Pies can make otherwise confident cooks cower in fear. Pie crust is hard to handle, can turn out soggy, burns unpredictably, and is best when made with lard – which is enough on its own to frighten most of us (not to mention our cardiologists). Fillings won’t thicken, fruit won’t cook, and the first cut slice always looks like someone dropped it on the floor.

But pie crust is not necessarily a fearsome thing. Yes, lard made your great-grandmother’s pies flaky, but it isn’t needed for a perfectly nice pie crust. Crisco isn’t either. Think about this: puff pastry and croissants are the flakiest pastries known to mankind, and both are properly made with butter. That said, both are made with many, many layers of butter, which pie crust doesn’t have. But butter really does make a lovely pie crust.

You have official permission to go ahead and use refrigerated pie crusts, now that Cook’s Illustrated has conceded that refrigerated Pillsbury crusts are now nearly as good as homemade. The best are the ones rolled up into tubes; the fold-out ones tend to tear at the folds. Commercial crusts don’t taste quite as good as homemade, and they are usually not very flaky, but after your first midlife rotator cuff tear you won’t be rolling out doughs anymore anyway.

Pay strict attention to filling thickeners – flour works, but not as well as tapioca. Our grandmothers used tapioca pearls, but the wide availability of gluten-free foods has brought tapioca flour to most grocery shelves and online merchants. Tapioca flour (also called tapioca starch) gives a glossy, translucent look to the food it thickens – not appealing in gravies, but perfect for fruit pie fillings. Cornstarch also works, but we think the resulting filling is slightly gluey and stretchy. That said, King Arthur Baking has a very nice cornstarch thickener, called Instant Clearjel, that works reliably without the gumminess of regular cornstarch.

You may notice something missing from our fruit pie recipes: an instruction to “dot with butter” before baking. Carla got bored during one spring break when she was stuck at school, and decided to find out why most recipes call for it. With the web and the deserted Northwestern University library at her disposal, she found out … that there is no food chemistry/molecular gastronomological reason for adding butter to fruit pies. So why do we do it? One of the consulting bakers monitoring the community forums on what we’ll call a nationally known food-related television channel’s website told her that the butter helps the crust brown. But how does it do that when it’s underneath the crust, she asked? No explanation followed. The real answer lies in our DNA – like wasps, humans crave fat and sugar. The more fat and sugar in a food, the better we think it tastes. Adding butter to pies makes them taste better. Or maybe it doesn’t. Carla stopped adding butter just to see what would happen, and she found that fruit pies tasted brighter, somewhat sweeter, and the texture felt less gloppy. If you disagree, go ahead and dot about 2 tablespoons of butter over the fruit before adding the top crust. She won’t mind.

No matter what the recipe says or doesn’t say, seal the edges of all double-crust pies. The easiest way to do this is to brush the edges of the bottom crust with water or an egg wash (1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon of water), put the top crust on, then press the tines of a fork around the edges, sealing the crust. However, when baking fruit pies, always put a cookie sheet on the lower rack to catch drips, which WILL happen even if you seal the edges perfectly. Put the pie on the center rack to bake.

Finally, you can use pie weights to pre-bake a crust so the bottom doesn’t get soggy, and this will give you a fair shot at getting the whole crust relatively flaky. To prevent burning the edges of your pie crusts when you bake the filling, you can lightly tuck a strip of aluminum foil around the edge of your pie pan. The crust may not be the same color as the top of the crust (think tan lines) but it won’t be burned.

For a fully baked pie crust, bake at 350 degrees for bout 30 minutes or until golden brown. If you need to partially bake a crust, bake at 350 degrees or until it just begins to brown – usually about 10 minutes.