Appreciation post: The cold butter trick for pie crust I ignored for years

I spent a decade making soggy, tough pie crusts because I thought room temp butter was easier to work with. Last Thanksgiving I finally tried grating frozen butter into my flour and it gave me the flakiest crust I've ever made in my life. Why do we keep doing things the hard way when the simple fix is just a few minutes in the freezer?

3 comments

3 Comments

adam4142d agoTop Commenter

Room temp butter is actually fine if you handle it right... it's more about not overworking the dough than the temperature of the fat. Grated frozen butter can be a pain to keep cold while you're mixing it in too.

kimblack2d ago

ok but is it really that serious though? i mean yeah you don't want to murder the dough but if your butter is literally sweating on the counter that's gonna be a problem no matter how gentle you are. like i've messed up plenty of biscuits and the issue was always butter that was too soft, not how much i mixed it. sure you can handle room temp butter if you're like super careful but for most people just using cold butter straight from the fridge is way more forgiving. i dunno maybe i'm just not that good at baking but my room temp butter experiments usually end up with flat sad cookies.

troyc172d ago

lol man i feel this so hard but for a different reason. i spent years thinking browned butter was just for fancy cookies and stuff but then i randomly tried it in my banana bread cause i had some leftover from a recipe and honestly it changed my whole life. like the nutty flavor with the bananas is just unreal. now i brown butter for everything even stuff that probably doesnt need it. my sister thinks im insane cause i'll brown butter for regular chocolate chip cookies too but she aint complaining when she eats them. the freezer trick is legit though i started doing that for my pie crusts after watching some youtube video at 2am and never looked back.