All the best cookery is more than the sum of its parts.
Pie is no exception.
This pie has a total of 10 ingredients. 11 if you count water, which traditionally doesn’t get counted in recipe-writing. Your pie could have even fewer, potentially, and still be glorious.
Pie crust should not scare you. If you own a food processor it is so easy it’s almost embarrassing. Even if you don’t own a food processor it’s not exactly juggling spent nuclear rods whilst rollerskating down the Filbert Steps.
Here is the ratio you need for a good basic sweet pie crust, sufficient for one 9 inch double-crust pie or 2 single-crust, with a little left over for baking in little strips as a snack. Because snacks are important.
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon table salt
- 2 Tablespoons sugar
- 16 Tablespoons unsalted butter (or vegan margarine), chopped into quarter-inch cubes
- 4 Tablespoons nonhydrogenated solid vegetable shortening
Have your fats ice cold and by ice, I mean put them in the freezer for 12-24 hours. Having your flour be cold is also a good idea. I store mine in the freezer. The colder the ingredients the flakier and nicer your pie crust will turn out.
When you’re ready, make yourself up a big measuring cup or small bowl of ice water. Pack it with ice cubes, then fill with water. Stick a tablespoon measure in there so you have it ready when the time comes.
Place the dry ingredients in your food processor. Pulse once or twice to combine. Add the fats and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Not sure what that means? Well, if it looks like wet sand looks when you stir it up with your toes, that’s about right.
When you get to this point, pour this mixture into a large mixing bowl and grab a fork. Sprinkle 7 Tablespoons of ice water over the top and begin to stir it in. The mixture will clump, which is what you want. You want to encourage the clumps to get bigger and to incorporate more and more of the flour/fat. This takes some strength! Some force! This will not come together like iron filings clumping onto a magnet, you have to push and mash. But do use a fork, because the heat of your hands can toughen the dough. Work quickly. Pie crust making is a brusque and short process. Don’t think you have to baby it.
Sprinkle on another tablespoon or two of water once you get to the point where no more will incorporate easily. It should take no more than 10 T total (and may take somewhat less) to get all the dough to come together.
When it has come together and you have a nice big heavy dense mass of dough, turn the dough out onto a floured surface. Cut it in half. Pat each half into a disc about as wide as your hand from heel to fingertips. Pat the edges so that there are no big cracks. Work quickly and handle the dough as little as possible, because again, the heat of your hands can toughen the dough. It doesn’t have to be pretty! Wrap each one in plastic and put it in the fridge. The cooling off time will let the flour absorb the water without creating gluten (which would toughen your pie crust).
So you have a pie crust. Now, what to put in it? This time of year in the northern hemisphere I strongly recommend some kind of apple situation. Here’s what I put in the one pictured above.
Apples — I used Bramleys, which are an outstanding cooking apple. Any good cooking apple will do. Cooking apples are tart, dense, and hard, not the crisp sweet things people look for as eating (dessert) apples. Some possible varieties: Pippin, Empire, Northern Spy, Pink Lady, Gravenstein, Hubbardston. Some apples normally used as eating apples, like Granny Smith, will make a decent pie. But others, such as Honeycrisps or Red Delicious, do not make a good pie at all.
I usually prep my apples for pie this way: quarter, core, and peel, then slice across the quarters the short way into thin slices (7-9 slices per quarter apple). This lets them stack evenly in the pie, increasing the likelihood that your filling will be dense, which is both satisfying from an eating perspective and architecturally preferable to ones that run all over when you cut into the pie and have to be served with a spoon.
Dried tart cherries — entirely optional, but nice. You could as easily toss in a few handfuls of whatever other dried fruit you liked, chopped into small bits if required. Raisins are good, so are chopped unsulfured unsweetened dried apricots. But you can also just have apples.
cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice — these are the classic seasonings for an apple pie. Heavier on the cinnamon than the other two, and you’ll be using them in a powdered format. Season to taste. I’m also fond of Penzey’s premixed Apple Pie Spice, which is delicious and convenient.
a little sugar — if your apples are super tart, or you just like a sweeter pie, add a little sugar. A few tablespoons, no more. It doesn’t matter what kind of sugar you use. White, brown, maple, whatever you have that you like. But you don’t have to add any sugar at all if you don’t want it. And sometimes you don’t.
