I searched for years for my perfect piecrust recipe - then one day I found it. Here it is: These quantities make enough pastry for 3 double-crust pies or 3 1/2 dozen tart shells - muffin size. 5 cups flour 1 teasp salt 2 teasp baking powder 1 lb (454 grams) Tenderflake lard 2 teasp white vinegar 1 egg - slightly beaten. Add water to vinegar and egg to make 1 cup 1) Mix together flour, salt and baking powder. Cut in lard until crumbly (using two knives.) 2) Add liquid and mix gently with hands. (I use a fork to help me here.) Roll into a ball. 3) Roll out amount needed on a floured board. Refrigerate or freeze remainder. Source: 'I've GOT To Have That Recipe' Doubleday Canada - Victoria, B.C. 1986 My tip: After step two I often put it in the fridge for an hour to make it firmer and easier to roll out. *************************************** When I use it for apple pies....here's the fruit mixture: 3/4 cup sugar (or a little less if you wish) 1/2 teasp salt 1 teasp cinnamon 1/2 teasp nutmeg 1 1/2 TBS flour 2 TBS butter 4 1/2 - 5 large apples *(I prefer Granny Smith)- peeled and sliced. Nathan's pastry - enough for double crust pie 1 TBS milk and 1 teasp sugar for top of crust * Check quantity of apples by slicing them first into empty pieplate before lining with pastry to see if you have enough. Then remove and wipe plate clean again. 1) Preheat oven to 425 F (218 C) 2) Peel and slice apples into a mixing bowl. In another small bowl combine the dry ingredients and pour them over apples. Toss well to coat all over. 3) Line pieplate with pastry and pile coated apple slices into pieplate. Dot apples with pieces of butter. 4) Roll out top crust and put on pie, flute edges, brush crust with the milk and sprinkle with sugar. 5) Bake 10 minutes at 425F (218C) then lower heat to 350F (177C) for 35 - 40 minutes or until crust is golden. SharonCb

My favorite pie crust recipe doesn't call for lard but I see no reason why you couldn't replace lard for the shortening. I used to make lard pie crust most of the time but realized one day that while I liked it for savory pies I really like butter based crusts better for dessert pies. Foolproof Pie Dough Cook's Illustrated Vodka is essential to the texture of the crust and imparts no flavordo not substitute. This dough will be moister and more supple than most standard pie doughs and will require more flour to roll out (up to 1/4 cup). INGREDIENTS--For one 9-inch Single-Crust Pie 1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (6 1/4 ounces) 1/2 teaspoon table salt 1 tablespoon sugar 6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter (3/4 stick), cut into 1/4-inch slices 1/4 cup chilled solid vegetable shortening , cut into 2 pieces 2 tablespoons vodka , cold 2 tablespoons cold water 1. Process 3/4 cups flour, salt, and sugar together in food processor until combined, about 2 one-second pulses. Add butter and shortening and process until homogeneous dough just starts to collect in uneven clumps, about 10 seconds (dough will resemble cottage cheese curds with some very small pieces of butter remaining, but there should be no uncoated flour). Scrape down sides and bottom of bowl with rubber spatula and redistribute dough evenly around processor blade. Add remaining 1/2 cup flour and pulse until mixture is evenly distributed around bowl and mass of dough has been broken up, 4 to 6 quick pulses. Empty mixture into medium bowl. 2. Sprinkle vodka and water over mixture. With rubber spatula, use folding motion to mix, pressing down on dough until dough is slightly tacky and sticks together. Flatten dough into 4-inch disk. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 45 minutes or up to 2 days. 3. Adjust oven rack to lowest position, place rimmed baking sheet on oven rack, and heat oven to 425 degrees. Remove dough from refrigerator and roll out on generously floured (up to ¼ cup) work surface to 12-inch circle about 1/8 inch thick. Roll dough loosely around rolling pin and unroll into pie plate, leaving at least 1-inch overhang on each side. Working around circumference, ease dough into plate by gently lifting edge of dough with one hand while pressing into plate bottom with other hand. Leave overhanging dough in place; refrigerate until dough is firm, about 30 minutes. 4. Trim overhang to ½ inch beyond lip of pie plate. Fold overhang under itself; folded edge should be flush with edge of pie plate. Flute dough or press the tines of a fork against dough to flatten it against rim of pie plate. Refrigerate dough-lined plate until firm, about 15 minutes. 5. Remove pie pan from refrigerator, line crust with foil, and fill with pie weights or pennies. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove foil and weights, rotate plate, and bake for 5 to 10 minutes additional minutes until crust is golden brown and crisp. Note: I've doubled this recipe for two crust pies, just rolled, filled and put the top crust on, it's wonderful. Nancy

