Whole Grain Pie Crust Tips and Tricks

• Go Soft. When making pastry with whole grain, use soft wheat or whole wheat pastry flour. In this recipe, we use a combination of soft white wheat, sorghum flour, and amaranth flour. This will give you a tender crust.
• Use a combination of fats. We use shortening and coconut oil in this recipe. The mouthfeel of the finished pastry is not waxy or overly funky-fatty. You’ll love it.
• Keep the fat chill. Put those love shortening pats in the fridge and keep them and the coconut oil on the cool side. That will keep the flaky texture of the crust that you want.
• Vinegar? It sounds weird. The small amount of vinegar in this recipe does a couple of things. Mainly the acid adds to the tenderness of the crust. It won’t make the crust taste sour, but it’s one of our chef’s favorite magic pie crust ingredients. If you don’t use vinegar, you can use vodka…Errr…water.
• Dough Chill. Yup. Don’t skip the 30 minutes of chilling the dough in the fridge. This step is pivotal in letting the dough relax and roll thin and getting flaky crust because the fat will solidify a bit between the layers of dough.
• Random fact…you can store pie dough in the fridge for up to a week and prepared pie shells unbaked in the freezer for up to 4 months.

Perfect Multi-Grain Pie Crust

Ingredients

1 cup Organic shortening

1 cup Organic Coconut Oil

5 cup Organic Grains Whole Wheat Flour

1/2 cup Organic Grains Sorghum Flour

1/2 cup Organic Grains Amaranth Flour

1 1/2 tsp. Salt

3/4 cup water, cold

1/4 cup White Wine Vinegar

Directions

Dice the shortening and return it to the refrigerator while preparing the flour mixture. Place the flour and salt in the mixer bowl fitted with a paddle and pulse a few times to mix. Add the butter and coconut oil. Mix 2-3 minutes until it is almost a flour paste.

With the machine running, pour the ice water and vinegar slowly into the mixer until the dough begins to form a ball.

Dump out on a floured board and roll into four equal balls.

Wrap each ball in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Roll each piece on a well-floured board into a circle, rolling from the center to the edge, turning and flouring the dough to make sure it doesn’t stick to the board.

Fold the dough in half, place it in a pie pan, and unfold to fit the pan.

Trim the edges and roll under.

Crimp edged or even pinch them to keep the edge plain. Repeat—yield 4 (10-inch) crusts (or two double-crusted pies). Prepared pie crust can be frozen raw for up to 4 months if wrapped tightly. Balls of pie dough unrolled are good in the fridge for up to 7 days.