 Hey y'all, it's Tammy with Collard Valley Cooks. I'm gonna start making all holiday recipes, things that we would have on our holiday table. Today, we're making a homemade pie crust because you can't have the holidays without making a pie. This pie crust is in our volume two cookbook. Now, this pie crust today is made with shortening. I have several different ones. When you use shortening, the pea-sized shortening pieces help the crust fluff up and be flaky. That's my favorite pie crust, shortening pie crust. We're gonna start out with one and one half cups of flour. One and a half cups of flour. Now we're gonna use a whole half cup of shortening. That's a lot, y'all. All right, we're gonna add a quarter teaspoon of salt and then we're going to blend this with a blending fork. Start it off with flour on top of the shortening and that way it doesn't get your blending fork too sticky to start with. And it will just continue to blend really, really well. You're gonna just press your shortening up against the sides of the bowl. If you have a fully fork, blending fork like I use, make sure you have Pyrex bowl set because it fits right up against the edges really easy and it will save you a lot of time because it does such a good job in this type of a bowl. The shape of it's perfect for your fully fork. Now you can see the shortening is about the size of a pea, for the most part, and that's where you want it to be. Do not blend it until it's all incorporated into tiny pieces or your Pyrex will not be as flaky. Now this is the last step. We're going to add water until this dough just barely stops clean from the sides of the bowl. It can vary by how you measure your flour. So I'm gonna go ahead and start out because I know it's going to take four at least. So I'm just gonna go ahead and add four. I might have drizzled some in there at the same time. It's anywhere from three to five tablespoons, typically, about how much it's gonna take. So now you're just going to take your fork and press it in together. Good. You need to continue to blend and don't add extra water unless you absolutely need it. So just continue pressing it into the bowl with your foley fork. We still got a little bit of flour on this opposite side. So I'm gonna try to get that incorporated in and if I can, then I don't have to add any more water. I think it's good to go. Now at this point, you clean off your foley fork, you take your hand and you grab all the dough together. This is how it should look in your bowl. It should still look dry, but your crust is nice and moist at the same time. Now I'm just gonna take this dough. We just need to let the shortening and water react with the flour. So a lot of mistakes people make as they mix up a pie crust and they go ahead and roll it out and you have to wrap it with saran wrap or plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes so that it can go through a process. If you don't, then your dough is gonna shrink up in your pie plate. You can refrigerate it longer, just make sure it's a minimum of 30 minutes in the refrigerator before you roll it out for your pie. This is a pre-baked crust that was not refrigerated before it was rolled out. You can see how the sides look and how they've drawn from the edge and how they're not nice and smooth and pretty. They're just kind of dimply looking. That's what happens when you don't refrigerate. All right, we've got our pie crust. It was in the refrigerator probably about an hour actually and you can leave it in there longer and I've got headed out for just a few minutes so it's still pretty cold. We're gonna use our sifter and just barely lightly set the surface with a little flour. Put out our pie crust, sift it up a little bit and we're going to roll it. Now, when you roll a pie crust, you turn it quarter turns and you just keep, oh, let's knead it first. Let's knead it a little bit first, just a few times. Now you can see how it looks flaky. That's how you want it to look and that's what the shortening does. A lot of people make a pie crust out of oil and it works, so it's not gonna be real flaky like this crust is gonna be. So you're just gonna turn it as you roll it. And you can see we don't have a good edge around the edges so we do not have it rolled out quite good enough. And if you have to take some off and fill in some holes, do it before you continue to roll it. You can wet it just a little bit to get the stick better. Now, if you've got a really big pie plate, you may have to go inch and a half around the edge. But I've just got a standard Pyrex, old-fashioned pie plate. They're my favorite because they have an edge that you can use for your pie crust. Now we're gonna roll this up. I'm actually gonna roll it out bottom to the top because it's the prettiest. And we're going to lay this in the plate until we kinda get it straight. Okay, here we have our pie and our nice, beautiful crust. You can tell this has been refrigerated, just by the way it looks. It looks so different than the one that wasn't. And I am just going to start decorating the sides. I'm gonna pinch them. I'm just gonna fold it over and pinch it. Fold it over and pinch it. Like that. I was missing a little bit of dough right here, so I'm gonna trade it out. Some that was on the other side, just so that it's pretty. There's a skippy, wimpy section too. All right, you're gonna be able to really tell a difference in the crust that you refrigerated and the crust that you did not refrigerate. You can already tell that it's smoother looking before we even put it in the oven. And show them that one over there close up. Now look at this one and look at the difference. It's gonna make a big difference in the texture of your pie crust. Same ingredients. All right, here's our homemade crust. And I want you to see that it's nice and flaky. This is the shortening crust. I'm just showing you the crust. It's nice and dry with that egg custard in there and it was a really wet filling. You can see when I break it apart that you can kind of see the layers in there and see that it's flaky. It's a really good pie dough. I love it.