Carry Laws
Hi, I’m Marie welcome to Marie’s kitchen, I’m so glad you’re back today, we’re making apple pie, and there are two main problems that I see with apple pie. The first is undercooked apples. You go to cut into your apple pie and it’s hard or you go to bite into it and it’s crunchy. That is not what you’re going for. So in order to cook the apples more, you put it back in the oven and end up burning your crust.
So that’s problem number one: either undercooked apples or cooked apples in a burnt crust. The second problem is shrinkage apples shrink when they cook they release juice, they release Steam and they shrink way down. So, even if you go and build up your apple pie really tall and have a big crust and egg wash and sugar and it’s beautiful – you put it in the oven, it comes out and it’s sunken down, or sometimes the apples sink down and the crust stays Up so then, when you go to cut it, there’s a huge gap, I’m going to show you how to solve both problems with one easy fix. Let’S get started and I should add. This is not a perfect pie.
If you’re looking for a perfect pie, you came to the wrong place and I’ll tell you why it’s not a perfect pie, because that is not my standard and I don’t think it should be yours. The standard for a pie is delicious, lovely, warm, comforting memorable. This is not a perfect pie. We just need to take that out of our vocabulary. I see it way too much in recipes lately, and I just I’m I’m making a statement here and we’re not going for that on this show.
Okay, this next step is going to solve your apple pie problems. We are going to cook the apple, so you need a big pot or you know a large pan and we’re going to start by putting in 3/4 cup brown sugar and to that we’re going to add 1/4 cup allpurpose, flour and – and you can use gluten-free in Its place, if needed, you could also use cornstarch. If you prefer, I like to use flour, it doesn’t have quite as much flavor as corn starch and now things could get a little controversial here. I’Ve been teaching pie, classes for many years, apple pie, specifically and from those classes. I have learned something, and that is that people have very strong feelings about really three things: cinnamon nutmeg and how they slice their apples.
A good friend of mine will only Cube her apples, that’s how her mom did it and that’s how she does her apple pie. So I wasn’t going to change her on that cinnamon. Some people don’t want a lot of cinnamon in their apple pie. They want just a hint, and that is totally fine. Today I go anywhere from a tablespoon down to a half teaspoon, so you can do whatever range in there that you like next is nutmeg.
I’M always surprised there’s so so many people that hate nutmeg and it’s a strong word, my husband, actually hates nutmeg. I love nutmeg we’re just going to do a little pinch here, so it’s not strong. I think it has such a great flavor. It’S lovely now we’re just going to stir our dry ingredients together here in this pan, and this will get the salt, the sugar, the spices, the flour, all mixed together, break up the LMS of the brown sugar. If you can and we’ve got a nice mixture here looks good to that, we’re going to add our apples.
There go the apples and we’re also going to add 1 tbspoon lemon juice about a tablespoon. Next up is some vanilla and I used to not put vanilla in my apple pie, but I love it now. It’S just a wonderful flavor. It goes well with the vanilla ice cream. So now I put a te teaspoon of vanilla in and this is um definitely optional.
Whatever you like now we’ll sort of toss, the dry ingredients with the apples just gently here, you can use your hands if you like, and that is ready to go on the stove, we’re going to add 1/4 cup water, and next is 1/4 cup and salted butter. 1/4 cup is 4 tablespoons and I will put on the screen the conversions when I edit this article cuz. I don’t remember what they are right now, but we’re going to add about uh 4 tspoons butter, I’m going to cut that into some cubes. It’S a/4 cup toss that in and that’s going to give this pie a lot of richness, so we’re just going to stir this. You know fairly frequently you want all the apples to get evenly cooked and you don’t want anything to burn so keep the temperature fairly low or medium medium low and let this cook for about 15 to 20 minutes.
