Pie crust intimidates more home bakers than anything else, including yeast bread. The fear comes from a few mythologies: that you need ice water, that you cannot touch the dough, that one wrong move and the whole thing turns into shoe leather. None of this is true. Pie crust is a flour dough with a lot of cold fat in it. If you understand that, you understand pie.
The whole job is keeping the fat in big enough pieces that it streaks through the dough instead of getting absorbed into it. When the pie hits the oven, those streaks of fat melt and turn into steam pockets, which is what gives you flake. So you want your butter cold, your water cold, your hands cool, and your mixing time short. The opposite of bread, where you knead to develop gluten. With pie you do the minimum to bring it together.
Spend one Sunday afternoon making three crusts back to back. Make the first by hand, the second in a food processor, the third by smashing big slabs of frozen butter with a rolling pin into a sheet of flour. By the end of the afternoon you will have a feel for the dough that no recipe can give you. Bake the three crusts blind, taste them, take notes, and you will never again be afraid of a pie.
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