The Healthy Pie Crust

Shelby, the wannabe chef's Note:

Found on veganmania.com I used this in a cheese & sausage quiche, and it was good! This will definitely be my staple pie crust from now on... No more frozen store-brought ones :] Also, you can lower the amount of ingredients in this- this crust is kinda thick.

• Total Time: 6 mins
• Prep Time: 6 mins
• Cook Time: 0 mins

Ingredients:

Servings: 8

• 3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour (Heh, I didn't use pastry.. I just used regular..)
• 3/4 cup unbleached flour
• 1/4 cup natural corn oil (I just used canola, and a bit less than 1/4 cup)
• 1 pinch salt
• 1/2 cup ice water (Not sure what original recipe meant by that, so I just used semi-cold water. Worked fine.)

Directions:

1. Stir the flours together in a small bowl and freeze for one hour. Freeze the oil in a separate container for an hour also. Remove both from freezer and mix the oil into the flour until it makes a crumbly dough.
2. Stir the salt into the ice water and mix the water into the dough. Mix only enough to bind the dough. If it's too dry, add more water, a little at at time.
3. I found it easiest to simply place the ball of dough into the pan, and squish it around with my hand -- Bake as directed for whatever recipe your using.

Reviews

[Chef #1509418]

outstanding. i am surprised, considering i followed very few of the directions. I love empanadas and meat pies, but cannot stand the thought of eating the high fat of traditional crusts. i made empanadas using very very thinly rolled (as thin as i could get it on foil, and peeled it off like a fruit roll) dough using only bleached flour, no chilling. i barely mixed, however, so that the gluten would not develop (like a biscuit), and the crust was light and flaky!!! better than when i used butter under traditional chilling/methods. who knew? i'm so happy i found this recipe. i will be using it again and again. btw, i used enough water so that the dough was very pliable and soft- wetter than the normal "just held together" type recipe.

[cooledskin]

I quite liked this. It was perhaps a bit more difficult to work with than a traditional pie crust, but that's to be expected - they're made with saturated fats for a reason! I was overall surprised by how well this worked. I added a few tablespoons of sugar to make it work for a sweet pie.

[Anemone]

Nice easy recipe. My daughter and I made this (with only white flour) for an apple pie. We didn't add any sugar to it, which was a nice balance to the sweet filling. We also didn't bother to chill anything, and it worked fine.