How To Make Apple Pie Crust From Scratch

Use A Spatula To Incorporate Water

Your processed flour and butter are sitting there in the bowl of your food processor and you’re tempted to save yourself a bit of cleanup by just adding the water directly in there, right? Don’t do it! Sure, it’ll work out okay, but you won’t form nearly the same level of flakiness as you do if you incorporate with a spatula. Here’s what a crust made 100% in the food processor looks like:

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Compare that to the crust I made with the spatula:

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

See the difference? By using the spatula to fold the water into the dough, you’re even more likely to end up with flaky layers.

Don’t Miss Out On This Fall Classic Learn How To Make Apple Pie From Scratch And Enjoy The Flavors Of Autumn

Theres no fall treat more iconic than the apple pie. Who doesnt love going to their local apple picking farm, getting crisp apples and combining them with warming cinnamon and buttery pastry? Because this fall dessert is so beloved, its one home bakers should try to master. If baking pies is intimidating to you, have no fearwell walk you through how to make the perfect apple pie step by step.

How To Pit Cherries Without A Cherry Pitter

We have a small kitchen. That means that we only buy what we need on a weekly basis and while we would love to eat a slice of this cherry pie every night that just cant happen. So, we dont have a cherry pitter in the house. That didnt stop us, though. We just looked around and figured out two ways to pit cherries without a cherry pitter.

On the top, youll see we used a chopstick. We used the thicker round end to push the pit out of each cherry. The second option was to use a small piping tip. Place it onto the work surface then push the cherry down onto the tip the pit pops right out. Of the two, we preferred using chopsticks. Both work, but the chopsticks were a little less messy.

Recipe updated, originally posted May 2013. Since posting this in 2013, we have tweaked the recipe to be more clear and added a quick recipe video. Adam and Joanne

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Why This Easy Apple Pie Recipe Is So Great:

• The best flaky pie crust made with only 4 ingredients. All you need for this pie crust is all-purpose flour, vegetable oil, milk of any kind , and a little bit of salt. There is no chilling required, no food-processor or pastry cutter needed. All you do is mix and roll.
• The best apple pie filling made with fresh apples and only 3 other ingredients. Other than apples, the only other ingredients you need to make the filling are brown sugar for sweetness, cinnamon for flavor, and flour to thicken the natural fruit juice that is released from the apples while baking
• There is no easier apple pie recipeout there that tastes as amazing as this one. Here is what my readers have to say:

This is the BEST apple pie Ive ever had! It was so easy to make and my husband and boys helped without any issues. I really love the flavor and how its not overpowered with sweetness just perfectly balanced. Thank you for sharing- I will be adding this to my collections of favorites! Emily

I decided to bake this with my kids and it was super easy with very little mess in the kitchen. In the end, we all loved it so much we made it together again a week later! Olivia

Easy Apple Pie Recipe With Store Bought Crust

This is an easy homemade apple pie recipe for those days when you don’t have time to whip up a buttery, flaky crust from scratch. The filling comes together in minutes with warm spices and loads of fresh apples, so it tastes like it came from Grandma’s kitchen. The pie is fool-proof…and it comes out perfectly every single time!

Whether it was intentional or by observation, I learned just about everything that I know in the kitchen from my mom. She is an amazing home cook, and she has always used smart, simple shortcuts to create easy recipes with minimal effort.

When I moved into my first apartment as a 21-year-old who had just graduated from college, my mom gifted me this little journal that is full of her hand-written recipes from my childhood. She picked my favorites and she put them all in one place. How awesome is that?

I cook from my mom’s recipes on a regular basis, and this easy apple pie is a consistent winner. I bring it to potlucks, share it at cookouts, and offer it as a dessert to finish off meals with friends and family. It’s ideal for that dinner party that you’re hosting because you can bake the pie in advance and leave it sitting on your countertop until you’re ready to serve it. No last-minute hassle!

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Top Tips For Making Apple Pie

Baking homemade pies was always something that intimidated me in the past. They seem so complicated, but the reality is that they can be pretty simple. This easy recipe is proof of that! If I can manage to make a pie crust and bake a fruit pie from scratch, then trust me, you all can too.

Instructions

Thats one EASY homemade recipe if you ask me. Nothing complicated, just a few simple steps! Be sure to watch the video to see the recipe in action!

*what Can I Use Instead Of Pie Weights

When you pre-bake an empty crust a.k.a. blind-bake, the dough tends to puff up and rise. Using pie weights solves this problem. Here are some alternative to store-bought pie weights.

• Dry Raw Beans beans should not be used for cooking following a blind bake but can be re-used to blind bake pie crust.
• Dry Raw Rice If using rice, it becomes toasted and can be used for cooking in pilaf recipes after it is use to prebake a pie crust

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Homemade Pie Crust Recipe

An easy tutorial on how to make your own homemade pie crust! This recipe uses just a few simple ingredients and turns out perfect every single time. This post also includes several different ways that you can use this pie crust recipe!

Making your own pie crust should never be intimidating. In fact, if you have a good recipe and instructions its actually pretty easy.

If youve been following me for a while youve probably seen this pie crust recipe at some point. But today I wanted to share this simple recipe with you again because its one that I use all of the time! Youll absolutely love this recipe because its:

• Super flaky
• Uses simple pantry staples you likely have on hand
• Tastes better than anything that you can buy at the store

Trust me when I say that youll never go back to buying store-bought pie crust again once you learn how to make your own!

