Homemade Chocolate Pie Crust

We all love pies, don't we?

They can appear daunting because making homemade pie crust can be challenging, especially when you're starting out. Practice makes perfect and that is very true when it comes to baking.

Having good recipes is also needed if you want to master pie dough making. This one took a long time to get right as I was using too much cocoa powder at first and that made it borderline bitter and too astringent.

This is a recipe that will produce a solid chocolate dough that you can use with a myriad of pie recipes, from individual black forest tarts to chocolate sandwich cookies.

Replace your favorite traditional crust with this one for an extra dose of chocolate.

It's especially good for those that already have chocolate in the filling like the chocolate raspberry tart or the chocolate pecan pie. But you can also replace cookie crusts with it and use it for the baked cheesecake with chocolate crust or the easiest chocolate mint mousse pie.

So, let's get into this chocolate pie crust recipe.

Ingredients

• Cocoa powder: always use unsweetened. I like Hershey's unsweetened cocoa powder, Ghirardelli Premium baking cocoa, and Scharffen Berger natural cocoa powder. And, in my experience, the dark ones are the best (this does not apply to the super dark used for making homemade oreo cookies known as dark cocoa powder).
• Butter: use good quality and unsalted. Lower quality butter usually has a larger percentage of water. For doughs, I like to use the best I can buy.
• Egg yolk: it binds the dough together and adds richness and makes it more pliable, easy to handle.
• Powdered sugar: also called confectioners' sugar or icing sugar, it acts very differently than regular sugar making the crust smoother so don't substitute it.
• Flour: I use cake or all-purpose and have great results with both. Each country tends to have its own definition of what each one should or shouldn't contain, so use the one you always do.
• Salt: I like to use kosher salt when baking. But regular table salt works just fine.
• Vanilla: I use pure vanilla extract or pure vanilla paste when available, but a good vanilla essence (artificially flavored) also works. 

Steps for making this recipe

I always use the food processor for the first part where the butter is worked into the dry ingredients. It saves time and I can make a double batch (this will depend on the size of your processor, so don't double the recipe the first time).

But it can be easily made by hand in its entirety.

Both are finished by hand on the counter.

Food processor:

1. Put dry ingredients in the bowl of the processor (image 1). Mix to combine.
2. Add butter cubes (image 2) and pulse a few times to mix. The butter should be the size of peas, roughly.
3. Add the egg yolk and vanilla if using (image 3) and pulse a few times until it moistens the mixture (image 4) but be careful not to start making a ball.

By hand:

1. Put dry ingredients in a large bowl. Mix to combine.
2. Scatter butter cubes on top. Use your hands or a pastry cutter (also called pastry blender) to incorporate the butter into the flour until it's roughly the size of peas.
3. Add the egg yolk and vanilla if using and mix with a fork until it is moistened. The dough will be more irregular than image 4, as it's harder to incorporate it evenly by hand.

For both methods:

• Dump the shaggy mass onto a counter or working surface (image 5).
• Start bringing it together with your hands. At first, it will appear as though it will never bind or come together properly (image 6). But it will.
• Keep turning it onto itself until you have a solid dough (image 7).
• Wrap it in plastic wrap or put it in a freezer bag (image 8) and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. This is a crucial step for getting tender and flaky doughs. It keeps for several days in the fridge or frozen for a month.

Rolling the chocolate dough

• Lightly flour a clean counter or surface, and unwrap the cold dough.
• Start rolling (use a rolling pin) and make sure you do a quarter turn often (I do it to the left), that is you roll a few times and then lift the dough and turn it a little to the left. That will ensure that the dough never sticks too much to the counter and, if it does, you fix it by adding some flour.
  But you don’t roll it a lot without checking if it needs more flour. Because if you do, it will soften too much, stick to the surface and it will be difficult to lift it without tearing it. And also, it will probably mean that the dough has softened too much and we don’t want that.
• Roll it until the dough is a few inches larger than the pan you’re using. Measure it so you have enough dough to go up the sides.

Vintage Kitchen tip: make sure the dough is rested before rolling. And that the pie dough is softened enough to be rolled but still cold, as cold as possible.

Lining a pie pan

This chocolate dough is good for one large 8 or 9-inch tart pan or for 4-6 individual tartlets, depending on the size you use.

Most pie doughs are similar when it comes to rolling, lining the pan, and baking. So for very detailed instructions go to the post for Sweet Shortcrust Pastry. There are videos and images to guide you.

Vintage Kitchen tip: when lining a tart pan (or pie plate) let the rolled dough ease into it, don't stretch it to fit. If you do that it will shrink too much when baked. I highly recommend freezing it for 15 minutes before baking. It will help it keep its shape as much as possible.

Baking

There are a few steps that will help you get a flat tart shell with a crisp texture.

• Pricking the crust: once the pie pan is lined and the excess dough is removed, we need to prick the bottom of the pan with a fork (dock a pie crust as we say).
  Why do we do this? In the oven, the dough will try to grow and puff up too much, reducing the amount of space left for the filling.
  Piercing the bottom helps it stay put and not grow as much because the air trapped inside will be able to escape through the holes.
• Blind baking: this step is pre-baking the dough with weight on top (pie weights, rice, beans, flour, there are many options with what you have at home). It is called blind because the raw pie dough is completely covered with paper (aluminum foil or parchment paper).
  Why do we do this? To prevent a soggy crust and to help the crust retain its shape as it bakes. You can find instructions in this link: steps for bling baking pie dough.
  

Uses for chocolate pie crust

• Pies and tarts. Any filling with chocolate and/or berries is great for a chocolate crust.
• Cookies. Roll, cut, and bake as you would any other cut-out cookie. They are amazing and can be glazed or sandwiched.
• Cobblers. There is a type of cobbler that is made with pie crust. I like to make a simple lattice-like for the Fig Jam Tart. That way the fruit bakes and bubbles around the crust. An amazing and easy dessert.

This is another recipe for the Basics category, one of my favorite parts of this blog, and of being a baker. I love doughs of all kinds. Love making them and working with them.