Working Butter Into Pie Crust Is A Breeze With This Handy Tool

There are many important rules to remember for perfect pie crusts including keeping the fat cold, double-chilling the crust, and ensuring the perfect crimp. All of your efforts to craft the perfect flaky pie crust will be in vain if you fail to reach the right size butter pieces, don't distribute the fat well enough, or melt the butter before your pie crust even reaches the oven. 

Luckily, a single tool can help solve these three major pie baking problems: a pastry cutter (also known as a pastry blender). This small, handheld tool, which has a rocker shape and about four tines, allows you to break down the butter into small pieces without touching it. While you could manually break down the butter with your fingers, the heat from your hands can cause the butter to warm, prompting it to melt into your dough rather than retain its shape and its hardness. While this tool is especially useful for making pie crusts, you can also use it for making the streusel on a homemade crumb cake, or any occasion where you need to break fat down into small pieces without wanting to get your fingers dirty. 

Pastry cutters come in a ton of different sizes, shapes, and price points. However, you're going to want to take our advice on this one and avoid super cheap models that bend easily under pressure. You can also find some models with a comfortable ergonomic grip handle, though if you feel you have to put your whole body weight into the fat to break it and work at it for hours with your cutter, it may be a sign that the butter is a bit too cold to be making a pie with in the first place.

Alternatively, brands like KitchenAid also make pastry blender attachments that can affix to your stand mixer. While this may seem convenient, we don't recommend using them. When you break the butter down by hand with a pastry blender, you can work the large pieces of butter that you find into smaller ones. When you attach a perforated beater to your stand mixer, you are just asking for overworked dough and pieces of butter that are either too large or too small. A food processor is a far better alternative to a pastry blender paddle, though in our opinion, nothing beats a good handheld pastry blender.