Rolling pie dough: I always have success, and have followed the Joy of Cooking's basic pie dough recipe for decades -- I've successfully baked pies for 40+ years. The recipe calls for only the basics: cold butter, room temperature shortening (I use Crisco), all purpose flour, salt and 4-6 Tablespoons of cold water. That's it. Very simple and very traditional. The dough is NEVER chilled. Think about it: You want the butter and shortening to be soft and absorb/mix-in with the dry ingredients. Chilled fat will take a LOT of handling to get to that consistency, and increased handling results in tough pie crusts. That's why most of the recipes I've seen do not call for chilling the dough. I mix the flour, salt and butter together using a hand-held pastry blender -- See photo. It's a simple, basic pastry making tool that costs between $5 - $10. Very traditional, very tried & true. Sometimes I mix the butter in first, sometimes I mix the shortening. Whichever you choose to use, use the blender to mix the dry ingredients and butter/shortening until the crumbs look like peas. Then add either the butter or shortening and continue mixing with pastry blender until the ingredients look like cornmeal. You really will notice the difference. At that point, add the cold water 1 Tbs at a time, using a fork to lift and mix the ingredients together. While the recipe calls for 4-6 Tbs., I find that 4 Tbs works for me ....sometimes as much as 5. This has been true regardless of whether I've made pies in the dry, mountainous West, or the humid east coast. You'll add only enough water until you can get most of the dry ingredients to hold together in a ball. Assuming it's a 2-crust pie, I halve the pie dough and immediately begin working the first crust. I leave the rest of the pie dough in the bowl, uncovered, open to the air, at room temperature. I ALWAYS roll the dough on a pastry cloth, using a cheese cloth cover for the rolling pin. I use a 40 year old wooden rolling pin. Standard size and weight. Absolutely nothing fancy or unusual about it. The key to using a pastry cloth and cheese cloth cover for the rolling pin is that you will be able to roll out your pie dough and use MUCH less flour. All you need to do is lightly sprinkle a small amount of flour on the pastry cloth, roll the rolling pin over the top of the pastry cloth to get some of the flour on the pin, then begin to work the dough. I have granite counter tops in this house. Other houses have had Corian, wood and the old fashioned vinyl. The type of counter makes absolutely no difference in the quality of the crust. I promise! I anchor the pastry cloth with my body in the front and cannisters in the back, so that everything stays fairly quiet...but even it if moves a bit, that's not a problem. When rolling out your pie dough, work gently but quickly. Do NOT lean on the rolling pin. Merely lightly push the pin from the middle of the dough out in circles. You'll work around the dough. You'll have thick spots of dough and thin, and work the thick spots out...by gently rolling the pin over the dough. Don't lean on it or force it by brute force. More often than not my pie crusts are not perfect when they are rolled out. I like a thinner crust, so that means that I'll have some repair to do as I lay the crust in the pie pan, or lay the top crust on top of the filling. There is lots of room for forgiveness. If it's the bottom crust you're repairing, no one will ever know because it will be hidden by the filling. If it's the top crust, your cut-outs to allow the steam to escape the baking pie will camouflage that. The key is to ensure you have a solid bottom crust so that juice will not escape the pie crust, AND to ensure you have a large enough bottom crust that you can flute the edges of the pie. OR, a large enough top crust for fluting....I've done it both ways, and it just depends on what the crust gods decide that day. I hope these suggestions help. I assure you that once you understand what you're supposed to do, you'll be able to turn out consistently good pie crusts, with confidence and speed. Here is a link that might be useful:

I debated on whether to add this since it is long. It was submitted by Marys1000 back in Oct '08. Don't know which forum. But it was a lot of fun to read and you might enjoy it: Here is an article I found very informative in my search for info on pie crusts. She spent a lot of time actually baking with lard, oils, goose fat, and even suet. November 15, 2006 Heaven in a Pie Pan: The Perfect Crust By MELISSA CLARK A FEW years ago, I achieved perfection in a pie crust and it smelled like pig. Not in a muddy, barnyard way, but with a very subtly meaty, nutty aroma. Carefully confected with part butter and part freshly rendered lard, this pie pastry was everything baking-book authors and bloggers wax poetic about: a golden-brown-around-the-edges epiphany richly flavored and just salty enough to contrast with the sweet apple filling, the texture as flaky as a croissant but still crisp. It shattered when you bit it, then melted instantly on the tongue. The only problem with my masterpiece, I told my guests as they licked the crumbs off their plates, was that I was never, ever going to make it again. Because what they didnt see was the outsize effort that went into acquiring and preparing the not-so-secret ingredient: leaf lard, the creamy white fat that surrounds a hogs kidneys. The veritable ne plus ultra of pig fat, its far superior to supermarket lard, which is heavily processed stuff that can have an off taste. But leaf lard is hard to track down (I special-ordered it from a friendly butcher) and a headache once you get it. Step one: pick out any bloody bits and sinews, chop the fat into pieces, and render it slowly in a double boiler for eight hours. At the end of the day, be prepared for a kitchen that smells like breakfast at a highway diner, and a pan full of dangerously molten fat crowned with cracklings. The leaf lard may have made great crust, but, like homemade cassoulet and puff pastry, this was a culinary Everest I felt no need to climb twice. Everest became a lot more manageable when I discovered that rendered leaf lard was available at the Flying Pigs Farm stand at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza Greenmarkets on Saturday and by mail order. With this convenience at hand, I decided to have a pre-Thanksgiving pie crust baking binge to see whether, with the prep times and mess not being a factor, lard pastry was really the best when tested next to my favorite standby, an all-butter crust. Or was my memory of the