You want your apples to be tender, not as soft as you want them in the end, obviously, but nice and tender another benefit of cooking apples like this is the apples are gently preheated and what happens is they’re pectin. It’S a naturally occurring thickener in Fruit changes to a heat, stable form, which then prevents the apples from getting mushy when they’re cooked, so lots of benefits of this pre-cook method. Now this can be done ahead, so you can do your apples for Thanksgiving today and then put them in a glass, Pyrex or Tupperware, put them in the freezer and then, when you need them just take them out, Tha them and you’re ready. You have apple pie, filling ready to go so huge fan of make a head stuff, and this is definitely one that you can do ahead and in fact you have to do it ahead because you have to let the apples completely cool before you put it in Your crust, if you put warm, even slightly warm apples into your crust, it is going to melt that crust and the result is a very Soggy Bottom crust. So you do not want to put warm or even slightly warm apples into your your unbaked pie, crust.
Okay, now it’s time to roll out the crust, my favorite part, so I’ve got a crust here and I set it on the countertop about 10 minutes to bring it a little bit warmer. You don’t want it ice cold. If you have an ice cold crust, it’s going to be too hard to roll out, so you want it to have a little pliability. I’M just going to put some flour down here and then what I usually do is just use my hands to kind of start. The process of rolling I just kind of flatten it out into a flatter disc, and this also warms up the edges just a little bit.
I find the edges crack the most. So if you can warm it up, just a tiny bit with your hands, it seems to crack less, but don’t worry about cracks cracks happen all the time in pie, Crest, and what do they say? That’S how the light gets in, so nothing to fear. Nothing to fear and again we’re not going for Perfection here, we’re going for just a beautiful homemade, Crest, okay. So when we’re rolling, if you’ve watched my P articles before after each roll or a couple of rolls, you’re going to turn the pie crust a quarter turn, and that is really for two reasons.
The first reason is that will help you keep your pie crust in a round shape the other reason to turn it after. Every few rolls is to make sure that it doesn’t stick so roll. The way to know when to stop rolling is to Simply take your pip plate and we’re just going to put it down like this, and you want to have about 1 or two in on the edge cuz. You want the pie crust to fit all the way down across the bottom. All the way up and have a nice thick Edge so looks like we might need one more inch of rolling, and that really is the easiest way to measure without having to you know, get out some measuring tape or something there.
We go. Okay, let’s try again that looks better. We’Ve got about 2 in around the whole thing, so we know it’ll fit in our pie plate and then the way I like to move. It is just fold the crust in half and then pick it up and unfold. It now you want to just sort of set the pie crust into the pie plate.
You don’t want to stretch it at this point. If you do try to stretch it in it’s going to pull back together, the gluten and the pie crust will pull it back together and you’ll have a a shrunken pie crust so set it in gently like that, because with an apple pie, we are adding a Top crust and I’m going to show you a few different variations of that you can add a lattice top. You can add a whole pie crust. You can add decorations, I’m going to show you all three different ways to do it if we have time. But the point is: is that whatever you’re adding you don’t need a really thick edge here, so I’m just going to turn it under just tucking it under itself and resting it on the lip of the pie plate and if you’ve watched my pie, crust articles before You know I really like it when pie crusts have a lip where you can rest the crust on it.
I think it helps hold the pie crust in place. It’S less likely to slip down while it’s baking. Okay, so there’s our pie crust in the pie plate and we don’t need to make a fluted Edge at this point because we are adding another crust on top. So now I’m going to put this in the refrigerator and let this chill for about 20 minutes. While we roll out the other crust time to roll out crust number two, and because we are going to do a lattice top on this apple pie, you don’t need to roll it in a perfectly round shape.
You can roll it a little bit on the longer kind of rectangular side and if you don’t feel like making two crust, try. My Dutch apple pie that you just sprinkle the the strucel on top and it’s so much easier whenever I’m making a double crust. Apple pie, I’m always thinking gosh. I wish I was making a Dutch apple pie. It’Ll only be one crust to roll out, so that one is, I think, easier and equally, delicious.
