pockets. She recommends cubing the butter and re-refrigerating it, and chilling the flour mixture as well. If the dough tears or sticks while rolling, rechill it before continuing.

A Return to the Classic Recipe

Last year, she demonstrated a dough using vodka, a trick from Cook's Illustrated that was supposed to increase flakiness. While the alcohol evaporates in the oven, she found the dough too sticky and the flakiness not improved enough to justify the fuss. She has since reverted to her basic, vodka-free recipe, though she acknowledges many readers loved the vodka version. Her new tutorial includes the updated, all-butter recipe without vodka.

For those ready to take their pie crust to the next level, these adjustments offer a path to a flakier, more flavorful result. As she puts it, the goal is to keep tweaking until you get closer to that perfect crust.