Mix your prepped apples, dried fruit (if using), spice, and sugar in the same bowl you mixed your pie crust in. Don’t wash it first, you want the remnants of flour and butter to get mixed in with the apples to help thicken the filling. If you did wash it already, just toss in about 2 Tablespoons of flour when you mix the apples/spice/sugar, then dot the top of the fruit with a few small pats of butter before you put the top crust on the pie.
OK, so now what?
Now you roll out the pie crust. Get your rolling pin out, and the pie plate you’ll be using. You’ll need a big flat surface to roll on, and some flour to dust the surface with so the crust doesn’t stick.
Roll one half of the pie crust out so that it’s in a rough circle (this is not geometry class, don’t stress) that is about 3 inches bigger around than your pie crust. It should be evenly thick. If it tears, moosh the torn edges back together and pat them down gently.
Transferring the rolled crust to the pan can be tricky unless you know how. I’ll tell you how. Loosely and gently roll it up around your rolling pin, then lift the pin and the crust over the edge of the pie plate, then unroll and drape the crust across the pie plate. Gently tuck it down into the pie plate so that the crust conforms to the shape of the plate.
Fill the pie! With most fruit pies you want the fruit to stack pretty densely. For apple pie, this means that most (not all, you needn’t get all obsessive about it) of the apple slices will lie on their flat sides. I also believe in filling a pie fully, which for fruit pies means that they need to appear slightly over-filled when you put them in the oven because fruit cooks down.
Obviously, the amount of fruit will vary depending on the size of your pie plate and the size of your fruit pieces: larger pieces take up more room, smaller ones can be compacted into less space. For a 9-inch apple pie, though, I usually end up using 7 or 8 apples. More if they’re tiny, fewer if they’re huge.
Pat the fruit gently into place to ensure that it is happy.
Roll out the top crust the same way as you did the bottom crust. Place it over the top of the pie with the same rolling-pin transfer method. With a paring knife, trim both bottom and top crusts to the same size, leaving yourself an inch or a little more of seam allowance — where the crusts touch at the side of the pie — all the way around.
Pinch those “seams” together and fold them up and in toward the center of the pie to make a rim of sealed pie crust. You can get decorative if you like, with pinching little divots into it or whatever, but that’s totally optional.
The last steps, before you slide this bad boy into a preheated 350F oven, are two: steam slits and a cookie sheet. Steam slits are the slits you cut in the top crust with a sharp knife to let some of the steam escape while the pie bakes. Otherwise the top crust will end up soggy instead of flaky. You can make these decorative or you can just stab the thing a few times and call it good.
A cookie sheet (preferably one with a rim all the way around — jelly roll pans are great for this if you own one) is what you put the pie plate on before you put the whole thing in the oven, so that in the not unlikely event that the pie oozes some juice out of the pie plate, it doesn’t end up on the floor of your oven. It’s easier to wash a cookie sheet than it is to clean your oven.
Then you bake your pie. How long? Until the top crust is sweetly golden all over. Not brown, just gold. But definitely not pasty white. The small amount of browning is crucial — the crust tastes better, the texture is better, and the additional cooking time it takes to get the pie nice and golden is a good way to make sure your fruit is thoroughly cooked. Usually this takes about an hour, maybe a little more or less depending on your oven and whether you’re cooking anything else in the same oven at the same time. You’re allowed to start peeking to see if doneness has been attained at around 45 minutes of baking time, but remember that every time you open the oven to peek, you let heat out and so it will actually take a little longer than you think.
If you do this a lot it becomes second nature and you can whip out a pie in barely more than 2 hours start to finish including the time it takes to make the crust and peel the apples. And during that second hour, you can clean up the kitchen and still have time for a cup of tea and some quality time with a crossword puzzle. Or Minecraft. Or your cat. However you roll.
p.s. The leftover scraps of pie crust? Collect them, moosh them into a ball, roll them out thin, cut into strips, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar, and bake for about 15 minutes while the pie is baking. When they are golden brown, pull them out and let them cool a little, then eat them with that cup of tea.