lard pie crusts sublimity simply a hallucination caused by long hours of porcine toil? And while the kitchen was a floury mess anyway, why not test a variety of other fats to see how they affected the flakiness and flavor of the final crust? With fat as my variable, I decided to keep all the other ingredients in the crust as straightforward as possible. That ruled out using a mix of flours with different protein levels (like bread flour, cake flour and Wondra). For this pie, I went with all-purpose all the way. But before I started baking, I did some research in the pie crust recipe canon. Most crusts were a combination of shortening and butter, or all butter, so I started there. I first made five crusts: all-butter; all-shortening (I used the trans fat-free kind now on the market); 50-50 butter and shortening; 70 percent butter to 30 percent shortening; and vice versa. Crisp, flaky and sweetly luscious with deep, browned flavor, the all-butter crust was the hands-down favorite. The shortening crust, however, was a bust among tasters. Even when combined with 70 percent butter, all agreed that the unpleasant greasy film the shortening left on the palate was not worth the vague texture improvement. Shortening is much less expensive than butter. Is it popular with bakers because of the cost? Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of "The Pie and Pastry Bible" (Scribner, 1998), gave another explanation. Because shortening is manufactured for stability at extreme temperatures (both hot in the oven and cold in the fridge), it is very easy to work with, she explained in an interview. "Shortening crusts enable you to get fancier decorations that will hold up when you bake," she said. Once she mentioned it, I realized that even the quickly crimped borders on my shortening crusts stayed pert in the oven compared to the butter border, which melted into Gaudí-like undulations. With round one going to butter, I next experimented with oil crusts inspired by the Mediterranean appeal of a pie pastry scented with extra-virgin olive oil holding a caramelized pear-pomegranate filling. I tested several olive oil variations, chilling the oil in the freezer before cutting it into the flour, and trying other desperation measures like adding egg to one, baking powder to another, and some butter to a third. Then I went on to test canola oil, grapeseed oil, coconut oil and ghee. Not one managed to even get close to a minimally acceptable flakiness level. I had better luck using chilled mixed-nut butter (you could use any natural nut butter, such as peanut, hazelnut, cashew, almond and so on). Combined with regular butter, it turned out a marginally flaky, cookie-like crust with a toasted nut flavor that goes particularly well with pumpkin pie. A dozen or so pies down, it was finally time to pull out my hero, the rendered leaf lard. I pitted it against an array of animal fats beef suet (the fat surrounding the kidneys), duck fat and processed supermarket lard just to see what would happen. The processed lard was not available at my Park Slope supermarket, but I scored it in a nearby bodega. I ordered rendered duck fat online, and picked up suet from the butcher, who charged me a token dollar and told me he usually threw it away. Then I baked and baked. The whole house took on a rich pastry scent with undertones of roasted meat and butter, tinged with ginger, nutmeg, thyme and honeyed apples from the fillings. Not wanting to give up the flavor of butter entirely, I tested all the recipes using half butter, half other animal fat, and also at a ratio of 70 percent butter to 30 percent other fat. I also made a few crusts using all high-fat, European-style butter. The crusts were spectacular, each in its own way. The high-fat butter produced a crust that was markedly flakier, more tender and puff-pastry-like than those made with regular butter. It also shrank a bit less when I pre-baked it, and had an irresistible, browned butter flavor. This was the perfect crust for anyone not inclined to include meat products in a dessert. But overall, the favorites were the crusts using 70 percent butter and 30 percent animal fat. Any more animal fat pushed the meatiness factor too far onto the savory side of the pie spectrum, making these better for quiches than for fruit and custard fillings. Of the three animals, pig, cow and duck, the duck fat crust had the lightest flavor and, texturally, struck the best a balance between crisp and flaky. The pie crust revelation, however, was the suet pastry. As easy to work with as the shortening crust, it retained its shape perfectly in the oven, baking up crisp yet marvelously tender and flaky. It was nearly as delectable as the leaf-lard crust, tasting rich and slightly meaty, though not identifiably beefy. Suet is easy to find (most butchers can get it for you) and inexpensive. One caveat: suet is sold unrendered, but, as I discovered by way of my own laziness, you do not need to render it. Simply cut out the pinkish bits, finely dice or grate the chilled white fat, and toss it in with the butter. More refined bakers might blanch at the idea; if youre one of them, go ahead and render to your hearts content. Still, the leaf lard crust was as gorgeous as I remembered. Puffing up in the oven, and crumbling deliciously when you cut it, it took the crown. That very mild hint of bacon was happily still there. Not so with the processed lard pastry, which had an off flavor veering toward barnyard. Now, after my brief moment of pastry satisfaction, Ill move onto the next obsessive round of pie crust testing. Theres a whole roster of fats Ive yet neglected goose fat, marrow, foie gras fat, browned butter, truffle butter ... and if anyone out there has a source for bear fat, Ill try that too.