Basic Pie Dough

For our Tennessee issue, we turned to Dale Mackey, owner of Dale’s Fried Pies in Knoxville, Tenn. for a little inspiration and for her candied sweet potato fried pies. When making a fried hand pie, Dale reminds folks that the consistency of the dough should be a little bit “wetter” than regular pie dough. With regular pie dough you are just rolling it out once and you are done manipulating it, she says, but with a fried pie you are cutting it, folding it and crimping it. If the dough is erring on the side crumbly, it is going to be too hard to work with when trying to crimp it shut.

While Dale keeps her pie dough recipe a closely guarded state secret, we did manage to get the basic ingredients out of her, which means that you can use this basic double crust pie dough recipe to great success.  

Basic Pie Dough

2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. sugar
1 ½ sticks cold unsalted butter
8 tbsp. cold water

1. Add the flour, salt, and sugar to the work bowl of a food processor. Process briefly to combine. Cut the butter into ½-inch pieces and add to the flour mixture. Using short on-off pulses, cut the butter into the flour mixture until the butter pieces are the size of small peas.

2. Add 3 tbsp. of the water to the bowl and pulse on and off again for 5 seconds. Add 3 more tbsp. water and, again, pulse on and off for another 5 seconds. Add the remaining 2 tbsp. water and pulse on and off for another few seconds. Remove the lid and pinch a piece the dough. It should hold together easily. (If it doesn’t, add another tbsp. of water and pulse to incorporate).

3. Turn the dough out onto a floured board and shape it into a solid ball. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour before rolling out. Roll out the dough as directed in Dale’s recipe in our fall issue. Just be careful when frying.