Published September 1, 2005.
For an all-butter pie pastry recipe that would be easy to mix, handle, and roll, we cut some of the butter in the traditional recipe and replaced it with sour cream, which added flavor and helped keep the dough tender. But sour cream had one drawback: Its additional moisture made the dough too damp to cut in and properly disperse small bits of butter. We compensated in our all-butter pastry recipe by using the food processor, which brought the ingredients together quickly and evenly.
Use this recipe for making single-crust pies like pecan or pumpkin. We prefer ceramic or metal pie weights for prebaking the pie shell. If you don’t own any weights, rice or dried beans can stand in, but since they’re lighter than pie weights, be sure to fill up the foil-lined pie shell completely.
Dear Friend,
These days, it’s pretty easy to get free recipes on the Internet. I’m sure a search for “roast chicken recipe” will turn up thousands and thousands. But, as with so much on the web, you should tread lightly if you don’t know the source.
In America’s Test Kitchen, our motto is, “Recipes that Work,” and our mission is to be your trusted source for recipes that work every time you use them. Our test cooks spend their days obsessively testing recipes until they offer consistently great results. As we like to say here, “We make the mistakes so you don’t have to.”
CooksIllustrated.com is the only place you can find not only 20 years' worth of our foolproof recipes, but also objective ratings of cookware, and blind taste tests for hundreds of everyday supermarket ingredients (hey, without the proper ingredients and equipment you can still run into problems — no matter how good the recipe).
Let me make a simple, no-nonsense offer. Try out our website FREE for a 14-Day, No-Hassle Trial Offer. I’m pretty confident that CooksIllustrated.com will quickly become an invaluable resource for everything from quick, weeknight suppers to huge, holiday feasts for family and friends.
Thanks for your consideration,
Christopher Kimball
Founder and Publisher
