No Fail, Healthy sour cream dessert recipes Cream Pie Crust It’s the easiest, flakiest homemade pie crust ever! No machine required for this longtime reader favorite, a buttery pie and pastry crust recipe anyone can make.

Elise founded Simply Recipes in 2003 and led the site until 2019. She has an MA in Food Research from Stanford University. It is flaky, it is buttery, it is un-fussy, and it needs no difficult-to-clean equipment—just your clean hands and a large bowl. No added water, instead you add sour cream.

This method works and it couldn’t be easier. The recipe comes from my friend, former Zuni Cafe chef Kathi Riley, who has been using it as her go-to pastry crust recipe for 25 years and who graciously shared it with me to share with you. Why Does This Pie Crust Recipe Work? The biggest issue with flour-based pie crusts is toughness. Toughness develops when protein strands in gluten form when the flour and water come together. By rubbing the flour initially with butter, you coat the flour protein molecules in fat.

When you add sour cream, you add moisture that is surrounded by fat. Both the fat in the butter and the fat in the sour cream help keep water molecules away from protein molecules, resulting in a more tender pie crust. Take the chill off the butter: Many pie crust recipes call for working with very cold ingredients, which is important for an all-butter pie crust. Squish the butter into the flour: As you work the butter into the flour, squish it so that some of the cubes flatten into the flour. Pressing down with your knuckles in the bowl can help with this.

Flattened pieces of butter will result in flaky layers. Stir the sour cream: Use full-fat sour cream and if it has separated in the container, stir it before adding it to the dough mixture. Do what you need to do to get the dough to hold together well. As you work it into disks, it should end up smooth, having the consistency of play-doh. Once you wrap the dough disk in plastic wrap, you can massage the dough and the edges with your warm hands to close any cracks.

You can easily make ahead and refrigerate or freeze this pie dough. To make ahead, form a disk with the dough as flat as possible and wrap well with plastic wrap. You can make and refrigerate it one day ahead, no more than two days ahead of use. To freeze the dough, wrap tightly in plastic wrap and then wrap tightly with aluminum foil. It will last in the freezer for up to 3 months. To thaw, let it gently thaw overnight in the refrigerator rather than at room temperature. This pie crust recipe is difficult to pre-bake.

There is more fat in it than in a regular crust, which can cause the sides to slump if you bake it without a filling. Halve these amounts for a single crust 10-inch pie. Sprinkled the cubes of butter over the flour. Use your clean hands to squish the flour and butter together with your thumbs, fingers, and knuckles. Work the butter into the dough until you have what resembles a coarse meal with some flattened chunks of butter. Add the sour cream to the flour and butter mixture.