Now to cut the lattice. You have some options. I have this, which is like a plastic pizza cutter, I’m not sure where I got it, but this you can use to cut it. You can also use a regular pizza cutter. You can use knife or you can use one of these and I’ve had this forever.
It looks like the brand is Wilton. I can put the I I’ll, find it and put a link in the description box, but this is really kind of cool for cutting lattice. So what you do is you just run it this way you you have to hold these two back here hold the strips, but then you can just go like that and you do have even lattice, so it is kind of cool. Now, let’s move this over. So I can cut my next and I’m going to hold these down.
Otherwise it’ll get all stuck, and then you just roll it that way. Okay, so there’s the lattice and now it’s time to assemble our apple pie. Finally, I’ll get the crust in the pie plate. Also, this is another thing you can do ahead. You can roll out your pie, crust, fit it into your pie, plate wrap it in sering, wrap and put it in the freezer.
So another thing you can do ahead. I love all the make ahead options that just makes everything sort of less stressful, especially on holidays, so feel free to make your crust roll it out, put it in your pie, plate double wrap in Saran, Wrap and put it in the freezer, and then don’t it. Just bring it out and assemble it and put it in the oven. First, We’ll add our apple filling. I have two batches here cuz I was making multiple apple pies.
You know how it is okay, so we’ll add that in and what you want to do is kind of press your apples down. This will prevent big gaps and it will also help avoid kind of that shrinking or dropping of the apples. So press your apples down just here with the spatula is fine, then we’ll add our next layer. So now it’s time to put the on the pie and we’re going to take one of our longer strips and put it a little off center and then another long. One and put that one a little off center and then our shorter strips we’ll put on this outer side where there’s not as much length needed.
So four strips looks great. Now. What we’re going to do is lift up the first and third lattice. You pull those back to the center, then we’ll take one of our longer lattice strips We’re going to put that down and pull these back over it. Now we’re going to lift up the next two.
That’S strips two and four lift those up and we’ll add another piece of lattice. So that is how you weave the lattice. You lift up every other one put a strip put those down lift up every other one put a strip now we’ll do this other side and we’re going to lift up these went under last time, so they’re going to go over this time, so we lift up Those two and lay our strip here put this one down. Now we lift up these two and we’ll put another strip here and there we have a lattice top on our apple pie. Isn’T that beautiful now what we’re going to do is just pinch off these edges.
We don’t need these extra long edges here, that’ll be too much for the crust, so just pull off most of these little edges here and then what we’re going to do is tuck the lattice pieces under our crust there and kind of make it into one crust. I’M going to do a little flower cuz, it’s getting a little sticky, so lattice, tucked under and then formed kind of into the crust. You mash it together under that crust and then kind of glue it together and we’ll just keep going around. Okay. Now real quick, we’re going to make a fluted Edge and to do that, we’re just going to use uh.
I use my finger and then two other fingers and kind of press it into a little Notch like that. You just go around and do it remember, the goal is to find beauty in The Mess Beauty in the imperfections, so do not stress yourself out trying to make the fluted Edge some. You know perfect Pinterest worthy Edge start to find some beauty in the imperfection, because aren’t we all right now, I just go around and sort of even that out a little bit and there we have our lattice apple pie with a homemade crust with a fluted Edge. Now this is going to go in the freezer. I need to chill it all.
You can leave it in the freezer for about 20 minutes or so, while your oven preheats, it’s really best to have your crust really cold. When you bake it, because you want your crust to sort of of stay in shape, if you have a very warm crust like it is right now and put that into a warm oven of around 350. That can just melt your crust, so my preference is always to chill the crust and then we’re going to put it in a hot oven and that combination of a cold crust going into a hot oven allows the crust to kind of get set and sear in Place instead of just melting, okay, the oven’s preheated, I got the apple pie out of the freezer, it’s nice and chilled now you can do an egg wash and if you like, you can do a few decorations. I’M going to show you how to do that. Real quick, I did roll out another crust here.
