Easy Flaky Vegan Pie Crust Recipe (2024)

This easy Vegan Pie Crust Recipe creates a crispy, buttery pie crust perfect for your next vegan pie. You can master this easy flaky crust using only 7 ingredients. It begins with the perfect vegan pie dough, made with my favorite secret ingredient!

You’ll love filling this pie crust with a Vegan Chocolate Pie Filling topped with Vegan Meringue. It’s not only delicious, but it’s beautiful too!

One of the most important parts of any pie is having a perfect pie crust. That’s not rocket science. But the really tricky part is making a simple pie crust that results in a flaky crust, suitable for any pie filling.

This recipe walks you through step-by-step so you can make a delicious vegan pie crust from scratch!

This is my time-tested vegan pie crust recipe. In fact, I’ve been using (and refining) this recipe for years.

Pie Crust Ingredients

You can find the full printable recipe, including ingredient quantities, below. But first, here are some explanations of ingredients and steps to help you make this recipe perfect every time.

This vegan pie crust ismade with only a few simple ingredients:

• Flour — You can also use all-purpose flour or whole wheat pastry flour (not the same as whole wheat flour)
• Salt — salt brings out the flavor in this crust.
• Sugar — I’m recommending a bit of sugar because sugar helps to prevent the formation of gluten in the flour, making for a more tender crust.
• Fat — We’ll use a mixture of vegan butter and shortening. The butter adds the best flavor, but the shortening adds the flakiness.
• Liquid — You have to have liquid in the dough to hydrate the flour and bind everything together. In addition, the liquid and the fat creates steam in the baking process, creating lift in the baked crust. I recommend a combination of chilled vodka and water. See more on why I’m using vodka below.

Use Cold Ingredients in Pie Crusts

Keeping your pie doughingredients — like the fat and liquids — as cold as possible prevents thefat in the unbaked pie from getting soft. If the fat gets soft and melty in the doughbefore baking, you can say bye-bye to a flaky crust.

However, using chilled fat helps it stay intact in the dough. Then as the pie bakes, the lumps of fat melt in the oven and produce steam. That steam helps creates micro-layers of flakiness. I think this may have been what my sisters called me when I was a kid, but I digress.

So, think of it this way, a warm dough will yield a hard, greasy crust, whereas a cold dough will yield a tender, flaky vegan pie crust.

How to Make Vegan Pie Crust

First things first, I like to use afood processor to make my pie crust. It makes it easier to get the vegan butter evenly distributed throughoutthe flour.

Here’s the dilemma: If you over-process your dough, it can overwork the gluten in the flour, resulting in a chewy crust. You also want big bits of butter throughout the crust, because that’s what makes it flaky. So, just be sure to use the processor in short bursts.

Step One: Mix Dry Ingredients

Combine the flour, salt and sugar in the food processor and give it a few pulses to combine.

Step Two: Cut in the Fat

Store both the vegan butter and vegetable shortening in the fridge (or even the freezer) for about 30 minutes prior to making your crust. Why? Because you want bits of fat distributed throughout the dough and working with cold fat helps achieve that.

Chop the cold vegan butter and shortening, and then add these slices to the flour mixture. After a few pulses, the fat should be equally distributed throughout the dough.

Step Three: Add Liquid

When you add liquid to all-purpose flour it immediately begins activating the gluten. That’s one reason I’m using equal parts of water and vodka. I learned about this trick from 101 Cookbooks. Heidi recommends including a little vodka because it helps make the pie dough to be more malleable and flakier.

To chill the water and vodka, pour it into a glass with ice. Then measure it out and pour it over the crust.

Sprinkle the cold vodka over the pie dough and stir until combined. Next, add the chilled water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the dough is slightly tacky and sticks together.

Step Four: Cover and Chill

This is a double pie crust recipe, so once your dough is ready, divide it in half and roll the dough into discs. Then wrap it in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes or up to 3 days. Or you can freeze it where it will last up to 2 months!

I love having a disk of frozen pie dough in the freezer for those spur of the moment times when I want to make a pie.

That chilling step is important because ithelps create a firm dough and makes rolling it much easier.

Step Five: Follow your Pie Instructions

The next step is to follow your specific pie recipe instructions. For example, a vegan pumpkin pie will call for an unbaked vegan pie crust. In that case, you would roll out the dough, place it in the pie pan, and crimp the edges. Once the filling is ready, pour it in the unbaked pie shell and bake it all together.

Alternatively, a chocolate pudding pie usually calls for a baked pie crust. In that case, you would roll out the dough, place it in a pie pan, crimp the edges, prick the bottom of the pie with a fork, and bake the crust. I oftentimes will add pie weights to the crust while baking it so that the crust doesn’t develop bubbles as its baking.

How to Roll Pie Crust

To roll out pie dough, begin by lightly flouring a surface or you can roll the dough between two sheets of waxed paper.

Either way, just remember to be gentle when rolling your dough. Using a rolling pin, always start from the center of the disc and roll out away from the center. This requires turning the dough frequently. So roll, and turn, then roll and turn. You get the idea.

For a standard 9″ inch pie pan, roll the dough 11–12″ in diameter. Yes, I keep a ruler in the kitchen. Or you can get a pie rolling sheet that gives dimensions.

Then transfer the dough into the pie pan and trim and flute the edges.

How Do You Make a Flaky Pie Crust?

Pie dough involves pockets of fat surrounded by hydrated flour. We’ll be using a food processor to cut the fat into the flour and then roll it out to make a pie crust. While that crust is baking, it gets flaky because of the layers of fat and hydrated flour throughout the dough.

The best trick to making a flaky vegan pie crust is to minimize the amount of moisture used, while still having enough stickiness to roll it. Using minimal liquids helps create the flakiest pie crust possible. That’s why my favorite trick involves alcohol.

Vodka adds moisture to the pie dough, allowing it to be malleable enough to work with. Of course, most of it bakes off in the oven, leaving a nice, flaky crust.

Vegan Pie Crusts

There are lots of different vegan pie crusts. Let’s discuss some of the options you have for your next vegan pie. For example:

• This Oatmeal Pie Crust is simple to make and undeniably flavorful
• You can create your own Oreos crust, like this one using Golden Oreos, Vegan Banana Cream Pie
• Here’s a healthy, raw pie crust using nuts and dried fruit that is more like a vegan tart: Chocolate Pie Pastry Recipe
• Or you can make a vegan graham cracker crust like this one, Vegan Cheesecake recipe
• You can’t go wrong with a flaky crust like this one. This Vegan Pecan Pie recipe shows how to bake your crust with a custard.

So, you see, there are lots of vegan pie crust recipes, including some healthier versions too.

That’s our post for Vegan Pie Crust. Use the recipe below to make your own and stay tuned because there are some pretty fabulous pie recipes coming your way this week.

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Enjoy!

This post was originally published in 2015 and was updated to include new photos, new text, and an updated recipe in 2020.