Pie Crust - Up Close and Personal

This was originally going to be a very simple post - describe the steps to making a basic pie crust and accompany those directions with photographs. This is a blog about pie, I reasoned. I should tell people how to make a pie crust!

Then I realized that 11,100,000 results come up in 0.24 seconds when you Google the phrase "pie crust recipe," and that describing the few steps to making a pie crust wasn't just the most obvious topic in the history of pie blogs, it was also the most boring idea I'd ever had.

So I decided to do things a little differently.

I had been itching to try out a new iPhone camera lens that this guy had gotten me for Christmas - a macro lens that magnetically attaches to the outside of your cell phone's camera - and rationalized that this was the perfect opportunity to blend my pie crust post and my new (nerdy) gadget. I mean, who hasn't stopped cold in the middle of making a pie to wonder "gee, if only I knew exactly what this flour looked like close up!" Well, I sure have.

I'll call it "pietography."

How to Make a Pie Crust - In Six Simple Steps but Many Accompanying Pictures

Ingredients 
1 cup flour
1/3 cup Crisco shortening
Dash salt
A glass of ice water

How to
1.) Pour the flour into a large bowl

1 cup of flour in a large mixing bowl

Flour, leveled with a knife

Flour on a knife

2.) Add a dash of salt

Grains of salt

Yes, I poured salt all over my kitchen table to get this shot

The (topless) salt shaker

So. many. grains. of. salt. And this is just a dash!

3.) Cut the shortening into smaller slabs, add into bowl

1/3 cup Crisco on a cutting board

Crisco on the edge of a knife

Flour/salt/Crisco in large mixing bowl

4.) Mix the flour/shortening/salt

A pastry cutter makes this step a lot easier

5.) Slowly add some ice water and begin to kneed the dough

A glass of ice water

Ice Cube - the frozen water, not the rapper

6.) Form the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes

Ball of kneaded dough

Dough isn't very photogenic up close. Sorry, dough.

Dough on the edge of the pastry cutter

The "normal" photos were all taken with my iPhone, sans special lens. The close-ups were all taken with the Photojojo Macro lens for iPhone. Let's hear it for iPhoneography!