Cook’s Illustrated Foolproof Pie Dough — New Go-To Pie Crust Recipe

For years, I have been a faithful adherent of the Gourmet Cookbook pie crust recipe.  I have never had a explicit reason to change recipes, but with all things Cook's Illustrated, given that I now have the online subscription and their techniques are generally close to perfect (if not perfect), I decided to try something new when making a Christmas pumpkin pie this year.  

I used their Foolproof Pie Dough for a Single-Crust Pie, and it definitely was different from your standard pie crust.  First, and perhaps most notable, the recipe calls for vodka — apparently this "secret" ingredient has a high water content, a lower gluten content, and allows the pie crust to be rolled out more easily.  And the alcohol evaporates in the over during baking, so no need to worry about keeping the kids away!  Second, the pie dough is definitely far more moist than your standard pie dough, so I definitely had doubts while folding it together about whether I had prepared it correctly.  The result though was fantastic – perfectly flaky and puffy, which was a nice change from the more flat and perhaps blah Gourmet version.  

I had to put foil "hats" around the edges though fairly early on in the pie baking process (one uses an unbaked dough with this pie recipe), and I think I need to refine my foil covering technique because I wasn't that successful in getting the foil covers to stay on the crust edges while baking.  So the crust was a little more brown than I would have liked – but you won't necessarily notice a difference in the picture below because of the crust edges were disturbed in the car ride from home to the Christmas gathering.  Bottom line:  if I happen to have vodka, I will definitely make this pie crust again.  If I don't have vodka on hand, I will probably be more than content to just go back and use the Gourmet version if I am pressed for time.