Welcome to the second part of my series on pie
crusts, where I compare three different recipes
from Bon Appetit, America's Test Kitchen,
and Milk Street.
If you haven't already, check out part one
where I show you how to blend the dough
and then pop it in the fridge to chill.
In this video we'll be rolling out each dough,
baking, and then tasting the three crusts
to find out which is the best.
So our pie crusts are all done chilling.
You can chill them anywhere
from about an hour to
four days or more.
Especially if you put them in the freezer.
So we've got our
Bon Appetit crust.
Our America's Test Kitchen.
And our Milk Street.
Now my testing methodology here is
I want to see how things work in the real world.
I'm not going to be rolling these
out between parchment paper.
I'm going to be rolling them right onto
the countertop onto a floured surface.
Which I think
with granite like this can have a
tendency to stick and
sometimes be a little
unwieldy to work with, so,
I think this should be a good test to see
which of these handles
well in this environment.
And I'll let you know how things turn out.
Let me get these back in the fridge
and we'll start rolling them up.
Now the key with getting the pie crust into the
plate is not to push it down. That will
stretch it and cause it to shrink.
You want to just carefully lift it and push.
You can  always trim it later.
Take your time with it.
And now we're gonna
make a nice little edge.
All you do is...
Take one finger on one hand,
two fingers on the other hand
press it together.
There we have it.
See all these scraps? I'm going
to be setting them aside.
These are what I'm going to use to judge,
uh, the flavor of the different crusts.
So these are the Bon Appetit crusts.
Our scraps, they're going to go outside
and I'll get back to them a little bit later.
The second crust we have is the
America's Test Kitchen Recipe.
This is going into the sweet potato pie.
And it smells a little... well, it's yeasty. I mean...
It's a little sticky already.
Got a little water, little vodka.
Let's see how this one comes out.
It's rolling out much easier than the Bon Appetit.
I remember with the Bon Appetit one I was seeing some cracking.
Now it didn't really make a
big difference or nothing.
In how it ended up fitting in the pan, but,
this one's got no cracking at all. Rolls
out super smooth, super easy.
This dough is really easy to work with.
So far I've got a good feeling about it.
Doesn't seem to stick to my surface too bad.
Even though it was felt tacky to me originally.
That looks about the right size
that I need. So that was...
easy.
We're going to be using the Milk Street
Kitchen Recipe of pie crust.
This one's an interesting pie crust
because it has corn starch in it.
We'll make a slurry of that and
microwave it with some water.
So, it's the first time I'll be rolling it out. Let's
try it out together and see how it works.
Now this recipe promises to... be easy to work with...
they advertise it as like working with Play-Doh. So,
let's see if it rolls out as easily as they say it will.
Like with just about any pie
crust, you can work ahead.
And make the crust in advance. And then leave it in that disk or puck
In your fridge till later.
I actually made this about four days ago.
And I'm just going through to finish my pie now.
So far it seems like a fairly sturdy crust.
It's not quite as easy to roll out as the America's
Test Kitchen one was, with the vodka
and the schmaltz.
But then again, I'm no pro baker.
And I imagine if you're watching this,
you're not a pro Baker either.
So let's just see if this one is going to be as easy.
Got our crust in there. Now we
just need to trim the edges.
Rolling pin does a decent job of that.
All right.
There we have it. Crust in the tart pan.
I'll bake up our scraps and we'll do our
test comparison of all the different pie crusts.
Now that we have all three crusts made,
We're gonna try our taste test comparisons.
And of course I made pies out of each crust. But
these are the scraps that are left over from each.
Bon Apetite, the America's Test Kitchen, and the Milk Street pie crust.
To make it a fair test I wanted to just taste
just the crust by itself. So what I have them as laid out here. Gonna pour some sugar over each of 'em.
Normally I would add cinnamon as well as sugar here.
Just because it makes a nice little tasty treat.
But I thought for the taste-test it'd be best to keep it even
and not confound things with additional flavors.
Only sugar and the crusts themselves. So I'm
going to pop these into the oven and just
keep them in there just to brown them. We'll find
out together, see which ones taste the best.
While those crusts are in the oven,
let's talk about ease of rolling out.
So I'd say the Bon Appetit one
was the least easy to roll out.
Just because of it's
lower moisture content probably. And...
It was just stiffer,
kind of prone to cracking,
and really dense to roll out.
The America's Test Kitchen one with the vodka was
super easy to roll out. It rolled out like a dream.
Super easy work with. I was actually worried about it, worried
that it was going to be a sticky mess, but it was not.
Rolled out simply,
uh, held it's shape and didn't crack whatsoever.
Lastly was the Milk Street crust. It rolled out pretty well, it also had some cracking like, like the Bon Appetit.
I did have to roll it out thinner just because
of the tart pan that I was using.
So I don't know that it was necessarily
a fair test. I'd say, on all,
Our winner for the ease of rolling out
would be the America's Test Kitchen.
Going back to the very beginning,
let's talk about ease of
Bringing it together to start with.
The Bon Appetit one was fairly simple. It didn't
dirty a lot of plates, but it required a lot of
manual muscle manipulation with the rolling
pin in order to get everything combined.
America's Test Kitchen was fairly straightforward.
It all came together in the blender, er I'm sorry, in the food processor.
That was fine. Finally, the
Milk Street one came together quite easily as well,
in the food processor, so,
I don't know that I would come up with a clear winner, and maybe we'll say a tie between the Milk Street
and the America's Test Kitchen on ease of bringing it together.
That said, I want to give the Bon Appetit one
thumbs up just because
it didn't dirty a bunch of stuff. It's always kind
of a drag to pull out your food processor.
At least I think. So, the fact that you don't have to dirty all those pieces and you can just do it
with one piece of equipment, your
rolling bin and a boll, kudos to that.
Now it's time to take out our pie crusts and
taste test each one.
Alright, our samples already. We're gonna give them a minute to cool and then we'll taste them.
They all look pretty good, though.
Smell good, too.
I love these things.
Now that I've given it a few minutes to cool,
looking at each of these, they all look about evenly browned, so that's a good start.
Start with the Bon Appetit.
Remember the Bon Appetit recipe was the one where we only
mashed in with the butter.
No special ingredients. No vodka, no cornstarch, no sour cream.
So this is, it's traditional a recipe as you can get.
A really good buttery crust.
Got lots of layers.
Not sure if you can see that.
Very good, classic crust.
I like it a lot.
Move on to the America's Test Kitchen.
Remember this one had some vodka in it. SO lert's see if it tastes any different.
This one also had the schmaltz in it, but I'm not picking up an overwhelming
Chicken flavoring. It does taste slightly savory,
but it still tastes buttery. If I think about it really hard,
Might say it has a
ever so slightly savory taste, but very, very, very mild.
It's a fantastic crust.
Also has great layers. This is
just as good.
Lastly we have the Milk Street crust.
This one had the corn starch in it and it also had the sour cream in there.
Another very tasty crust.
I think I can detect that sour cream in there.
It also has great layering. Not tough. None of these crusts are tough.
So really all three crusts are great. Bon Appetit one, most basic recipe, it actually tastes the butteriest to me.
America's Test Kitchen one with the vodka
and it called for shortening, where I used to schmaltz,
tastes ever so slightly savory.
But also just as good.
Then finally The Milk Street Kitchen. This one had the sour cream and the cornstarch.
Also very good. Ever so slight taste of tang from that sour cream.
But it's got really nice browning, and I wonder if the sour cream helped to aid that.
I don't have a clear winner here.
They're all excellent, and I think they all have their own place.
Should we have a dogie taste test?
So there you have it.
Three very different crusts that work in
very different ways, but all have their own place. I think
you can find the one that works best for you.
In fact, why don't you leave a comment and let us know which one you're going to make next for your pie.
Thank you for watching today.
Give us a like and hit subscribe if you enjoy watching our videos. Our next one is going to be
James Beard's pumpkin pie.
We're going to put that practice into good use, so stick around.
Thanks for joining us. Have a great day.
