I Tested 3 Types of Flour for Pie Crust—Here’s the One That Stayed Crisp and Flaky for Days

It's the night before Thanksgiving, and you're frantically scrambling to bake your pies. After a day of prep and cooking, you're finally ready to get started on your pie crust, only to open your pantry and find that you're out of all-purpose flour. Is it worth the extra trip to the grocery store for more flour? Or should you make do with the bread flour or cake flour that's already in your pantry? To find out—and help our readers out of a potentially tricky situation—I decided to see what would happen if I swapped the all-purpose flour in former Serious Eats editor Stella Park's pie crust recipe for two other standard flours: bread flour and cake flour. Which would make the crispiest, flakiest crust, and does the kind of flour you use have an impact on a pie's shelf life after baking?

The Tests

To start, I prepared three batches of all-butter dough, each with a different type of flour: 

• Pillsbury All-Purpose (10.5% protein)
• Pillsbury Softasilk Enriched Cake Flour (6 to 8% protein) 
• Pillsbury Bread Flour (12 to 13% protein)

You'll notice that the flours above all have protein percentages, which indicate their gluten potential—how much gluten the flour can develop when combined with water or incorporated into a dough or water. Though you want pie crusts to be tender, you also want them to be durable enough to roll out and support the filling. As Stella touches on in her pie crust recipe, "Gluten is the force that gives pastry its power, that binds a crust together. It strengthens dough so that we can wield it with confidence, knowing it won't fall apart in our hands." It's likely why most pie crust recipes call for all-purpose flour, which has moderate protein that makes it a versatile choice for cookies, pancakes, biscuits, and more. But is all-purpose flour really the best flour to use? I decided to put it to the test. 

As I worked, I made notes about the dough's texture and durability. Then I blind-baked each crust, allowing it to cool before assessing its flavor and texture. Next, I repeated the process, this time filling each crust with cherry pie filling. After that, I popped my filled pie crusts in the fridge and sampled each one daily over five days to see how they held up. Would my crusts withstand the moisture of the fruit filling? Would they stay crisp and flaky, or would they dissolve into mush?

The Results

All-Purpose Flour

The Dough
My dry and wet ingredients combined smoothly, and the dough remained soft and pliable throughout, though I did find myself adding copious amounts of flour to prevent it from sticking to my rolling pin—which Stella notes is necessary when using a higher ratio of fat to flour, as is the case with her recipe. Of the three flours I tested, I found the dough made with all-purpose flour was easiest to roll to the correct thickness, and it showed minimal shrinkage after rolling.

The Bake
My blind-baked crust turned deeply golden brown, with a crisp texture and at least a quarter-inch of visible layers. Flaky yet sturdy, the all-purpose crust did not break, crack, or crumble, even when removed from the pan. It did shrink slightly after baking, but not as much as the crust I prepared with bread flour (more on that below).

The Filling
The shell remained crisp and super flaky after I filled it, and maintained its crispiness reasonably well over the course of my five-day fridge test. Near the end of the week, it became harder to slice and took on a slight chewiness. However, it still tasted buttery and never grew soggy, even after several days beneath a mountain of cherry pie filling.

The Verdict: All-purpose flour makes a flaky, crispy, easy-to-slice crust that holds up nicely against a moist filling.

Cake Flour

The Dough
Soft and snowy white, the bleached cake flour I used produced a silky dough that remained smooth throughout. Unfortunately, cake flour's finer texture and lower protein content yielded a delicate, less glutinous dough that tore at every step—rolling, folding, lifting it from the rolling pin to the pie tin, and when trimming and crimping. Tearing seemed unavoidable, no matter how well I floured my work surface, how thickly I rolled the dough, or how long it spent in the fridge. Despite my most valiant efforts, I ended up with an uneven, patched-together pie shell every time.

The Bake
My blind-baking parchment clung to the dough, creating thin spots and causing the crust to brown unevenly. Brittle and lacelike, I found the finished crust difficult to manipulate without breakage, and damaged the edges just lifting the finished pie from one side of my kitchen to the other. The crust also had a slightly bitter, metallic flavor, a possible side effect of the bleaching or chlorination process. (As Stella notes in her primer on cake flour, bleaching "impacts absorbency, flavor, and pH.")

The Filling
The fragile cake flour crust was no match for a can of moist cherry pie filling. The crust broke into pieces as soon as I sliced through it with a sharp knife. And as the days wore on, the texture shifted from crumbly and delicate to stale and slightly chewy to dry, hard, and crunchy. It also tasted progressively saltier as it aged.

The Verdict: Pack your patience. A pie crust made with cake flour is a pain to work with, bakes unevenly, and fares poorly against even a standard fruit filling. If you only have cake flour in the cabinet, it's worth a trip to the store to pick up a bag of all-purpose—or simply use a frozen pie crust instead.

Bread Flour

The Dough
Perhaps unsurprisingly, making bread flour pie dough felt an awful lot like making a loaf of bread. As Serious Eats senior editor, Genevieve, notes in this article about bread flour, "expect whatever you're making with [bread flour] to be quite bready." This higher-protein dough felt sturdier, stronger, and more elastic than my all-purpose version and did not break or tear easily, nor did it stick to anything, ever. At the same time, I found it hard to roll the dough to the dimensions I needed because its elasticity kept bouncing back to its original size, forcing me to re-roll the same piece multiple times and over-developing the gluten in the process. The sturdy dough draped neatly over the edges of my pie tin but immediately shrank there, too, requiring an extended chill to relax the gluten before trimming.

The Bake
Because I had trouble rolling the dough as thinly as I wanted to and because it continually shrank after rolling, my bread flour crust felt thicker and tougher than the others, with a slightly chewier (albeit still reasonably flaky) texture. On the upside, the dough was good and sturdy, remained intact when I lifted it from the pan, and sliced cleanly with a sharp knife.

The Filling
Crisp yet sturdy, the crust made with bread flour held its own against the cherry pie filling throughout my five-day experiment. It became chewier as the days wore on, and by the final day, it was difficult to slice. However, my crust remained flaky and fully intact, with no breakage or leaks.

The Verdict: I didn't have high hopes for this one, and found myself surprised by the results. Although all-purpose flour remains by far the best option for making pie crusts, if you only have bread flour on hand, it...actually kind of works?

The Takeaway

While cake flour makes great cakes and bread flour produces great breads, all-purpose flour is the superior choice for a flaky, crisp, and easy-to-slice pie crust. If you're in a pinch? Bread flour can be used. (Yep, this one surprised me too!) It's more difficult to roll out and is prone to shrinkage, but it makes a sturdy (if slightly tough), long-lasting crust that holds its own against a particularly dense or heavy filling. Cake flour, on the other hand, produces a crumbly, delicate crust that would not survive a bumpy car ride to grandma's house on Thanksgiving morning.