Around our house, I am the pie-crust maker. We make our crusts out of organic white rice flour. Mary cannot have gluten and I can't tolerate it often. For this batch, we ran out of our go-to flour and used half organic brown rice flour. No matter. I've found that any standard pie crust recipe only requires one modification in switching from wheat flour. Follow it, but add 2 eggs.
It helps to be fearless.
Other tips when making the attempt:
- Use a finer grind of rice flour, not coarse, if available.
- Make a well in the flour after you cut in the butter. Start to beat the eggs but only a little. The whites and yolks should still be visibly distinct. Then mix in and add the water -- ideally water chilled with ice cubes. Slightly more liquid is needed than for a wheat crust.
- Be prepared to abandon the rolling pin and press it into the pie pan by hand, if needed. I do this about half the time. If the second crust is still not holding together, you can cut it in strips or other shapes to get it onto the pie. Rolling it out on parchment paper helps.
Here it is ready to go in the oven:
For this pie, we also added 2 cups of grated mild cheddar to the pie dough after cutting in the butter. For the filling, we grated fresh ginger onto the apples and topped with generous sprinkles of cinnamon and allulose. We were trying out allulose in place of other sugars to see how it worked. Report: in the filling it tasted like regular sugar; a small handful in the dough was enough to brown up the crust nicely. Here it is just out of the oven:
