One day out of the blue, I began having trouble with pie crusts, even when made in the processor, despite having made them without problems for years. All of a sudden they were dry, hard to roll and were neither flaky nor tender. It was so frustrating. I wasn’t doing anything differently. Then it dawned on me: I’d switched from a true all-purpose flour, a blend of hard and soft wheats, to a hard-wheat all-purpose flour which, in terms of protein content, is nearly as strong as bread flour. Well, there was the culprit.
The flip side is switching to a soft-wheat all-purpose, the type popular in the South. It’s fabulous for biscuits, most cakes and pie crusts — once you’re used to it. Use a crust formula unchanged that always worked great with hard flour and you risk having a bowl of paste. Flours absorb water differently, depending on their strength, or protein content. And that affects your crusts.
The softer a flour is the less protein it has. Hard flours can absorb more liquid and they slurp it up. To get a workable pie dough from a hard flour you not only need more water, you need to work the dough more and those two factors, combined, can be trouble. Gluten develops, giving the dough strength and elasticity, desirable for breads but not for crusts.
To illustrate this I measured out one tablespoon of seven kinds of flour, from softest to hardest, on a non-porous surface. I tamped down a hole in each sample, put 1/2 teaspoon of water into each hole and waited:
This is one reason why pie crust recipes usually specify a range of water to use; in addition to the variable absorbancy of different flours, flour also absorbs moisture, humidity, from the air. It’s not a huge amount, obviously, but this factor is negated when measuring by weight. However much humidity is absorbed, it weighs something and the scale reflects that.
You might have noticed pastry flour is missing. I don’t use it. The Gold Medal Organic All-Purpose flour is a very soft flour, much softer than the other Gold Medal All-Purpose flours. You can see and feel the difference immediately. Still, I tend to save it and the White Lily, hard to find here, for more delicate baked goods. I use the other Gold Medal All-Purpose flours for crusts, choosing the unbleached when I want a darker crust. Pillsbury works well too.
The hard-wheat all-purpose flours I avoid are Hecker’s and King Arthur, both fine flours but too strong for crusts. King Arthur does sell a pie crust blend, a combination of their all-purpose and a softer flour, but I haven’t tried it. I keep even more flours than pictured and eventually, enough is enough!
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