Homemade Vegan Pie Crust Recipe | Aline Made (2024)

FAQs

What is vegan pie crust made of? ›

To make the vegan pie dough:

Whisk together the dry ingredients: plain all-purpose flour, sugar and salt. and use your fingertips to work it into the dry ingredients until you get a mixture resembling breadcrumbs. Add the frozen, sliced vegan butter.

Classic cookie doughs that follow a 1:2:3 fat:sugar:flour ratio make for great tart and pie shells, but any other roll-out cookie dough will work beautifully as well. Shortbread is lovely; sugar cookie dough is chewy and delicious; and I always love an easy press-in cookie dough.

Sugar: Not all pie crusts have sugar, but those that do will be more tender since sugar interferes with gluten development. In our experience, sugar can also make the pie dough so tender that it's hard to roll out and transfer to your pan without breaking. Egg: This makes the dough more pliable and easy to roll out.

This time, though, there was one very clear victor. Butter made a tastier, flakier, sturdier crust by far. This isn't to say that shortening and lard aren't useful ingredients. Shortening is a great way to get incredibly tender desserts.

Olive oil is great when used for crusts for vegan pot pies, biscuits and herb breads. If your recipe calls for 1 cup of butter, use ¾ cups of olive oil.

Chicken pot pie is a staple menu item for any cafeteria, diner, or family restaurant. You can skip the hardest part of make the pie – the pie dough – by simply substituting frozen pizza dough.

Butter. Butter is one of the most popular choices for baking for a reason. When you want to create flaky layers in your pastry—particularly when making pie dough—butter is a great substitute for shortening.

Some bakers use milk or buttermilk in their pie crust. Thanks to their milk solids, both will help crust brown and add a bit of tenderness. But the classic liquid in pie crust is water — ice water, to be precise.

Though the science is sketchy, a few professional pie bakers swear that it improves the texture of the crust, and they wouldn't dream of making pie dough without it. (Others swear by similarly acidic ingredients like lemon juice.) The acidic properties of vinegar inhibit gluten, some will say.

What is the secret to the best pie crust? ›

Use Very Cold Butter or Fat

Butter, shortening, lard, or suet—whatever fat the recipe calls for should be well-chilled and cut into small pieces to start with for the flakiest crust in the end. The fat in a pie crust must maintain some of its integrity in the dough to make the crust truly flaky.

Flour: For a tender crust, choose a low-protein flour. Pastry flour, with a protein content of about 8-10%, ranks between all-purpose flour and cake flour. All-purpose flour works just fine for pie crusts, while cake flour might lack enough protein to form a workable, elastic dough.

The pros: Butter has the best flavor. A butter pie crust forms light, lofty, flaky layers while it bakes. The flakiness comes partially from the water content of butter, which evaporates as the pie bakes and turns to steam, separating and puffing up the layers in dough.

Choosing between shortening and lard comes down to personal preference. Both create a flaky, tender crust, are semi-solid, and are 100% fat. Swap one for the other in recipes. If you want to add additional flavor to the dish, lard is the right choice.

Vegan butter is a non-dairy butter substitute made from plant-based ingredients. It is typically made from a blend of vegetable oils such as coconut, palm, or soybean and other natural ingredients such as nuts, seeds, and even algae. This makes it a great alternative for those who: Follow a vegan diet.

The Pillsbury Refrigerated Pie Crust, for example, consists of enriched wheat flour, water, lard, and a blend of vegetable oils (soybean and hydrogenated cottonseed). It's important to note that lard, derived from animal fat, makes this particular pie crust unsuitable for vegans.

Unfortunately most of Pillsbury's pie crusts contain lard and/or beef tallow, making them clearly not vegan. However, they do have one pie crust that may be suitable for some vegans: Pillsbury Frozen All Vegetable Deep Dish Pie Crust.

Is puff pastry vegan? Not all store-bought puff pastry is vegan, but you're safe with brands like Pepperidge Farm and Wewalka. When you pick up a packet in store, make sure to scan the back for ingredients like eggs and butter, as, of course, these are not vegan.