How To Make The Perfect Pie

All right guys , it's that time of year .

Again , it's pie season .

You want the iconic comfort classic , the fat , the fruit , the texture , the crust , all of it .

I mean , pie has it all .

We tested like a million of them .

I'm kind of sick of pies , but I'm not sick of pies because even after making like 20 of them , like at the end of the day , I still just wanna eat pie .

The thing with pie is you really have to nail the pie crust and don't be intimidated .

It seems like it's something that's gonna be difficult to work with .

But honestly , it's just three things fat , flour and water .

The thing about using like a liquid fat like a coconut oil or olive oil or something like that is honestly , I find it so hard to work with just stick to butter or a solid fat .

So we did test shortening butter and a combo of the two things we did a taste test .

We did like a tender test and just like an overall how is it to work with ?

We found that shortening does tend to give you a little bit more on the flaky side , but it doesn't taste as good and the combo was good .

It was , you know , a good compromise .

We don't love the idea of doing combo .

If it's not going to give you like a huge change in results .

Butter is not only going to give you a great flavor but a great texture .

And if you're gonna do all this work , you want it to taste as good as it possibly can .

So , as you know , here at Tasty , we love a secret ingredient and to do that , we added a little bit of egg yolk into our water .

We found it , it gives it just like that added richness that you really , really want when you're going for kind of that ultimate holiday pie .

And we're also gonna add ice water to our egg yolks , literally be taking the tablespoons of water from a cup of ice water just to make sure that your water is as cold as it possibly can be .

This is actually the pastry recipe that I learned in culinary school at Les .

It just is so good as you know , always add salt to everything that you do including sweets because it is a flavor enhancer .

We are putting in cold , cold , cold cubed butter .

We have to keep everything as bold as possible .

Always .

So you're gonna go in and you're not gonna use your palms , you're gonna use your fingertips as much as you can because your palms are warmer than your fingertips .

So you're just really trying to take the big chunks of butter and rub them into the flour .

So we're gonna kind of coat the flour with the butter once I'm happy and I have all the butter is pretty well incorporated into the flour .

I'm ready to add my liquid .

We're gonna use our judgment here and just kind of as quickly as we can incorporate the liquid with the fat .

This is still looking pretty dry .

So I'm gonna go to the dryer bits of the bowl and incorporate more of that egg yolk water mixture .

How you can test that is you put some together in your palms and if it's staying together in a little dough ball , then you're good to go .

So once I'm happy that all the liquids incorporated , I think that I have a good amount of moisture in here , dump it out onto our clean work surface and start to bring it together .

Get it into like a nice fall .

If you will , there's no like dry flowery bits , there's nothing crumbling off of it .

It's gonna be a lot easier .

If you make it into a disk , it's gonna be much easier to roll it out into a circle later .

So I'm gonna wrap it up with clean film .

We're gonna put it back in the fridge and let it chill out for a second .

This is gonna let the flour and everything relax .

So the thing about pie crust is it gets harder to work with the warmer that it is .

So , if your fat is getting really , really warm , it's gonna be hard to roll out and work with .

And what you're gonna first do flower the surface , you're gonna flour the top of the pastry dough , kind of push down on the dough starting from the bottom to the top and smush shush shush and it just kind of spreads the dough out before you start rolling every now and again , we're gonna give the dough a quarter turn .

That's just gonna help ensure that we have a nice round dough .

And it's also gonna make sure that we're double checking that our dough is not sticking to the surface that we're working on .

Always smush the cracks back together whenever you see a big one forming because it's only gonna get worse .

You wanna roll it out to like an eighth of an inch .

Roll it out way bigger than your pan is .

You can put your pan over the pie crust to make sure that you have enough .

So the easiest safest way to move it is to roll it up on your rolling pin .

Here we go .

It's not sticking to anything voil .

We don't want to stretch or tear the dough out and I'm going to lift the edges and almost lower it down in there .

And then I'm gonna use my knuckles to push it into the corners and then any big seams just kind of press them out .

So you're not overlapping or anything you want like a really clean side .

So first go around and just kind of tuck this excess under .

And so you have one kind of cohesive wall to work with if you will .

And now we're gonna go and crimp .

So we're gonna use our knuckle of your left hand or right hand and then the index finger and thumb of your other hand and just go in and pinch in .

So once it's crimped , we're gonna chill it down .

We want it to be as cold as humanly possible before we throw it into a super hot oven .

So now that we have a crust , let's talk pumpkin filling .

So when it comes to dairy , when we're looking at a lot of different recipes , a lot of them have sweet and condensed milk , evaporated milk and then some combo of fresh dairy as well .

The sweet and condensed milk , it's got a ton of sugar .

It's through this really thick interesting product .

Evaporated milk is a lot thinner than it has a little bit of sugar and not nearly as much as sweet and condensed milk .

But why not just use a fresh product ?

We understand it a little bit more .

So we decided to go with half and half .

We want to test three different things .

So we wanted to test canned pumpkin as it is roasting the canned puree and then we also want to try fresh pumpkin .

When we were first testing , canned roasted , we wanted to put everything in the filling and roast it aside from the dairies .

But we kind of made like a pumpkin caramel on accident .

