The Pie (Dough) Chart

[Mike Nolan]

Or, How to make the right amount of pie dough regardless of your pie pan size. If you've ever wound up with a bowl full of extra pie dough cut off the
[See the full post at: The Pie (Dough) Chart]

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[CindyLeigh]

This is helpful, thank you!
Hope you are well- it’s been a while!

[navlys]

This is worth saving.

[BakerAunt]

It's great to hear from you, again, Cindy. 🙂

Mike--does the weight of the dough depend on it being a butter and/or shortening crust? I have been making oil crusts. (I think that I posted my recipe here.) I usually use a deep dish Emile Henry pie plate, but I have had to guestimate for small tarts and for larger tart pans. So far that has been successful.

[Mike Nolan]

This chart was developed primarily with a butter-based recipe, but a shortening-based crust should have roughly the same weight. I've not tried an oil-based crust, I don't know if it has more or less oil relative to the amount of flour.

A cream cheese crust, like Rose Levy Beranbaum's crust, is heavier than a butter-based crust. And some people like their pie crust thicker or thinner than others, 1/8" seems to be the thickness most authors recommend. When I make a hot water crust for a pot pie, I think it is thicker than my regular pie crust, so it is heavier as well.

If you know how much pie dough you use for one size pie pan, you can weigh it and compare it to the weight in the chart for the appropriate size, and that'll give you your own standard weight that you can scale up and down.

Let's say you make a 9 inch bottom crust for a normal depth pan with 1/2 inch added for fluting, which becomes a chart entry of 11 1/2 inches. I used that as the standard because I found a lot of recipes for 9 inch bottom crusts. The chart sets that at 9 ounces. Weight the empty pan and then weigh it again with the finished bottom crust. If the trimmed weight of your crust come out at, say, 10 ounces, then you know you need to increase everything by 11%.

[S_Wirth]

CindyLeigh...it is so nice to hear from you! Hoping you are enjoying your work and that you and family are all doing well.

[cwcdesign]

Popping back in myself after the last couple of months. I appreciate your sending an email, Mike - this is great for a pie-phobic like me, but I probably won't be making pies for Thanksgiving this year unless there is an outdoor gathering - it's just down to Will and me.

Great to hear from you, Cindy Leigh!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by cwcdesign.

[S_Wirth]

So glad to see your post here, Carol! I'd been womdering if you were OK as I'd not seen a post from you since Aug. 9 here. Hope things are simmering down a bit for you.

[Mike Nolan]

Yeah, I suspect it'll just be the two of us for Thanksgiving as well, the original plans were to go to a family gathering up in Omaha, and I would have planned on making at least one apple pie for that, possibly two pies.

Hopefully our son and his family will come visit at Christmas. Kind of depends on how locked down things are by then.

[cwcdesign]

Thank you swirth and Mike. I did go into what’s been going on on the COVID the next 6 months thread so I didn’t highjack one of the cooking threads

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