As a young boy of about 10-12 years old I did very little cooking, to be quite honest. My uncle was a baker for 40 years I believe. His bakery made the best brownies. It was the mid 1970's and you could get a pie for 2 $ there. I was his nephew and had never worked for him but did learn how to bake 2 things: a coffee cake and custard pie.
If you have ever made custard pie you know how easy it is, basically milk and eggs and sugar, nutmeg,and maybe vanilla or a small amount of cinnamon according to you tastes or if you were out of nutmeg. That was pretty much the easy part, the filling, putting the whipped eggs in the milk just as it starts to hit a froth. What was hard for me to do was to get a good tasting crust.
What I started with was a late 1960's Betty Crocker cookbook pie crust recipe and only God knows where that went. I make it from scratch and the amounts really vary for me because every attempt I make from a recipe I usually have to start improvising. They never seem to have the right amount of flour to water as far as I'm concerned, its really easy for it to be too dry or too wet and a constant adding of just a little more flour or water. This might be my inexperience,however.I do have some tips though.
Anyhow, I would take about a cup and a half of flour,estimated, and less than 1/8 cup of water and a pinch of salt if that and 1/3 cup to 1/2 of lard. I would start mixing all that until I found a good consistency of pie crust dough, where its workable and not sticking to everything.
I would make it into a ball, then on a floured wax paper knead it by flattening it out and folding it in half over and over but only do this as little as possible. The less its worked the better.
I never had a rolling pin. I always used a heavy tea glass or tumbler, please don't break it if you use one and sue me. But I would take a large piece of wax paper and dust it with flour.
This is probably where I mess up with the amount of ingredients: too much flour on the wax paper I am rolling it on. I would then roll it out with the glass as large as I could get it without it coming apart or 10 -12 inches.
The tips I have are this and It may horrify the delicate nutritionists. The shortening or lard. I think you used to even be able to buy this stuff . Its not the pretty stuff called Crisco that looks like pristine snow, its a little bit of grease left over from bacon. What I did was use mostly Crisco, but added a little bacon grease and a little real butter.Its the only way I know to get a better flavor than pie crust without it. Otherwise to me its bitter and bland at best.
Another trick I used was this . After I spread out the crust and placed it in the pie pan I would take some sugar, or very small amount of powdered sugar and pat it to the inside of the crust right before you put the filling on top of it. Not too much and it can't be exposed to the heat by being on the edge.
But that's it and I know it sounds haphazard but I got a pretty good pie out of it and everyone ate it.
