Recipe: Pie Crust

Growing up, I always thought I HATED pie crust. I was the kid who scoop/scraped up all the pumpkin filling on Thanksgiving, leaving a sad flat sail on the plate. I couldn’t understand why gooey berry filling had to be wrapped in limp cardboard! I just never liked pie crust… until I had Benji’s.

Apparently, I just wasn’t having the right pie crust! When it’s flakey and buttery… it's so delicious. Now, the edge of the crust, with too many layers to count, is my favorite. And ever since I’ve come around, I’ve joined Benji in celebrating PIE SEASON when fall turns to winter and the holidays approach. This past pie season was especially fun for us because we were in the midst of launching our food business together. Naturally, we made the most of the timing and shared some of our favorites with you all. We made dozens of apple and pecan pies, quiches, and galettes – so many crusts rolled and shaped and baked! Our 2024 Pie Project is wrapped up now, but we hope you’ll keep the golden flakey good times going in your home kitchen with (drumroll please…) Benji’s own pie crust recipe! 

It’s the crispy, flakey perfect vessel for any pie, quiche, tart, and galette in your recipe box (or, ya know, on the internet). And, it’s easy enough that anyone, including me, can master it! We hope it’ll convince anyone who, like me, snubbed pie crust, that there’s a better way out there. 

It’s a simple recipe – give it a try, and let us know how it goes in the comments!

BENJI’S PIE CRUST RECIPE

The key with pie dough is to keep everything as COLD as possible! This goes for all your ingredients and means letting your dough ~CHILL~ at several points in the process. 

Resist the temptation to over-handle your dough – large streaks of butter and minimal water translate to great flakiness! Once the dough just comes together, it needs to chill for several hours to become workable. Then, when rolling out, be sure to let your dough chill again before filling and baking so the gluten can relax. Putting a COLD pie crust into the oven will help you get a nicely defined flute/crimp and reduce shrinkage. 

Yields 2 single or 1 double crust

300 g. all purpose flour
½ lb. unsalted butter (225 g., 2 sticks)
6 g. kosher salt
15 g. sugar if making a savory pie OR 30 g. sugar if making a sweet pie
½ to ⅔ c. ice cold water

Combine flour, sugar, and salt in a mixing bowl. Cut sticks of butter lengthwise, rotate and cut lengthwise again, so you have four long sticks of butter. Then cut the sticks into small squares, about the size of dice. Toss with the flour to fully coat each piece of butter. Put the bowl of butter and dry ingredients in the freezer for 15 minutes. 

After 15 minutes, take the bowl out of the freezer and begin working the butter into the flour, pinching each piece between your thumb and pointer finger and squishing it flat. Continue working the butter into the flour this way until the pieces are approximately ‘the size of peas’ (this is the visual cue pie crust recipes always use for some reason). If your butter feels warm or tacky at this point, return the bowl to the freezer for 15 minutes. 

Make a well in the center of your bowl and add ½ cup ice cold water. Stir to incorporate. The mix will be quite dry still – that is okay! Turn it out onto a work surface and push the dough together into a mound. Using a rolling pin, push the dough down, flattening it. Cut into four quarters and then stack them (they will still be a little crumbly). Push down with the rolling pin and repeat the process of quartering, stacking, and flattening twice more. If, while doing this, your dough feels way too dry, add a tablespoon of water at a time until it feels workable. (Adding water at this point is not ideal, as it's tricky to incorporate evenly, but it can be done. After making pie dough a few times you’ll get a feel for how dry is too dry. Resist adding too much water – that will result in a hard pie crust.)

Divide the dough in half if you are making 2 single crusts, or split into a ⅗ portion (for your bottom crust) and a ⅖ portion (for your top crust) if you are making a double crust pie. Tightly wrap each piece in parchment or plastic and gently roll over each a couple times to smooth out the sides. Let rest in the fridge for at least 2 hours or ideally overnight. 

Once rested, on a lightly floured surface, roll out your dough into a round a couple inches wider than your pie pan (the dough should be ⅛ to ¼ inch thick). Place the dough round in a pie tin — you should have about a half inch of overhang all around. Trim with scissors anywhere there is excessive overhang. Fold the overhang under to create a double-layered edge. You can flute, crimp or decorate this edge in any number of ways, so experiment and find your favorites. Return to the fridge for at least 30 minutes. 

To parbake (if your pie recipe calls for it), preheat the oven to 400°F. Gently dock your crust (poke it several times with a fork) to prevent it from inflating as it bakes. Line the prepared crust with tin foil or parchment (crumple it up beforehand to make it more pliable) and add pie weights (you can use rice, beans, sugar, or commercial pie weights) to completely fill the pan, making sure the sides are well supported. Place on a cookie sheet and bake at 400°F until the rim of the crust is starting to get golden brown, about 15-20 minutes. At that point, remove the pie weights, reduce oven temperature to 375°F, and bake the crust for about 10 more minutes, or until the base of the crust looks dry.

