pie crust
- emmadawngarofalo .
- Oct 19, 2017
- 3 min read

Something interesting about my family is that we never really did a whole lot of extremely involved cooking or baking while I was growing up. Once in a while my mom would find herself on a wild streak and whip up some Italian osso bucco, and of course, for special occasions like holidays, we would produce the standard slew of festive pastries and confections. One alleyway we as women never ventured down though was that of the classic American pie crust - I'm not talking about the crumbled kind, any moron with a pan and a bag full of crushed graham cracker particles can do one of those. What I'm referring to is the flaky variety that takes actual skill and know-how to create. I possess neither of those things, but that doesn't mean I can't try.
There's a girl on the internet I follow on Youtube, her name is Sarah. Sarah has a Vegan Kitchen, and in it, she cooks all sorts of fanciful vegan meals. One of her most highly-acclaimed recipes is her vegan pie crust, which is why I've selected it as the one we will be following today.
The slight modifications made today were unwise but necessary. Mostly because I'm not spending eighteen dollars on a god damn stick of Earth Balance butter. Sorry, Sarah. I do what I can.
one and a half cups of rice flour, plus extra on the side
one half of a cup of vegetable shortening
one teaspoon of salt
one teaspoon of sugar
one quarter of a cup of ice water
This is going to be another food processor recipe. Yeah, I know. There's been a lot of them lately. They come and they don't stop coming.

Get your goods into the food processor, waiting until the very end to pour in the water. Keep a bit reserved, just in case your dough needs a bit more lubrication to really start coming together. Pulse until it does that thing where it clumps up and rolls around the bowl. If it gets too sticky, put it in the fridge for a few minutes. It's important that it stays cold before baking.

Powder down your work surface and dump it out; be very generous here with the flour; it's really hard to unstick from the board. Ditto for any tools that will be touching the raw dough, so run the pin through the rice flour once or twice before you start steamrolling this thing.
The goal is to make it flat. I'm not sure how apparent that would be to a first-timer. If I were in your shoes, it probably wouldn't be that obvious to me, which is why I take the time to lay it all out on the table for you. No pun intended.

I had gotten this far successfully and thought the rest would be a cinch. I was young, foolish, and very much mistaken in that regard. The universe met my hubris with a mirror, revealing to me my own folly in full, excruciating color. The never-ending story.

Disaster. Betrayed by sheer physics at my most vulnerable moment. Will I ever learn to trust again? That's for god to decide.

In the end I decided to make do with what I had and just sort of used my fingers to press the crust in. The edges along the rim of the dish of course were a fucking disgrace so I did this queer little thing with the ring from a jar lid; I sort of stamped out a spiderweb pattern that somehow managed to simultaneously be much better-looking than expected while also being uglier than I ever thought possible.
It definitely looked the part. But would it be able to hold its own in the face of the ultimate test? I'm unable to divulge that information to you at this time, but rumor has it you'll be able to find the answer here tomorrow morning.

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