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Author:
Tracy Nawara
Everyone loves a good pie, even those who cannot eat gluten. Keep your gluten-free friends in mind and make a wheat-less dessert every once in a while. This writer knows firsthand how hard it is to refuse a delicious-looking pie because of the wheat crust. It’s not pretentious, it’s painful to ingest.
People who are not gluten-free cannot get over how delicious this Easy Gluten-Free Oat Pie Crust is! It is made with freshly milled oat flour instead of wheat flour, so the result is a crumbly, textured, buttery pie crust that goes well with any filling. Cinnamon flavors the oats, making for an oatmeal cookie flavor right inside the crust!
Step one in making a homemade oat pie crust is grinding the oats to make flour. You can buy oat flour pre-made, but why not make it yourself? It takes only a few minutes with the help of your food processor, and the fresh flavor is worth it. Simply add your oats to your food processor and measure out 1.5 cups after processing for accurate flour measuring.
After you finely process your flour, you have two options. You can add the pie crust ingredients to the flour as-is, or you can sift the flour first. Sifting will separate the fine flour from the larger oat pieces, leading to a more uniform pie crust. Adversely, you could also leave the grind on the oat a little chunkier, leading to a very textured pie crust. The recipe as written calls for sifting the flour to mimic a more traditional pie crust.
Once the flour is blended and sifted, it is ready to make pie dough. A small amount of sugar is added to lightly sweeten the pie crust. Cinnamon flavors the oats slightly, which is a very traditional pairing found in many oatmeal cookie recipes. You could even make a filling with raisins to make an oatmeal cookie pie!
The last and most important ingredient in this pie crust is the melted butter. The butter allows the crust to brown very nicely in the oven, but it also gives tons of flavor that you don’t get from oil. Butter is the most important ingredient inside pie crust, so don’t forgo it here. If you are vegan, use high-quality vegan butter for this recipe.
Once the crust is baked and cooled, the no-bake filling for your pie can be customized to whatever your tastes are. You could use chocolate pudding to make a chocolate oat pie, topping everything with freshly chopped nuts. Another great application for this pie crust is a marshmallow fluff/vanilla pudding filling for an oatmeal cream pie, much like the famous cookie.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a 9-inch pie plate with nonstick cooking spray and set it aside.
Process whole gluten-free oats until they are very finely ground in your food processor. If you want less texture in your pie crust, sift the flour before adding it to the dough. Measure out 1 ½ cups of the sifted flour and save any excess for other GF recipes.
In your clean food processor, combine the oat flour, white sugar, salt, and cinnamon. Pulse to combine the dry ingredients. Then stream in the butter through the feed tube while the machine is running. Stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula and process one more time to make sure everything is well combined.
Press the dough into your prepared pie plate. Use the flat bottom of a measuring cup to press the sides and bottom of the crust firmly.
Bake in your preheated oven for 15-20 minutes or until lightly browned and set. Allow it to cool completely before filling.
Fill with any no-bake pie filling that you like and serve.
