We have written several times about making a chicken pot pie using an Instant Pot. Briefly, you steam the chicken under high pressure for 15 minutes, and then cut the meat off the main pieces and refrigerate it and toss the bones back into the pot with the backs and wings, add 4 cups or so of water, a leek, carrots and celery and pressure cook for 30-40 minutes more to make the chicken stock.
Then making the stew itself amounts to cooking some carrots and celery pieces in butter for 10 or so minutes until soft, sauteing a few mushrooms in butter in a large pot, adding veggies and making a flour-butter roux and slowly adding broth from the pot until you have a nice thick gravy. Then add a little cream for richness and throw in the chicken meat. Then you bake it to make a pie.
If you make biscuits and put them on top of the chicken stew, it’s a pie or chicken ‘n’ biscuits. If you make biscuits and serve the stew over the biscuits, it’s chicken a’la King. And if you put the stew into little casseroles and top with a puff pastry crust, it’s a chicken pot pie for sure!
But what if you want a pie with a nice flakey, buttery crust? Well, this doesn’t take a lot of time except that you really must chill the pie dough for an hour to keep the butter from melting prematurely. The rest is easy.
You can find a bunch of buttery piecrust recipes by a simple search, and they all more or less require 2 sticks of butter, salt and 2-1/2 cups of flour and some ice water. But there are some differences. The important advance in ideas about butter crust came from a relatively recent article by Kenji Lopez-Alt in Serious Eats. In it, he theorizes that the flakiness of piecrusts come from fat coating the flour, rather than the other way around. And, that you should coat the flour with fat and then add the rest of the flour to interleave flour and butter in the crust. This works really well. One writer, writing for Inspired Taste, explained this recipe quite clearly.
Making the piecrust
- ½ lb (2 sticks) very cold unsalted butter, cut into little cubes
- 2-1/2 “scant” cups of flour (see below)
- 1 tsp Kosher salt
- 6-12 Tb ice water
- (for dessert pies add 1 Tb sugar)
The real trick here are those scant cups of flour. One way to achieve it, is to spoon the flour into a measuring cup and then level off the cup with a table knife. That means you have to repeat this 3 times: 2 for the cups and one for the half cup.
A better way is to just weigh the flour out, and forget all that spooning. If you just scoop flour out into your measuring cup, the flour will weigh just about 5 oz or 142 g. If you sift the flour, 1 cup will weigh about 120g. But if you use that spooning technique, you will have only about 112 grams in a cup. This is about 4 oz instead of 5. So, it really is a scant cup.
But instead, why not just weigh it to start with? Let me note that I use King Arthur flour which may be more or less dense than some other flour, But the weight will still be what you use.
Use a food processor
The easiest way to make this crust is in a food processor. If you don’t have one, you can use a pastry blender for about a minute instead. I did it both ways. They both work fine.
- Add 168 g (1-1/2 scant cups) of flour to the food processor (or bowl).
- Add the salt (and sugar if a dessert) and pulse or stir briefly to mix.
- Lay the cubes of very cold butter on top of the flour and mix it in by running the food processor for around 15 seconds. You now have the fat coated flour. You should be able to pinch some together and have it hold its shape. Lacking a food processor, just work the butter into the flour with a pastry blender.
- Add 112 g more flour (another scant cup) and pulse for a few seconds to mix the buttery flour with the new flour. (Or mix with a fork or pastry blender.)
- Turn the flour mixture into a bowl and sprinkle ice water over it, starting with about 6 Tb of water. Mix together with a fork or rubber spatula.
- Keep adding tablespoons of ice water and mixing until you can press the dough together in the bowl with your spatula and it will hold its shape. Depending on the flour and the humidity, this may take 12 or more tablespoons of water. In a warm kitchen in warm weather, you may have to refrigerate the dough during the ice water mixing process.
- Take the flour out of the bowl and mound it into a ball. If it crumbles, put it back in the bowl and work in a little more icewater.
- Cut the ball in two, press each one into a thick pancake, wrap with plastic wrap (or use a zipper bag) and refrigerate for at least an hour. The dough will keep for several days, and you can freeze if you want to.
- When you are ready to make the pie, take the dough out of the refrigerator and let it warm for a few minutes. Preheat the over to 375˚ F (206˚ C).
- Then place it on a floured surface or pastry marble and press it slowly across the dough with a rolling pin until it begins to give. Then start rolling it out until the dough is wider than your pie pan. Fix any cracks by pinching them together.
- Then fold the dough into quarters and lift it into the pie pan and arrange it with the extra dough hanging outside the pan. Don’t cut it off yet.
- Pour the chicken stew into the pie pan, roll out the top crust and lay it on top of the pie. You may not need all the stew. Freeze the rest for another pie later.
- Fold any extra dough from both crusts under the top crust and then go around and pinch the border to look a little decorative.
- Cut a couple of long slits in the pie and put it in the oven.
- Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the pie filling is bubbling. Serve hot.
You will have made a delicious, flakey, buttery piecrust that your diners will love. Serves 3-4 people.