Gluten-Free Casein-Free Pie Crust

“I’d given up on pie until I tasted yours,” said my friend S, who recently went gluten-free and dairy-free. I think she’s exaggerating, but I admit I was pleasantly surprised to taste the GFCF strawberry-rhubarb pie I made when we gathered at her parents’ lakehouse with three other families from our Bradley childbirth class. Yes, that’s a total of five families with toddlers, plus a new baby. We’ve had gatherings and potlucks before, but this was our first on-site living and eating extravaganza. Everyone seemed to think the pie turned out pretty well. It was nice to have a large kitchen to play in and to have my son busy playing with other kids instead of using my legs as a tunnel, but I’m still always trying to do a lot of things at once, so I rarely know exactly what I’ve done.

The filling recipe will have to come later, but I’ll start with the crust. This is a simple, easy version I came up with after scouring the in-ter-nets, including Gluten-Free Girl, (whose book I look forward to reading). I’ve decided to post this recipe and whatever others seem to work fairly well both for my friend and so that maybe I can keep a little less paper around for my son to plant stickers on and possibly refine the recipe.

It worked for me, but I encourage anyone else to use their own experience and intuition to tweak as necessary. Chemistry is not my forte, so take all the additional suggestions with something like 1/16 tsp of salt.

Gluten-Free Casein-Free Pie Crust

Ingredients
1 ½ cups GF flour. I use a combination of rice and tapioca flours
¼ tsp salt
½ cup oil

(After the above): 4 Tablespoons cold (filtered) water

I used mostly coconut oil (virgin unrefined) and a little ghee (clarified butter without the milk proteins or sugars). If making a quiche or another savory dish, try olive oil. No soy-based oils or hydrogenated oils! If you can tolerate a little butter (as some otherwise dairy-free folks can), get the good pastured, grass-fed stuff and go for it.

Basic directions

1) Combine flour and salt.
2) Combine dry mixture with oil. Should get crumbles
3) Add 4 Tablespoons cold (filtered) water and mix
4) Fill a 9-inch pie pan. I honestly didn’t try to roll the dough out – just plopped it in the Pyrex and spread it out with my hands. Time is, well, time.
5) Bake in preheated oven (375 ish) for 10-15 min before removing to put in pie filling – maybe longer if the filling is very wet (like a key-lime pie or all berry with no thickener). Eyeball it. Your oven light works, right?

Optional additions (depending on recipe you’re combining this with):
Combine with dry (flour & salt):

• A little brown sugar
• A little cinnamon
• Additional salt (for a savory dish, as a counterpoint to very sweet, or to help with lack of buttery flavor)
• A little xantham gum and a tiny bit of baking soda if you’re trying to make more of a cookie-type crust.
  

Combine with wet (mixture of flour, salt and oil):

• A little molasses, agave or rice syrup
• GF vanilla flavoring
• GF almond flavoring
• GF maple flavoring (good for making graham cracker-like flavor, along with molasses)