CurvyMama’s Best Pie Dough (or: Why You Should Learn to Love Lard)

Let the pig fat rock your world. That’s my most heartfelt advice for pie bakers.

When I waded into the world of piemaking, I did it ever-so-gently, to get over my sheer terror of rolling dough. I tried a half-Crisco, half-butter recipe, since Crisco makes dough easier to handle.

When I stopped hyperventilating and got more comfortable with making dough, I graduated to an all-butter crust. I wanted to get rid of that weird coating Crisco leaves on your tongue, and reap the flavor benefits of butter. The drama of the difference is hard to overstate. 

Then the pig fat came and rocked my world. When my pie mentor, Kate McDermott, came to teach workshops at my house in 2012, she introduced me to leaf lard, that cherished bit of top-notch fat around a pig’s kidneys. And no pie crust ever tasted or felt as good again.

Now I do want to say that all-butter dough retains a beloved and high-profile place in my heart. It’s my go-to crust when I am baking for Kosher and vegetarian friends. And it’s a great choice when you want a crust that’s a little bit more firm than the butter-lard crust. 

But the butter-lard combo is my top choice. The rich flavor of the two fats, and the effect they have on the crust’s texture–the perfect balance of flavorful and flaky–just can’t be beat.

My recipe is adapted only slightly from my pie mentor, Kate McDermott’s, recipe. It is meant to be a tribute to her revolutionary effect on my  pie world. Where she uses no sugar, I add a little tinch of sweetness.  Where she uses half butter and half lard, I tilt my proportions a teensy bit toward butter. 

Using lard in pastry is nothing new, of course. The good folks over at Everything Pies traced the butter-lard approach back to 1887 in the White House Cookbook (although this version uses baking powder, an ingredient I’ve never found necessary in pie crust). Southern biscuit-makers know the magic of lard.

But somehow it fell out of favor in recent years. When I tell people that I use lard in my pie dough, they often look horrified. Perhaps they’re thinking of the gamey hydrogenated lards that can be found unrefrigerated on grocery shelves.

As maligned as it’s been, though, lard is making a comeback. Kim O’Donnel chronicled her dive into baking with lard in The Washington Post, and Melissa Clark wrote about hers in The New York Times, declaring lard to be “heaven in a pie pan.” 

Food & Wine magazine trumpeted the health benefits of lard, noting that it has less saturated fat than butter. And Epicurious praised its lower water content and higher fat content, a perfect formula for pastry.

I’ll just add my small voice to the list: you gotta try a butter-lard pie crust!

The kind of lard you need for pie crust is very specific: leaf lard, so named because it spread out in a rough leafy pattern around the pig’s kidneys. Good leaf lard is pure white and creamy, and is devoid of any gamey flavor. It just smells…. rich. 

I’m lucky enough to have a local butcher who renders her own leaf lard, and it’s so awesome that just a whiff can get you high. If you don’t live near Wagshal’s in Washington D.C., though, you can mail-order it from respected farms (like Fannie and Flo) or find a local butcher who knows what you’re talking about when you ask for leaf lard.

Using your hands, break up the lard and butter into smaller pieces, coating them with flour as you go, and taking care not to hold onto any fat pieces for more than a second or two. You don’t want to melt them. Use a quick motion of your thumb against your other four fingers to break up and flatten the fats, coating them with flour as you go.