This is a store bot crust from Trader Joe’s. It’S a great backup if you don’t have time to make an extra crust or you can use your scraps left over from from the lattice too. So you can use your scraps or roll out another dough depending on how much you want, then what we’re going to do is take. These are so cool they’re called cutter, Stampers um pie, crust, cutter Stampers, you you can find them on Amazon at Michaels at William Sonoma, and they have all different. You know seasonal ones.
These are mostly fall leaves and what they do. Is you take the leaf and cut out the shape, and then you press the stamp down, and that gives you a leaf with these beautiful little veins and it’s so pretty and so easy to do and we just can decorate our pie crust. However, you like with your leaves, you can go all the way around. You can do a little bunch here on the side, usually what I like to do a little Bunch on the side, sort of a little accent there we’ll do a few different shapes, and this is so much fun for kids too. This is really fun to decorate.
The help you decorate the pie so we’ll just kind of put our leaves in there. However, you like okay, here’s my tip for egg wash. I don’t always do an egg wash, but if you want to do one, let me show you how and also so you can glue these down either with water or with egg wash either one will work so uh another option. If you don’t want to use egg, you can use a little heavy cream. That’S really easy and quick, but let me just show you the egg wash how I do it so we’re going to crack the egg put it in a little container here and that don’t do that whatever I just did didn’t crack it well give my hands a Rinse now what we’re going to do is give that a little stir and I’m going to add a few teaspoons of water or cream.
Now what I’m going to do? Is I really don’t like it when the egg wash has a lot of like really stringy pieces? So what I do now is strain the egg wash, so you just put it through a strainer and that will really make it a lot easier to spread your egg wash. So you just strain it out like this and all those big long, sticky pieces. We just toss those so now we have a nice smooth egg wash and I’ve just got a little mini brush here I love this little brush and we’ll just paint on our egg wash you don’t want any big like pools of it.
You just want to gently lightly paint it on and then we’ll use the egg wash to glue. These little leaves in place just put some egg wash underneath it and then glue that on. You can also use the water or the cream if you’re, using that instead and just kind of glue these into place and then go ahead and brush the leaves too so they’ll get a nice kind of golden shiny brown color. Now it’s the last kind of final decoration step optional. Of course, I’m use some raw sugar just sugar in the raw, and it’s kind of this golden Crystal sugar and sprinkle that on top it adds a little Crunch and a little color a little Sparkle.
So I like to add that okay, now I’ve got my oven preheated to 415 and if you’ve watched my other shows, you know, I always bake pies on a parchment line, baking sheet or at least a baking sheet because they can bubble over or the crust can Melt a little bit, some butter can melt down and you don’t want that in the bottom of your oven. The other benefit of this is that you aren’t going to have to pick up your crust here in the sides and damage the crust. You can hold the CR you can, you can hold the pie um, you can. You can hold the pan instead of holding the crust here and damaging the crust. So this goes in the oven at 415.
For about 20 minutes, we’ve got a hot temperature and that is going to kind of sear the crust and get it nice and golden in Place. Sear the bottom a little bit and then we’ll reduce the Heat and bake for about 50 to 60 Minutes more okay. So now, oh our Pie’s ready. Let me grab that out of the oven, so we can take a look at it. Just want to show you real, quick how it’s going so you can see it’s lovely we’re getting some nice brown crust everything’s staying in shape.
It didn’t sink down so we’re on the right track. I’M going to pop this back on the oven at 350 and continue baking and you can see down below some the butter or the juice did slip over. So I’m really glad I have it on a a baking sheet. If it starts to get too Brown in places, you can kind of selectively protect those areas. You can just use your foil and just put a piece of foil on top like that and that protects it from getting over Brown.
