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Back in 2008, Good Eats showed a recipe for pie crust which included distilled alcohol. In 2009, America's Test Kitchen showed a recipe for blueberry pie which also used alcohol in the crust. In both cases, the program explained that alcohol made the pie dough easier to work without encouraging gluten formation the way that water would.
Does anyone know where the idea of using alcohol in pie crust really came from? Was this a well-known trick, or did one of these programs invent the idea?
In November 2007 a recipe was published in Cooks Illustrated for a Foolproof Pie dough with vodka. That recipe was created by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt who was one of the chefs on America's Test Kitchen and writer for Cooks Illustrated. He has an article about the recipe here http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2011/07/the-food-lab-the-science-of-pie-how-to-make-pie-crust-easy-recipe.html?ref=sweets-sb3. As far as I know this was not a well-known trick and Lopez-Alt came up with it originally.
