I’ve Baked Hundreds of Pies. These Are the Essential Tools I Use Every Time.

Just like anything you create in the kitchen, great pie starts with quality ingredients—fresh seasonal fruit, good unbleached flour, and flavorful butter. I’ll admit that for a while I used whatever butter I could find at the corner grocery store to make my pâte brisée (pie crust dough).

But that all changed when we started buying big packs of Kerrygold at Costco for such a good price that I let myself use the fancy butter in my baking. I’ll never turn back. Like all European butter, Kerrygold has a higher fat content than American butter, up to 86% compared with around 80%, respectively. And Kerrygold butter is made from grass-fed cows, which produce more flavorful milk than grain-fed ones. These factors help create a delicious, buttery pie crust. If, for whatever reason, I can’t find butter from Kerrygold, Cabot is a solid runner-up choice.

(If you’re wondering, I default to salted butter these days, but you can definitely stick with unsalted if you prefer.)

I was a devotee of food-processor pie dough for many years. But one day I realized that lugging out my Cuisinart processor and all its parts, making one batch of dough, then washing and drying everything kind of took the joy out of pie making for me. So I decided to get a cheap pastry blender from the kitchen store—that I’ve since replaced with a one from Crate and Barrel—and immediately became hooked.

Cutting the butter into the flour with a pastry blender has made me a much better pie maker because it’s forced me to slow down and really pay attention. This let me figure out the exact texture that the flour mixture should be—a coarse meal with varying lentil- and pea-sized butter bits—before adding water to get a perfect flaky crust. I never had that level of control with a food processor.

After you’ve cut the butter into the flour, it’s time to pull the whole thing together with ice water. I follow two universal rules with pie dough: Keep it cold and work fast. The more you work your pie dough, the tougher it gets because heat and agitation cause wheat gluten to become elastic and toothsome. And our goal is tender and flaky.

The dough whisk, with its loop-de-loop design, lets you quickly incorporate liquid into the butter and flour mixture without the gloppy mess that builds up on a wooden spoon or even a fork. And its usefulness goes beyond pie. Wirecutter’s resident homesteader, senior staff writer Doug Mahoney, has already extolled the usefulness of the dough whisk for its ability to quickly and easily incorporate flour when he makes no-knead bread.

In a pinch, I’ve rolled dough with all sorts of things, such as dowel rods, wine bottles, and old, warped antique rolling pins. And even though those things do the job, investing in a well-made tapered rolling pin is the best option. The beautiful, hand-finished 23-inch Whetstone Woodenware French Rolling Pin is the top pick in our rolling pin guide.

A tapered pin is specifically designed to help you roll out your dough into a circle—assuming, that is, that you’re starting with an even, rounded disk. That’s because the tapered ends allow you to easily turn the pin as you roll. A straight rolling pin, on the other hand, tends to just roll back and forth until you pick it up to change directions.

But no matter what you use, remember this important rule: Be brave and work fast. Heat and overworking are death to any hopes of a tender, flaky crust.

Yes, this is obvious. But you can’t make a pie without a pie plate—otherwise it’s a crostata or a galette. I prefer shallower ones like the Pyrex 9-Inch Pie Plate, the runner-up in our guide to pie plates, over the deep-dish variety.

This is for two reasons. First, I find that shallow plates are more versatile. The Pyrex plate works for all pies, whereas a deep dish holds too much volume for your average custard pie recipe, like pumpkin, buttermilk, and lemon meringue. The second reason is more personal: I like lots of crust. So much so that I regularly take my first bite from the back edge.

This article was edited by Marguerite Preston and Marilyn Ong.