Your pie crust is now ready to be filled and baked according to your recipe!

Benji’s Backstory: Nov 8, 2016

November 8, 2016 was a formative day for me. It was the climax to a summer of 100-hour weeks working to organize my assigned purple slice of NW Illinois for the Democrats. Fresh out of college, I’d energetically put myself out there, making calls, recruiting volunteers, believing that Hillary and the Dems had this and if I just did my job, the coattails would be long enough not just to win at the top of the ticket, but all the way down to the bottom.

The signs couldn’t have been clearer that this was not going to happen, but I could not have been more oblivious to them: week after week of being hung-up on, listening to Democratic voters slander HRC, and feeling that I was pulling teeth to make anything happen. 

On election day morning, I got my clearest sign: when I arrived at the union hall that was my campaign HQ, there were literal snakes: half a dozen of them infesting my workspace, something my union contact assured me had never happened before. After sweeping the snakes out with a broom, I hustled all day, shepherding volunteers out the door, monitoring progress of other staging locations, and reporting to Chicago headquarters. Early intel was good, and they called the local house race for the Dems at 7:00pm, then the senate candidate I was working for successfully flipped a senate seat. 

When polls closed, I packed up, and I drove from the staging location to a results watch party blasting 50 Cent, pumping my first. When they called Florida, most people started getting nervous, but I remained so certain it’d all work out. It did not. They didn’t call the election that night, but the message was clear. That night, I felt disgust unlike anything I’d felt before. I went to a bathroom stall and made myself throw up. I came out, sat on a chair and held my head in my hands. An old man came up to me, patted me on the back, and said, “Could be worse, young man. When I was your age, they were trying to send me to ‘Nam.” 

Without this experience of failure, I would not have, a month later, followed my passion for cooking and applied to be a prep cook at Momofuku. And without that job, I would not have gotten the next job, or the one after that such that today I am sitting here with almost a decade of experience working in restaurants.

Initially, this pivot was an act of escapism, as I tried to distance and distract myself from the mess unfolding around me in DC. But of course, everything is political, and through restaurant work, I relearned the importance of politics. I had undocumented coworkers share their fears of being deported. I had coworkers without access to healthcare die preventable deaths. I learned about the unsustainable environment small businesses face and the inadequate support for working people in this country. It’s ironic that while working as a political organizer, politics felt so abstracted, turned into the blur of a horse race, but while working in restaurants, politics and its impacts came into sharp focus. 

Now, eight years later, my head is in my hands again. Everyone seems to have their take on why we lost the election and what needs to happen next – I’ll avoid the self-indulgence of such a rant, but since working in restaurants brought to life the importance of politics for me, I will share a little perspective from my experience in the hospitality industry:

I’ve heard a lot of people saying “we have to keep fighting” or referencing “the long battle ahead.” I get why this language is motivating, but I think it is a little irresponsible and distracts from the fact that what will change the outcome next time is not more “fighting.” It is approaching each other with a smile (even if it is a forced one), it is listening to a long list of baseless grievance and responding with empathy, and more than anything it is coming together and breaking bread.

FOODSPEAK

Since reading Animal Farm cover-to-cover as a dyslexic teen, I had liked George Orwell, but when I read Down and Out in Paris in London a couple years ago, he became one of my favorite authors. A first-person account of Orwell's time working as a dishwasher in Paris and living unhoused in London, Down and Out struck me as a startlingly relevant precursor to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and the chef-memoir in general. I plan in some future posts to return to Down and Out as inspiration and talk about some of my experiences working in kitchens, but this first post is inspired by Orwell’s more popular work, 1984: it’s a satirical look at the language we use around food.

Many thought Donald Trump’s election was the culmination of decades of polarization, but the year is 2041 and Donald McRonald Jr. is President, perhaps showing that Trump was merely the beginning of a new era of celebrity politics. The great-great-great-great grandson of a fast food mogul (and distant relation of Mr. Trump himself), Donald McRonald Jr. captured the nation’s heart with the campaign promise, “You’ll love it!” and free toys for all children. In his first term, he consolidated the FDA, USDA, and EPA into the Food and Taste Service Operation (FaTSO).

This deregulation set off a series of mergers as new players swept in to profit off the government's blind eye. Coke merged with Koch to form Coke & Koch, British Petroleum and Pepsi formed BPepsi, and McDonald’s merged with Monsanto to create a new food goliath, McSanto.

