I just realized this was a year old thread. Anyhow, if anyone ever reads it again - pie crust isn't all that hard to make. Just remember that what you're doing is shortening the flour, in other words you're rubbing grease onto the flour grains and that prevents the gluten from linking up too easily and making a chewy, rubbery crust. You want to develop gluten in bread, you don't want it in crust. What would you use besides butter? Maybe duck fat or even lard. Don't use margarines or commercial shortenings - they ruin the dough and leave a horrible coating on your mouth and to their credit, the good folks at the NYC Dept of Health banned them in baked goods. Butter has different amounts of water / butterfat ratios. That water isn't going to work on your crust like the water you add to the dough, but it will have an effect on the final product. When you cut the butter in, make sure you leave some larger pieces - pea size for example. It shouldn't be all uniform, which can happen if you use a food processor and run it too long. Pulse it. I always add the water by hand. Add a bit then pinch it together with your fingers. Toss those bits aside and add some more to the dry stuff. It's hard to give precise measurements because you have to go by feel, but figure one part butter to 3 parts flour and slightly less than one part water. And a bit of salt. So in measuring cups, that's like a stick of butter, 1 1/2 cups flour, and somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 cups of flour. And obviously you can vary those proportions - a little more flour, a little less flour, and your need for water will change accordingly. So add the water by hand and just gently work it with a fork and / or your fingers to make the clumps of dough stick together. Then gather them into a ball and smear the mass across the counter with the heal of your hand. You don't want to knead the dough like bread, but just smear it once or twice. The French call this fraisage and the purpose is to distribute the water and fat. Then gather into a ball and let it rest. Don't roll it right away. Leave it for an hour or more - you'll be surprised at how much easier it is to handle once it rests. The globs of butter you've distributed thru the dough when you rolled it out will melt, the water will create steam, and that will fill the vacuum created by the butter, blowing the crust apart into flakes. If your butter has a higher water content than some, you'll get a harder crust than if it's got a higher fat content - that's because the moisture will be incorporated throughout the crust with the butter. But even with the widely available commercial butters, you'll get a delicious crust. Duck or goose fat make a beautiful crust as well, as does good lard. The texture will differ however, as the water content is different from butter. Also, if you're using rendered duck fat, you may want to eliminate the salt from the dough if the duck has been salted. But taste and adjust accordingly. Any liquid will work, but water is the basic one. Milk contains some fat and solids. Cider, which I use sometimes, contains sugars, which affect the taste - not always for the worse. Vinegar and/or lemon juice also affect the flavor. Cold stock, which is kind of cool to use if you're using duck fat or lard, will have it's own seasonings and may have additional salt. Make sure the liquid is cold - you don't want to melt the fat at all, or make it too warm. It's tricky to use duck fat because it melts so quickly, so you have to work extra fast. Good luck.