So if you see any spot, sometimes the oven has hot spots. Sometimes it’s just the decorations get kind of brown whatever you need to do to kind of protect that from getting over Brown use a piece of foil all right now. This goes back in the oven, okay and real quick. I’M going to show you with using a smaller 5-in apple pie, how to make sort of a traditional top roll out your crust like this fold it over like we did before and then just set the fold in the center and unfold it and there you have Your double crust and what we do here is you don’t want quite this much around the sides, so we can pinch off a bit here now, we’ll just tuck. This second crust under like that tuck the crust under itself and rest it on the lip again so again, just tucking the top crust under the bottom crust and pushing it together and resting it on the lip is what we’re doing doing there.
So there we have that all in place and now we can go around and do the fluted Edge. In the same way, I’m going to use my two fingers and another finger. Sometimes I use my thumb, but I don’t want to get my knuckle right in the crust. I’M going to use my finger here and go around and make that little fluted Edge. Now we can do our quick egg wash here same egg wash now the next step – and you can imagine doing this on just a bigger 9 in or 10 in pie, same process just showing you on a smaller version.
So the next thing you want to do is cut some vent holes and I just use a sharp pairing knife and kind of cut down like this, like that got four vent, that’s going to let the steam Escape, so it doesn’t bubble out the Sides that can go in the freezer or it can go right into a 400 15 oven and bake. Okay last one – and I hope you’re still watching. If you have, will you comment something like painted, leaves or love the painted leaves? I would love to hear if yall are still watching at this point. I hope you are cuz.
This really is the most fun and so we’ve saved the best for last, not really on purpose, but that’s just what happens. So. What I have here is I’ve cut out. I use my cookie cutter Stampers to cut out these leaves with the little veins and I’ll put a link in the description to where you can get the little leaf Cutters and then what you’re going to do so much fun. You know how they put icing on cookies and they use a little food coloring in the icing.
Well, I thought several years ago go. Why don’t? We just use a little tiny bit of food, coloring and paint our leaves on the pie and won’t that be beautiful. So I have a clean kind of kitchen or pie paintbrush, I’m just going to paint the leaves you can mix it up, yellow orange, whatever you like. If you want the colors a little lighter a little thinner, you can just add a little touch of water there and you can get all natural food coloring if you’re not wanting to use the artificial dyes.
Look for that. I can put a link in the description. I believe it’s a Watson brand is the allnatural, so look for those, and then I like to paint them like, yellow and red and then put some orange on it. I’M really obsessed with leaves in the fall. We don’t really get.
Uh changing leaves we sort of do, but nothing like you would get like in New England. So if you’re still watching leave me a comment, tell me that you saw the painted, leaves and tell me if you like them or if you might try it. I love to hear from y’all, okay, the leaves are painted and my hands are thoroughly orange and, of course, this is another great one to do with kids. If you want a little fall activity or something on um Thanksgiving holiday to keep them busy, it’s really fun. Just roll out the pie crust cut the shapes and get out your paints.
Now I am going to put a little bit of egg wash here around the side, so we make sure our eggs stick to the side there and make sure our leaves stick to the side. Okay and then you can just place your leaves. I like to place kind of different colors on top of each other. So then you can see uh the different colors and the different shapes. So we’ll take more of a red one here and I might move them around once I get going.
I never know. What’S going to end up this over here, just like leaves that were falling, they fell on this pie. Okay, there is my fallen, leaves pie. I love it now same thing. You can pop that in the freezer or freeze it for 20 minutes and then put it in the oven thanks so much for joining us on Marie’s kitchen.
If you stuck around this long, you are a real trooper and I hope you enjoyed everything we did today. Homemade crust apple, filling lattice top traditional top painted Leaf top, so many fun things to do. I can’t wait to hear if you’re going to try them. Let me know in the comments I would love to hear from you also, if you like this article, be sure to give us a thumbs up. That means so much to me and also to YouTube so hit that like button, I really appreciate it and if you haven’t yet subscribe, I’ve got lots more articles coming up and I don’t want you to miss any of them for this recipe and more head over To my website Marie saa.
om there, you can go and print out this recipe for apple pie, homemade crust and all my other recipes. You can put them in a notebook if you like, and make your very own Mar’s kitchen cookbook for free. My goal is to give you some really easy recipes that turn out great every time, so you can build some confidence in the kitchen and feel really inspired to share good food with people that you love. For my kitchen, yours, thank you. The first question I always get with apple pies is what Apple should I use it’s a great question and my top recommendation is Granny Smith.