Tips For The Best Apple Pie Recipe

• Let the pie crust come to room temperature before you try to unroll it. Otherwise the cold pastry may tear or crack.
• Once the dough is unrolled, I like to cover the dish and chill it in the refrigerator for about 10-20 minutes before I add the filling. This isn’t necessary, but the cold pastry yields a flakier pie crust! You can do the same for the top layer — unroll the dough at room temperature, then cover and chill the dough before topping the pie.
• Halfway through the baking time , I suggest that you lightly cover the edges of the crust with strips of aluminum foil. This will prevent the edges from burning or getting too dark while the rest of the pie bakes.
• Allow the pie to sit on the counter on a wire rack to cool for about 2 hours before slicing. This gives the filling a chance to set.
• Top each slice of pie with vanilla ice cream or freshly-whipped cream for a real treat!

This homemade easy apple pie recipe is the definition of All-American comfort food, and it certainly wins a blue ribbon in our minds. I hope that your family enjoys it as much as we do!

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The Benefits Of The Food Processor Method

So that’s all very interesting, but the real question is: Why should you care? How does this make forming pie dough any easier?

It does so in two ways. First off, this method completely removes the variability of a traditional pie dough recipe. By weighing out a given amount of flour and fat, combining them together until they form a near homogeneous paste, and then adding the remaining dry flour to that paste, you are very strictly defining exactly how much flour is used for gluten formation and how much ends up coated with fat. No more trying to visually judge whether the fat is properly cut into the flour. No more adding ice water a drop at a time until a dough is formed. The dough comes out the same, every single time.

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

The other key advantage is that your dough becomes much more pliable. The flour-fat paste formed at the beginning is much softer and more malleable than pure butter, which means that your final dough rolls out smoothly and easily with little-to-no risk of cracking like a traditional pie crust, even without the vodka.

List Of Items Needed For Baking Apple Pie

• Large bowl

• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1 large cup of ice water

Mix the flour, salt and sugar together in the mixer. Then mix in the frozen butter until the dough is pea sized crumbles. Next, add ice water until the dough all sticks together. Pat the dough into two large discs and wrap in plastic wrap. Cool in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour.

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Rolling The Pie Dough Out For The Top Layer Of The Pie

Next, roll out the top pie dough layer. Follow the same steps as with the bottom dough, but you’ll want the top layer to be slightly larger than the bottom layer. Trim the top layer leaving about 1 inch of overhang.

With the top pie crust placed on top of the pie and trimmed, it’s time to crimp the top and bottom layers together. Watch this portion of the video closely. The top layer is pulled over the bottom layer and then the bottom layer is gently pinched between a fold in the top layers overhang. Pinch the top layer to the bottom layer all around the pie. Then using your thumb and forefingers from both hands, pinch a decorative design around the pies edge. The video demonstrates how this is done.

How To Make The Strawberry Filling

We really like to use fresh strawberries for this. Start by mashing about 2 cups of strawberries. Add some sugar, corn starch and extra flavors then cook until bubbly and thick. Thats your strawberry glaze.

Then, toss with more strawberries and add to the baked and cooled pie crust. Refrigerate for a few hours then top with whipped cream.

Recipe updated, originally posted May 2013. Since posting this in 2013, we have tweaked the recipe to be more clear and added a quick recipe video. Adam and Joanne

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But First Let’s Talk About Some General Rules About Making Pie Crust From Scratch

As I mentioned, there tends to be a lot of mystery and rules involved in the art of pastry making. It’s important to understand the fundamentals about making pie pastry in order to be successful. Don’t let the rules intimidate you remember, knowledge is power. The more you know, the better your dough will be.

So first, let’s cover what you are actually doing when you are making pastry.

At its heart, a good pie pastry is a balance of three key ingredients: flour, butter and water. My pie pastry recipe contains a few other ingredients that make it the best it can be, but the aforementioned three are what makes up the base of the dough.

Flour

The flour is obviously the base of this recipe. It adds structure and texture to this recipe. In baking, the amount of flour that a recipe uses will determine the quantities of the other ingredients needed. So it’s important to measure your flour accurately.

Water

The water interacts with the flour to form the gluten that helps creates the structure for the dough. You want to develop just enough gluten that it has some strength to hold its shape but not so much that its tough.

Butter

The butter coats the flour, helping to keep the dough together. It also creates pockets of air once it melts during the cooking process which then creates that flakiness we all love.

Each ingredient added to this pie dough recipe is there for a reason, and with a recipe like this, its best to follow the instructions as closely as possible.

How To Make Our Favorite All

Weve been making pie crust the same way in our kitchen for years. We cut butter into flour until the butter and flour look crumbly and have pieces of butter the size of peas. Then, we add just enough water to form the dough into a ball. That was until we found a better way. A homemade pie crust recipe, rather a pie crust method, thats consistent and makes dough thats a dream to roll out.

Its not that our previous method failed us. We just came across another way of how to make it. A while back Cooks Illustrated reworked pie dough.

You may have heard of it they added vodka to their recipe. .

Cooks Illustrated looked at the science behind pie crust and it made sense. Our high school science teachers would be proud.

Heres all you really need to know: Gluten is an enemy to pie crust. Some gluten is okay and actually needed for structure, but too much can really mess things up.

So, remember this: less gluten formation = flakier and more tender pie crusts.

Back to the vodka. Thats what got all the hype why wouldnt it, right? In their recipe, the vodka replaced some of the water.

The theory is that vodka doesnt promote gluten formation, whereas water does. So, by replacing part of the water with vodka, it helps the pie crust become flakier and more tender.

We love the idea and many swear it works, but adding a 1/4 cup of vodka to our homemade pie dough recipe just didnt sit well with us. Its not something we store in our home often and its expensive.

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