Want to make a pie but too intimidated by the task of making dough? This recipe shows you how to make an easy dough with a few quick steps in a food processor.
Gather your ingredients!
I’ve used nectarines for this recipe, but any fresh fruits or berries work well with this easy pie crust.
Slice your fruit to the desired size. You should have about 4 cups of fruit.
Mix the fruit with 3/4 cups of sugar. Set this aside for an hour or so, and a slow transformation will occur. Due to osmosis, water will leave the fruit, creating mixture of softened fruit in a sugary syrup.
Add the dry ingredients for the pie crust into your food processor and pulse a few times to mix.
That’s 1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour, 1 teaspoon of sugar, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt.
Thinking of doing this by hand? Don’t! The food processor makes this crust so much easier to make!
Chill the crisco and the earth balance for at least a half hour before using them. Using cold fats gives a more flaky texture, wheras warm fats can leave the crust feeling too dense.
Scoop 1/4 cup of vegetable shortening (crisco) and 1/4 cup of earth balance to the dry ingredients in the food processor.
Pulse the ingredients for about ten seconds until the mixture looks like a coarse meal, as pictured here. It looks almost like cauliflower rice.
Slowly pour in about 3-4 tbsp of ice water while running the food processor. Stop adding water when the dough begins to clump up.
When you’ve mixed in enough ice water, the dough will look like this.
Flour your hands and flour a large, flat working surface.
Knead the dough (only slightly) and shape it into a ball. Remember, you want the uncooked dough to stay cold, so don’t hold it in your hands too long,
Roll out the dough into a large enough shape that you can drape it over the 9″ pie dish. Don’t worry about it being perfectly round. It is soft enough that you can combine several sheets together to line the dish.
Drape the dough over the pie dish and press it down with fingertips and knuckles to evenly line the dish. If the sheet of dough breaks, don’t worry! Just overlap two pieces of dough and press to combine.
Save a bit of dough to do a design on top, if desired.
Pour the pie filling into the crust-lined pie dish. Use a frosting spoon to scrape out the sugary syrup and include it in the pie.
If desired, use any leftover dough to add a design to the top of the pie. The theme of this crust is “easy,” so I did a pretty lazy design!
Now here’s an odd step. Preheat the oven to 425°F and cook the pie for 10 minutes. Then, lower the temperature to 350°F and cook for at least 45 minutes, checking frequently. Once the edges of he pie crust begin to turn brown, the pie is ready to be removed from the oven.
Allow the pie to cool for a bit before serving. Enjoy!