They have great texture, they’re, nice and tar they’re, not too sweet. They hold up well in the pie. So that’s always my first recommendation: some people don’t like Granny Smith and that’s okay. You can use. This is pink lady.
You could use honey, crisp, Bray, bur. These are Golden Delicious. You can mix and match. You can use different apples which will give you both different flavor and different texture, so you’re adding some depth to your pie. So today we are going to use, use a mixture of all these apples.
We have pink lady Golden Delicious and Granny Smith. If you have any other questions about apples feel free to leave a comment. I love to help you out. The one you want to avoid is something like red delicious, which gets really mealy when cooked. So you want something with good texture and good flavor and that’s what we’re using here today now time to peel the apples.
I’Ve peeled some here, as you can see, and I’ve read recently in a book. I was reading uh, an old pie book and the chef said be sure not to peel your apples too early, because they will turn brown and they are. But here’s the thing we’re going to use brown, sugar and cinnamon, so the whole filling is brown anyway. So you don’t even notice so I say: do this ahead. Peel your apples ahead, slice them.
You can do it the day before cover it in Saran, Wrap, put it in the fridge and then pull them out when you’re ready to move on to the next step of the apple pie. An apple pie has a lot of steps. So if you can make something ahead, I say: do it now: let’s talk about options for peeling. Apples first is just do it by hand, grab a peeler and just go around and peel that Apple now to cut it. You can also do that by hand and you’ll want them about a/4 in thick and that’s pretty thin.
Okay, because you do want these to cook in the oven, now we’ll put our apples in a bowl and what I use kind of as a hack. Is this really big Pyrex? It’S eight cups and guess how many cups of apples we need for the apple pie about 8 to 9 cups. So as soon as you fill this up, you know you’re done now. The second method for peeling apples is this.
This is an apple peeler, core slicer and unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find this online as easily as I did when I bought it. It’S a fantastic Gadget. It’S one of my favorites. My recommendation is that you are going to buy one of these Apple gadgets. Don’T buy something really cheap.
I bought something really cheap one time and it just it completely, fell apart and did not work so try to get something. That’S a little bit higher quality, maybe check out William Sonoma or look for something with a lot of good reviews. Online so with your apple peeler, core slicer you’re, going to take your Apple and put it right into these prongs here and you just twirl it down it’s going to peel it and then it’s going to core it and it does it slices it into this rings. So then all you have to do is cut right down the middle and there you have your apple slices, so love this gadget. Kids love.
It too be careful. This is sharp, but my kids always love to help me. You know help with um the apple pie when I’m doing that. So if you have kids or grandkids put them on this job – and it goes really quick – you just peel core slice cut that into slices and into slices there. We go and the third method for cutting apples is a food processor.
If you do have a food processor. This is also super quick and easy, so I do recommend it. What you’re going to do is you take your food processor, and this is the uh little stick thing that goes in here. You put your blade on top like that, and then we put it on our food processor and, of course, be careful. Those blades are sharp and then we close that and we are ready to go so I’m going to take an apple that I’ve already peeled.
You do have to peel them by hand. Of course you could leave this the skins on, but I’m not a huge fan of that, because some apple skins can be pretty tough, we’ll just cut our Apple into some pieces. It needs to be small enough to fit in here. Then you turn this on to low. I do and we’ll just put our apple right in there.
So that’s super simple too right. Those look, nice very nice. These are pretty thin. So don’t do what I did don’t use three different methods use the same method. So you have about the same thickness.
These are a little thinner than the other ones, but we’re going to go ahead and add them in not worried about it.
