Delicious Homemade Gluten Free Pie Crust

Savory pies… a thing of the past if you have to eat gluten free. Or so you thought! This homemade gluten free pie crust is flaky, moist, and delicious. Just like you remember!

When I first started this journey of cooking from scratch, gluten free, there were plenty of dishes I just couldn’t get right. Gluten free baking is hard!

It took trial and error and lots of determination but I am so excited to share this delicious homemade gluten free pie crust with you all. You can feed this flaky gluten-free pie crust to a crowd of non-gluten free people and they will rave about it.

This makes for the perfect recipe because you can simply swap out the flours to an all purpose flour and you have the most delicious regular pie crust to go with any pie. So this one recipe can be used for both gluten free or regular!

Some of our favorite ways to use this pie crust is in pumpkin pie, to use up our apple pie filling that’s sitting on our shelf, or in our chicken pot pie recipe! You can never go wrong with a gluten free pastry.

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Ingredients:

• 3 3/4 cup all purpose gluten free flour or regular all purpose flour if you don’t need to be gluten free. I use my own homemade gluten-free flour blend, I share that recipe in my digital The Ranchers Homestead Cookbook. Just make sure whatever gluten free flour mixture you are using has xanthan gum in it or add 1.5 tsp of xanthan gum to your bowl.
• 1 TBSP sugar
• 1/2 TBSP salt
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 Cup & 6 TBSP cold butter
• 2/3 cup ice cold water, remove ice before adding to bowl
• 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
• 2 TBSP sour cream or plain yogurt

How to make this homemade gluten free pie crust.

1. Mix all your dry ingredients in a large bowl.
2. Fill a measuring cup with 2/3 cup of water and drop a few ice cubes in it to keep it super cold. Set it aside.
3. Cut your cold butter into small cubes. Using a pastry cutter, cut the butter into the flour until you have pea size pieces. You want to make sure to work the butter in good so it is evenly distributed. This will help with the flakiness of your crust. For years I used 2 butter knives to do this job. It works but a pastry cutter is so inexpensive and works so much better!
4. Remove ice from water and add half the water to the bowl, along with the plain yogurt or sour cream and apple cider vinegar. Mix all together adding more of the water as needed. It’s better to start with less water and add as your go then adding too much water. It is much harder to correct when you over do it with the water. Use your hands when needed, until you have a dough ball. The dough should not be sticky and easy to work with.

Baking crust or storing for later.

1. Wrap you dough in pieces of plastic wrap or leave in the bowl if using within a few hours. Place your dough ball in the refrigerator until ready to use. If you want to save for a later day you can divide the dough into 2 large or 3 smaller balls of dough and place in a freezer bag. Store in the freezer for 6 months to a year. Remove from freezer and thaw your dough to be rolled out, when ready to use.
2. When ready to make a pie, cut ball of dough into 3 equal smaller pie crusts or 2 larger pie crusts. Place a sheet of parchment paper and sprinkle flour on it. Put one dough on the parchment paper, another sprinkle of flour, and top with another piece of parchment paper. Using a rolling pin, roll out you dough to the desired thickness.
3. Place in a well buttered or oiled 9-inch pie pan and fill with your favorite pie filling. Bake pie according to your pie filling directions or until golden brown. I usually have to cover the pie edges halfway through the bake process since the filling always takes longer then the pie crust.

Tips to getting a flaky and moist homemade gluten free pie crust.

When it comes to a pie crust, what is everyone looking for? The best flaky pie crust of course.

One of the main reasons this crust is so flaky is because of the fat I am using in it. For best results, using all butter in this recipe will give you the best flakiest crust.

Butter is high in water, so as it bakes and melts it is turning into steam, which then creates thin crisp layers. There are other options you can use in place of the butter but I find that using butter gives you the best results.

You want to make sure your butter is nice and cold, along with your water. If your butter is too warm before baking and when you are making up the dough, you won’t get the flaky crust you are looking for.

Adding sour cream or plain yogurt plays a role in getting your homemade gluten free pie crust moist. The sour cream adds extra fat content to your dough which will make your crust moist and the flavors of your crust richer.

In general using sour cream or yogurt in place of milk during baking will make your end product more moist. I like to use it in many recipes, but especially in my gluten-free pie crust recipe.

What if you need to be gluten free AND dairy free?

There was a period that I was healing my middle daughter from extreme eczema and we had to remove many items from our diet, dairy being one of them.

You can make this recipe using tallow, lard, coconut oil or vegan butter in place of the butter, but the flakiness will be a bit off. The pie is still delicious but you may not get as much of the flakiness you are looking for as the water content in those are not as high.

If you are choosing to use tallow or lard, make sure it is rendered down well so all the impurities are out. Otherwise your pie crust may have an off taste.

Some will suggest using vegetable shortening in place of butter. I would prefer to stay away from any kind of shortening as these are not the healthiest choices to add to your crust. After all, if I am going through the trouble of making this pie crust from scratch I want to make sure to use healthy ingredients.

Always remember that your food is only as healthy as the ingredients in it. Cooking from scratch doesn’t necessarily mean you are making a healthier dish, unless you are using healthier ingredients.

For the sour cream, you can simply not put in the sour cream or plain yogurt and add in more water if needed.

Although I have never tried it, but another good dairy-free option for the sour cream or plain yogurt would be a plain dairy free yogurt. You can find plain dairy free yogurt made from cashew milk on Azure Standard. You may want to look at your local grocery store as well to see if they have other plain dairy free yogurt options.

Eating gluten free doesn’t mean you have to miss out.

Just because you have to eat gluten free doesn’t mean you have to miss out or your food has to taste like cardboard. There are so many good foods out there and so many ways to tweak a simple recipe to make it gluten free.

When I make this homemade gluten free pie crust for a crowd, I always get the response “wow, I would never have known this was gluten free unless you told me!”

Now that’s the reaction I am always looking for when I serve a dish!

Please note that this recipe will make 3 smaller or 2 larger pie crusts. So feel free to half the recipe. I like to make the full recipe and freeze the pie crusts I don’t use for later. That way you can make a pie on a whim in no time!

With this one recipe making so many pie crusts, you can have a top crust and a bottom crust, or you can just use the bottom of the crust and freeze the rest. So many possibilities!

Just imagine already having a pie crust in your freezer and chicken pot pie filling pressure canned in jars on your shelf… You could have a home cooked, from scratch meal whipped up in no time to feed your hungry family at the end of a long day.

So the next time you are sitting around the table with your family sharing a delicious dessert, make sure to serve up a nice slice of your favorite pie using this homemade gluten free pie crust!