Q. What type of flour to use for pies?
A. This is a tough one. It depends on the type of dough you’re making and how flaky you want your crust to turn out.
For regular pie dough, all purpose works perfectly well, since you’re cutting the fat into the flour the strands are fully coated and shouldn’t develop too much gluten anyway.
For sweet short pastry (SSP, sweet dough or pate sucree), a combination of half bread and half cake flour works best. But whatever you have on hand will work fine.
Puff pastry requires bread flour ideally, but it’s not too common for that to be made at home. In Michel Roux’s awesome book, Pastry, he uses all purpose flour for all his doughs, and he has 3 michelin stars, so who am I to argue?