In aggregate, these moves consolidated all agricultural land, seeds and food production facilities in the hands of just a few companies which operate as a cartel in close alignment with the White House. To support this new agro-industrial reality, FaTSO began circulating a FOODSPEAK dictionary in support of the goal of alienating food from people, land, and health. With this rhetoric, the new American food industrialists have been able to feed all Americans a profit-maximizing “GOODFOOD” diet. Today, Americans get 95% of their food from the Three Step-Sisters (corn, wheat, and soy) and are on track to meet President Donald McRonald’s promise of a 100% GOODFOOD diet for all Americans by 2050 – health and biodiversity be damned! 

UPDATES TO THE FOODSPEAK DICTIONARY, 2nd Edition: The Official Business Language Guide for the Modern Food Industry

FOODSPEAK is used to disguise the nature of a hyper-processed diet, factory farming, and labor exploitation through helpful neologisms, happy imagery, and sanitary language. It aims to discourage unnecessary critical thinking about food’s origins and health impacts, while promoting mass consumption and convenience over nutrition or connection. There is only one diet now, GOODFOOD, so terms and definitions have been reduced to only those relevant for promoting this hyper-processed diet.

UNSAD MEAL (n.)

A term for children’s meals. The term HAPPY MEAL and the idea of “happiness” was no longer resonating, so we recommend updating the phrase to remain relevant to a physically and mentally unwell population. 

MAXIMUM OPPORTUNITY WAGE (n.)

A replacement for the concept of a MINIMUM WAGE. Starting at the bottom means these workers technically have the greatest opportunity to increase their earnings!

LIVING WAGE (n.)

Any wage paid to a living person; it need not meet any threshold for subsistence, just technically be paid to a currently alive person.

FAST-PACED WORK ENVIRONMENT (n.)

Helpful neologism for stressful, high-pressure, and thankless workplaces with unrealistic demands. Safe working conditions are a nonviable expectation in such fast-paced environments.

FRIED (adj.)

During the late twentieth century, misled “medical experts” convinced the general population that deep fat frying was “unhealthy.” This negative association has been difficult to dispel. Deep fat frying is in fact the most patriotic way of preparing food: not only does it enrich the food with beneficial crunchiness —excellent for exercising under-utilized jaw muscles — but it supports the national seed-oil industry, a security priority of this administration.  We recommend continuing the 21st century trend of disguising “deep fat fried” items on menus. Never use FRIED, instead, use one of these FRESH FaTSO-approved substitutes:

• GOLDEN

• CRISPY 

• CRUNCHY

• KETTLE-COOKED

• CRACKLIN

• LIGHTLY-DUSTED

• CRUSTED 

• FRIZZLED 

• SIZZLED

• BATTERED 

• BEER-BATTERED

• BREADED 

• DREDGED

• FINGER-LICKING 

• HOMESTYLE

• CRUMBED

• NUGGET

• TEMPURA 

• FRITTER 

• CRISPED TO PERFECTION

DIETARY FREEDOM (n.) 

Used to justify unhealthy food choices and obfuscate industry marketing’s role in shaping harmful eating habits.

FROOT, FROOTY (n, adj.)

Today, there is no real FRUIT, only fruit flavors. FROOT has replaced the word candy and can refer to anything sweet. After the seedless fruit blight of 2025, all fruit varieties went extinct, so this archaic term has been revamped and FROOT now refers to candy and sweet snacks, and FROOTY to any sweet flavors.

NUTRINSTANT (adj.)

Marketing term for sugar- and caffeine-highs from insulin-spiking, hyper-refined, fiberless, and stimulant-laden foods and beverages.

ORGANIC (adj.) 

Carbon-based; This definition is stripped back to its correct chemical meaning: any compound that contains carbon. Today, all foods are grown with chemical additives so the previous use of organic is obsolete. 

AGRI-BOOSTER (n.)

Any additive, including pesticides, chemical fertilizers, or antibiotics, used to increase yields. Fake news coverage has led consumers to be afraid of these necessary compounds. Moreover, the suffix “-cide” has a negative association with death, so in any future discussion of these chemicals, strike PESTICIDES and HERBICIDES and replace with AGRI-BOOSTER.

For illustrative purposes, here are some examples of the full FOODSPEAK dictionary in action:

• “Naturally Processed”

• “Lite Creme”

• “Really Frooty”

• “Globally Sourced”

• “High in Balancing Superfoods”

• “New Vita-Boosted Formula”

• “Guilt-Free Snack Cakes”

• “A Great Source of Calories”

• “Heart-Healthy Ingredients”

• “All-Natural Meal Replacement”

• “Organic Flavor”