Gluten-Free Pie Crust Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why is my gluten-free pie crust so hard? ›

Too much water makes pie crusts tough, ESPECIALLY gluten-free crusts. An extra tablespoon or two can make your crust rock hard. Try to use the least amount of water listed.

Xanthan gum.

This acts as a binder (essentially a gluten replacement) and prevents the pie crust from being too crumbly and from tearing or cracking when you roll it out and use it to assemble the pie crust. It allows you to easily crimp the edges, create a lattice or anything else you might want to achieve.

Flour: For a tender crust, choose a low-protein flour. Pastry flour, with a protein content of about 8-10%, ranks between all-purpose flour and cake flour. All-purpose flour works just fine for pie crusts, while cake flour might lack enough protein to form a workable, elastic dough.

While gluten-free pastry is more delicate to handle, the most frequent reason for cracking is that there is insuffi cient moisture in the pastry. When making shortcrust pastry you mix the fat into the flour until it has the appearance of breadcrumbs, then add the liquid to bring together the dough.

Bake gluten free pizza for longer than you would bake a regular pizza of the same size. For the pizza in the video above, the bake time is about 13 minutes on a hot baking stone. (A dough with gluten would be about 8 minutes.)

Gluten-free baked goods often benefit from extra liquid to hydrate the flour blends, eliminate grittiness, and achieve a less dense or dry texture. However, it's very important to drive off this extra moisture during baking, or you'll wind up with a gummy texture. The best way to do this? Longer baking times.

The three most common binders are xanthan gum, guar gum and psyllium husk powder. Each one works in a slightly different way to help create the structure we need to hold baked goods together.

Eggs are natural leaveners that help boost the rise and volume of bread. Eggs also add moisture, flavor, and protein to gluten-free bread recipes. If you select a gluten-free bread recipe that includes eggs, you have a better chance that the resulting bread will have good color, more volume, and softer texture.

Add some almond flour: Using a small amount of almond flour in your baking can enhance the taste and texture dramatically. Due to the high moisture and fat content, it can also add moisture, and will help your baked goods to brown.

#2—Add cold water

Like the fat, the water should be ice cold. Before you start making the dough, fill a glass with ice and water. Add the ice water gradually to the dough, about one tablespoon or so at a time, and stop when the dough is just moist enough to hold together when a handful is squeezed.

What does vinegar do in a pie crust? ›

Vinegar helps tenderize pie dough because it slightly inhibits gluten development, leading to a crust that is flakier and easier to work with.

Some bakers use milk or buttermilk in their pie crust. Thanks to their milk solids, both will help crust brown and add a bit of tenderness. But the classic liquid in pie crust is water — ice water, to be precise.

Gluten-free flours often contain fine starches, so they absorb more liquid than conventional flour. To address this, gluten-free recipes usually call for more liquid and produce looser batters. They may also call for a larger quantity of leavening, like baking powder, to help add volume and lighten the texture.

Owing to the challenge of gluten-free flours to form a protein network that provides structure and strength to dough, breads produced in the absence of gluten tends to be flatter, denser, crummier, less chewy and less tasty.

Free From Heaven states that gluten-free pastries are much more delicate to work with than glutinous pastries because they are prone to cracking due to a lack of moisture, and often the solution would be to add more liquid to the gluten-free dough.

The pie crust could have a firm or tough texture if you bake your pie before resting your dough. Giving your dough time to rest will allow all the ingredients to chill, help the moisture distribute more evenly throughout the dough, and make it easier to roll out.

Tough pie crusts are typically the result of working the dough too much (again, gluten). You don't need to make sure it's a perfectly uniform ball. “As long as the dough is mostly holding together, you don't need to spend a lot of time kneading it,” Susan Reid wrote for King Arthur Baking.

To make pie dough soft and pliable, ensure your ingredients, especially butter or shortening, are chilled but not too cold. Handle the dough gently, and avoid overworking it. Adding a bit of water gradually can also help achieve the right texture.