Now’s the time for all good pastry mavens to dust off their favorite pie dough recipe as Thanksgiving approaches, with its trilogy of holiday pies – pumpkin, pecan and apple. That said, I urge you to use lard in your pie dough. A great dough can be made with all lard, as I feature here with Paula C’s Pie Dough or the one that I have published here often– a flaky pastry dough that uses both butter and lard.
The lard that you see on supermarket shelves should be avoided at all costs because it’s hydrogenated and filled with the “bad” fats. Pure freshly rendered leaf lard has no trans fats whereas the commercial variety available in supermarkets has it in spades because it’s so highly processed.
