Instructions

Cut butter into cubes and place, with shortening into the freezer to chill completely. Next, add the flour and sugar to a large bowl and stir briefly to combine. Once the butter/shortening has chilled, add to the bowl of dry ingredients. Cut in the fats using a pastry cutter or (if you're old-school like me) two knives-- see method below.

If you need to break up the chunks a bit more, feel free to get in there with your hands a bit. You should be left with chunks of butter flour roughly the size of large peas.

Tablespoon by tablespoon, add ice water to the bowl and mix with a fork. At this point your dough should be coming together nicely.

Dump out onto a floured board and roll into a ball-- it should come together with little to no flour dust, and yet there should still be visible chunks of butter visible. Wrap your dough ball in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Once your dough has refrigerated for 30 minutes, cut the ball into two pieces-- one should be slightly bigger than the other (the bottom part of your pie will be bigger than the top since it needs to run up the sides of your pie pan.

Place the first, larger ball in between two large sheets of wax paper, and using a rolling pin roll this out to at least 1 inch larger than your 9 inch pie pan (you should still see those bits of butter in the dough).

At this point you can pre-bake or fill, according to whatever recipe you're following. If topping, roll the top out in the same way, and crimp the edges closed-- also according to whatever design aesthetic you're going for! There is a handy sample of crust border designs here at Food52.