No Bill Burr in it, but I swear by the cook’s illustrated vodka recipe:
I never made a pie before and it worked perfectly from the first try. Also delicious for pasties.
paging Thug Kitchen… you have a new spokesman. : )
I’m not sure about the chapeau choice, actually, so there’s that.
yeah, well, see, what he shoulda done…
Get in line, bub!
Mmmmmm…transphobe pie…you can’t get that just any old place.
Any asshole that ruins a butter crust with vegetable shortening isn’t shaming me for a goddamn thing.
Gold Medal flour, kosher salt in pastry, and vegetable shortening?! I judge his life choices.
Butter pastry gets airier, but that don’t fuckin matter when there’s two pounds of wet hot pie filling sitting on top of it. (Or steaming it from underneath, in the lid’s case.) For croissants and bearclaws and similar, yeah, butter. But for pie the shortening crust is more appropriate.
Also it’s not really necessary to sift the flour unless you got it from some artisanal Amish miller who’s still using actual stone millstones. Any commercial flour is going to be plenty uniform and lacking in tiny bits of wheat kernel and pieces of rock.
And for chrissakes, weigh the flour, don’t measure it! Same goes for any highly-compressible baking ingredient, e.g. brown sugar.
Butter? Shortening?
You want a good pie crust? Then you use LARD!!! Why? I don’t fuckin’ know, I don’t bring the science to the table. I do know that if your crusts do not have good ol’ fashioned pork LARD installed then you might as well see if you can put a couple more hours in at the dentists office next week…you might need that to fall back on.
Hope I channeled Bill for that, if not it may have been Busey’s darkside lower companion monkey…
This! Anybody a bit serious* about baking should weigh the ingredients.
* everybody caring about a sure consistent outcome.
* everybody nervous about the result.
* Every first baker.
* 
Bill Burr is one of my absolute favourite people to listen to. He’ll ramble on with some absolutely horrible thought that you find yourself cringeing at and then he has a laugh at himself and says “what an asshole!” and you feel better for the human race.
Wait what?
I think it’s because lard has a higher melting point. One of the important parts of good pie crust is pockets of fat/oil. It’s too easy for butter/marg/oleo/shortening to be disolved into the flour. Lard tends to stay as little islands.
A tablespoon of vinegar also works instead of vodka/ethanol. Either way you’re inhibiting the gluten in the flour from cross-linking, which makes the crust flakier.
This!, too.
Pretty much any baking: weigh the dry ingredients. When making bread, weigh the flour, you’ll find that you get the right amount of flour every time.
Definitely correct on the weights and measures…bakin ain’t easy. Folks
that make it seem that way do so at your expense. Cookin is easy by
comparison, but I got locked out again.
I am suspicious of a pastry recipe which would work equally well for pies as pasties. You need less flakiness and more stick-to-it-iveness with pasties.
What @L_Mariachi wrote, but also: the flakiest pastry dough is made with a mix of different shortenings, because they heat at different temperatures and thus better provide the flaky layering effect. Half butter and half veg shortening is a good choice. My grandfather – the finest cook I’ve ever know, professional or otherwise – made his crust with half butter, half OIL and it was phenomenal.
