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For the past 2 weeks I have been working on an ice cream pie recipe and I’ve been running into a few issues(I have less than 2 months of baking experience). I would like to know if I can use traditional pie crusts(for nut pies, cream pies etc) to make ice cream pies. I have attempted it myself but the crust was said to be either chewy or too hard. Any advice?Final outcome of the pie

PS: I also added a picture of the final outcome for reference.

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  • Welcome to the site! Are your pastry crusts coming out right in the first place, before you add the ice cream?
    – GdD
    Jul 7, 2020 at 9:56
  • Thank you for the warm welcome! There are so many oven temperatures for pie crusts that I’m asking myself the same question. The crusts for the pies above were baked at 218 C°(425F°) for 20 minutes with beans for pie weights and then an additional 5-10 minutes without.
    – Abdulhamid
    Jul 7, 2020 at 10:35
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    I would suggest you focus on making a good pie crust first. There are several questions about pie crusts and pastry on this site which have good answers, just use the search link at the top. In general if you have a good crust to begin with you'll get a good ice cream pie, but there are some things you can do. I'll see if I have time to answer this later if nobody else does.
    – GdD
    Jul 7, 2020 at 10:46

1 Answer 1

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As you don't have much experience with baking, I would recommend that you find a recipe for a crust specifically intended for an ice cream pie, and then work from there.

It's possible that you'll find that there's something wrong with your technique, and the crust isn't any better than what you've made so far, but I suspect that your problem is that most pie crusts aren't meant to be served nearly frozen.

Starches and fats can change significantly when chilled. Consider something like long grain white rice -- it may have been perfectly fluffy when cooked, but when cooled to refrigerator temperatures the starches form a hard crystalline structure. Many breads get chewy after they've been frozen and thawed. I suspect that this is your problem with hard and/or chewy crusts.

Our perception of tastes change with temperature as well, so it's possible that you'll need more salt, sugar, or spices in the crust.

I'm not an experienced baker myself enough to know what changes need to be made for ice cream pies, and that's why I don't think that you just need to "focus on making a good pie crust", as even the best pie crust for a fruit pie might make a horrible crust for an ice cream pie. I suspect that there's a reason that many freezer pies use cookie crumb crusts, and not a pastry crust.

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  • Hi Joe! Thank you for the response. After all my efforts, I did some research and found that most recipes call for graham crackers which is not readily accessible in my region (Nigeria). Some use cookies crumbs and others use chocolate wafers e.g KitKat. My intention was to implement these ice cream pie in my family Gelato shop.
    – Abdulhamid
    Jul 7, 2020 at 16:34
  • @Abdulhamid : this might help : cooking.stackexchange.com/q/50371/67
    – Joe
    Jul 8, 2020 at 14:49
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    Also a thought -- as you're doing this professionally, and not as a one-off, you might want to talk to any local bakeries. You might try experimenting with stale or broken cookies, and maybe find a use for items that they would consider to be waste.
    – Joe
    Jul 15, 2020 at 5:48
  • Thank you so much Joe. I attempted making graham crackers from scratch which came out decent for a first attempt but i will continue to work on it.
    – Abdulhamid
    Jul 15, 2020 at 13:51

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