Rolling pie dough: I always have success, and have followed the Joy of Cooking's basic pie dough recipe for decades -- I've successfully baked pies for 40+ years. The recipe calls for only the basics: cold butter, room temperature shortening (I use Crisco), all purpose flour, salt and 4-6 Tablespoons of cold water. That's it. Very simple and very traditional. The dough is NEVER chilled. Think about it: You want the butter and shortening to be soft and absorb/mix-in with the dry ingredients. Chilled fat will take a LOT of handling to get to that consistency, and increased handling results in tough pie crusts. That's why most of the recipes I've seen do not call for chilling the dough. I mix the flour, salt and butter together using a hand-held pastry blender -- See photo. It's a simple, basic pastry making tool that costs between $5 - $10. Very traditional, very tried & true. Sometimes I mix the butter in first, sometimes I mix the shortening. Whichever you choose to use, use the blender to mix the dry ingredients and butter/shortening until the crumbs look like peas. Then add either the butter or shortening and continue mixing with pastry blender until the ingredients look like cornmeal. You really will notice the difference. At that point, add the cold water 1 Tbs at a time, using a fork to lift and mix the ingredients together. While the recipe calls for 4-6 Tbs., I find that 4 Tbs works for me ....sometimes as much as 5. This has been true regardless of whether I've made pies in the dry, mountainous West, or the humid east coast. You'll add only enough water until you can get most of the dry ingredients to hold together in a ball. Assuming it's a 2-crust pie, I halve the pie dough and immediately begin working the first crust. I leave the rest of the pie dough in the bowl, uncovered, open to the air, at room temperature. I ALWAYS roll the dough on a pastry cloth, using a cheese cloth cover for the rolling pin. I use a 40 year old wooden rolling pin. Standard size and weight. Absolutely nothing fancy or unusual about it. The key to using a pastry cloth and cheese cloth cover for the rolling pin is that you will be able to roll out your pie dough and use MUCH less flour. All you need to do is lightly sprinkle a small amount of flour on the pastry cloth, roll the rolling pin over the top of the pastry cloth to get some of the flour on the pin, then begin to work the dough. I have granite counter tops in this house. Other houses have had Corian, wood and the old fashioned vinyl. The type of counter makes absolutely no difference in the quality of the crust. I promise! I anchor the pastry cloth with my body in the front and cannisters in the back, so that everything stays fairly quiet...but even it if moves a bit, that's not a problem. When rolling out your pie dough, work gently but quickly. Do NOT lean on the rolling pin. Merely lightly push the pin from the middle of the dough out in circles. You'll work around the dough. You'll have thick spots of dough and thin, and work the thick spots out...by gently rolling the pin over the dough. Don't lean on it or force it by brute force. More often than not my pie crusts are not perfect when they are rolled out. I like a thinner crust, so that means that I'll have some repair to do as I lay the crust in the pie pan, or lay the top crust on top of the filling. There is lots of room for forgiveness. If it's the bottom crust you're repairing, no one will ever know because it will be hidden by the filling. If it's the top crust, your cut-outs to allow the steam to escape the baking pie will camouflage that. The key is to ensure you have a solid bottom crust so that juice will not escape the pie crust, AND to ensure you have a large enough bottom crust that you can flute the edges of the pie. OR, a large enough top crust for fluting....I've done it both ways, and it just depends on what the crust gods decide that day. I hope these suggestions help. I assure you that once you understand what you're supposed to do, you'll be able to turn out consistently good pie crusts, with confidence and speed. Here is a link that might be useful:

The Perfect-A-Crust rings are not drawn on a mat like the old Tupperware mats (I have a wooden board with the pastry sizes on it like the Tupperware mat I used to use). These are hard plastic rings that are about 1-inch wide and the thickness you would want a nice thin pastry. I know one professional pastry chef who uses them for all their pies because of the consistent results; and a friend who does pastry and baked goods catering and sells a lot of pies, who uses them. The nice thing is that you won't need to use bench flour to roll the dough out. Too much bench flour can cause your crusts to become tough. Raw flour on baked goods isn't always a desirable addition due to the taste it imparts. You use wide sheets of plastic wrap with the rings. If you use an extra sheet of plastic wrap, your rings don't even get dirty. You also have a perfectly round crust when you are done -- no more trimming necessary - so one more time-saver. Clean-up is also a cinch when you don't have the mess of bench flour. -Grainlady

Not growing up, but I do now. We moved for my dad's work when I was in second grade. The 'new' house had a big patch of rhubarb which I suspect my mother had never seen. I don't remember her making much use of it, and there was a big commercial sized freezer in the basement of that house. (It held an occasional salmon and lonely large container of ice cream from time to time) My sister and I would 'sneak' the sugar bowl, go out back and cut rhubarb, dip, eat. Great fun. I can't remember why we felt the need to be sneaky, no one cared if we consumed sugar or not in those days and the rhubarb wasn't otherwise in demand. And by the way, I'm another don't spoil the rhubarb recipes with strawberries. I love rhubarb-only pie.