What is the difference between lard and Crisco? Answer: Lard is actually rendered and clarified pork fat. Crisco®, which is a brand name and part of the Smucker’s family of brands, is a vegetable shortening.

Luckily, for most recipes, it is perfectly fine to use lard instead of shortening. If you’re looking to use lard as a substitute for shortening in pie crust, remember that it is the same consistency and ratio as the recipe already specifies.

“Shortening” actually refers to all fats and oils, but what we’re talking about here is hydrogenated vegetable oil shortening (such as Crisco). This kind of shortening is typically made from soybean, cottonseed, or palm oil.

Lard: If it doesn’t make you squeamish, lard makes an incredible pastry crust. It chills nicely and doesn’t break down under heat as quickly as butter. Shortening: The fat of choice for pie baking in the fifties and sixties, shortening has a very high melting point, which makes it very easy to mix into pie crust.

The Pie Crust Takeaways Butter made a tastier, flakier, sturdier crust by far. This isn’t to say that shortening and lard aren’t useful ingredients. Shortening is a great way to get incredibly tender desserts.

You can substitute shortening with butter using a 1:1 ratio, and then adding 1-2 tablespoons more of butter for good measure. So for every cup of shortening plan to use 1 cup of butter plus 2 tablespoons. Butter has a lower melting point than shortening, so this might slightly change the texture of your pie crust.

Flour: For a tender crust, choose a low-protein flour. Pastry flour, with a protein content of about 8-10%, ranks between all-purpose flour and cake flour. All-purpose flour works just fine for pie crusts, while cake flour might lack enough protein to form a workable, elastic dough.

Bob’s Red Mill Unbleached Organic All-Purpose Flour. Heckers Unbleached All-Purpose Flour. King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour. Pillsbury’s Best All-Purpose Flour.

Basically, if you’re baking something that isn’t bread (which demands the elasticity that comes with a higher-protein bread flour), pastry flour is an excellent ingredient to turn to. Cake flour can be a better choice for cakes with an extremely light texture, such as angel food cake or a melt-in-your-mouth pound cake.

Eggs play an important role in everything from cakes and cookies to meringues and pastry cream — they create structure and stability within a batter, they help thicken and emulsify sauces and custards, they add moisture to cakes and other baked goods, and can even act as glue or glaze.

Pastry Flour: An unbleached flour made from soft wheat, with protein levels somewhere between cake flour and all-purpose flour (8 to 9 percent). Pastry flour strikes the ideal balance between flakiness and tenderness, making it perfect for pies, tarts and many cookies.