100% Foolproof Pie Dough Relies on an 80% Proof Ingredient

I usually blog about Central Texas/Austin real estate, a business I happen to love, but I also love cooking and I just discovered something from America's Test Kitchen -- read on and try a very different way to make pie crust.

100% foolproof pie dough relies on an
80-proof secret ingredient! Pie dough should be simple: mix flour, salt, and sugar together, cut in some fat, add water, roll it out, and bake it. But somehow the same recipe can result in perfect crust one day and a tough-as-nails crust the next. We wanted to figure out why this happens, and how to guarantee a tender, flaky crust every time. The trick to creating consistently great dough depended on the amount of water incorporated, and in particular how it was absorbed. There had to be a substitution that would keep the dough moist but not create too much gluten, which is produced by combining water and flour and makes for a leathery crust. After many dry, crumbly, dough “don'ts” we discovered the perfect liquid to use. Vodka! It added moisture, but is only 60% water—the other 40% of vodka is ethanol. The alcohol doesn't create dough-toughening gluten, so when we baked up this pie dough, we had a perfectly flaky AND tender pie crust with absolutely no vodka taste (all the alcohol evaporates in the oven during baking).