Flaky Cream Cheese Pie Crust

The results are delicious but I find the instructions too fussy--I had fabulous results grating cold butter and cream cheese into the flour and mixing by hand. I added lemon juice instead of vinegar. I skipped the whole "kneading in a bag" deal and mixed the ice water by hand and spatula till it came together and then flattened it onto plastic wrap and chilled it. I found it very easy to roll out on cold, well floured marble. The dough held up beautifully during par baking and the crimping was easy and looked great at the finish. Similarly, the two-crust pie looked so pretty and tasted so good. I love this crust...

I made this crust for the apple pie on page 81. It is a pretty long procedure but the instructions are very helpful. I did make mine by the hand method since my large food processor died and my other one is to tiny to make a double crust in. I'm not the best pie crust maker (my daughter is better) but I found it easy to knead the crust in the gallon zip bag. My kitchen was very warm so rolling between two pieces of plastic wrap helped a bit with the sticking. Baking on the pizza stone worked well and I had a nicely browned flaky (although not the prettiest in the world) pie. My sister said it deserved a blue ribbon though. Love the use of cream cheese along with the butter.

this is my go to flaky pie crust recipe. it is very methodic and fairly easy to make. the recipe is well explained and you will obtain the same good results batch after batch. i love what each "unusual" ingredient does. using cream cheese as part of the butter to make it tastier! using cream instead of water to make things more tasty too. using a little baking powder to lift more flakiness. and of course, it is an all butter crust.

the dough freezes for a very long time. have some on hand for any pies or pastries. note that it doesn't contain sugar, so it is perfect for sweet or savory.

makes fantastic crust for pecan or pumpkin pie.

I made this for the apple galette. I wished I had read Andrew’s review first, the next time I will try mixing the dough in plastic wrap. But I did find I could shape and refrigerate the dough in the bag and that worked well. The dough seemed very soft, and I probably would have had better luck if I had a large enough work area, but my wooden cutting board was narrower than my finished product was supposed to be. The dough was coming along fine until the last bit of rolling when it tore simultaneously in 3 places. However I was able to patch it back together, but did not have the patience to try and cut out the circle, so I just used all the roughly circular dough. I am not sure if the cider vinegar was all mixed in as the dough had dark patches in it that were not attractive when the dough was raw, but I did not notice in the final product. The crust was flaky and delicious.