There's a little bit more margin of error there .

We actually ended up just doing the spices in the pumpkin puree that gave us an awesome pumpkin flavor .

It kind of did the double work of not only roasting the pumpkin puree , but also really just enhance everything that's going into this and make it like a really intense complex flavor , which is so good and so worth it cool .

So scrape it all to one side , put it back in your bowl .

So we're gonna throw in the granulated sugar , the dark brown sugar just giving us a little bit of that molasses flavor .

Give it a little bit of vanilla for that flavor enhancer , three eggs and one egg yolk and that egg yolks just for a little bit of extra richness without too much extra moisture .

And then just whisk this until it's completely smooth and it's gonna be like this really nice , gorgeous custard .

So what we're gonna do is pre bake the pie shell .

We need to fold up a big piece of parchment and then we're gonna throw in , we just had like some dried chickpeas that we use .

These are our baking beans if you will .

So kind of push them off to the side to hold up the walls and we're good to go .

You're gonna put this in about like 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 15 , 20 minutes or so .

Depending on the pie dish that you're using and to know that it's done , pull back the sheet of parchment with the beans inside and you just wanna make sure there's no undercooked or like raw pastry left .

So we have our pre baked pie crust .

Let's pour it all in there .

I get every little bit .

Give me a little bit of bubbles .

And what you can try and do is kind of carefully plop it on the table and see if you can get out in those bubbles with a lot of custard pies .

It's pretty common to start with a really hot oven and then lower it down .

And what it's gonna do is give us like that really instant heat to get everything started .

So I know that this might seem crazy but roasting a real whole pumpkin and making this into your pie .

This is so good .

So cut it up .

Get in big chunks .

Don't go crazy with this .

All we're really trying to do is get out the seeds in that little pulpy bit in the middle .

I'm using a little perry knife , makes it really easy to get all that stuff out .

Get these big chunks on to a uh parchment line baking sheet , have a little fun with it .

Just dry , roast those suckers , you know , really high heat , like , I don't know , 400 for 15 , 20 minutes .

So you can really smell them again .

Developing that flavor .

We're gonna throw the flesh of the pumpkin into a food processor with everything else that we need .

The sugars , the eggs , the heavy cream , the vanilla , the salt , all the good stuff and give it a whiz .

It's not gonna be as smooth and kind of like mush , I guess as the period that comes out of a can which is like really nice actually , like it has a little bit more of a bite to it , but it's still like super creamy and delicious .

Honestly with the food processor like do this more than you think because you do want a pretty smooth texture .

So once we're to a good place , pour that into your pre baked crust .

If you really want to do something a little bit extra .

Like these steps don't take a ton of extra time and they give you a very complex and very unique take on a pumpkin pie and same deal .

We're gonna do a nice high heat to start and then we're gonna lower it down to finish the cooking .

All right .

So again , like we just could not decide between apple and pumpkin .

So we gave you both guys , there are tons of different varieties of apples .

The only thing that you really need to know for this one like we're using Granny Smiths because they're easily accessible .

Got a great tart flavor .

They really work well on pies .

But if you have different ones in your grocery store , as long as you're using cooking apples , that'll hold up to cooking .

Doesn't matter for apple pie .

We tested three different preparations .

We tested fresh apples putting in mastered apples , which just means they sat in sugar and salt for a bit to draw out the extra moisture .

And then we also tested a cooked apple recipe .

We found that we preferred the macerated method because we had a lot of good like bite still to the apples .

But since we took care of a lot of that moisture loss , we didn't have like huge gaps in our pie .

You have a little bit of a bite , but they're cooked enough that it's , it's not like you're biting into raw apple and as you're peeling them , it's a really good idea to have a big bowl of water .

If you have some lemons pop a little in the water too , that'll just keep them from browning .

So we're gonna use like so many apples because they do have a lot of moisture in them and they are gonna bake down , pour them , cut them into those little cheeks and then slice them super thinly .

So we're gonna macerate these apples .

And what we're gonna do is put salt and sugar , which are both desiccants and that's just a fancy way of saying that they draw out moisture from what they come in contact with and the salt is not only gonna draw out moisture , but it's also gonna help enhance the flavors that are in there .

We're gonna put in cinnamon here a little bit of lemon juice .

So what we're just adding aside from the Deskins are just a little bit of flavor that'll just kind of marinate a little bit .

We're also gonna add half of our corn starch now .

So we're gonna toss all the apples and all this stuff and we're gonna actually gonna let it sit for about 30 minutes .

It's a good idea to stir every like 10 minutes or so .

Just so the apples on the top or in the middle can really drain out all that extra moisture .

After that 30 minutes , we're gonna let it sit in a colander over another bowl and we're actually gonna just draw out all that liquid .

So we really wanna make sure that we're getting out as much moisture from these apples as we can right now .

So as you can see , I mean , look at all this moisture that came out of these apples like holy moly .

So we're gonna boil this down .

There is a bit of corn starch .

So this mixture should thicken up a good amount right away .

So we're gonna take the rest of that corn starch , add a few tablespoons of water to make a slurry .

So we don't have like big chunks of corn starch and we're gonna throw our slurry in here and just thicken this up .

We don't wanna boil it too much , but we're gonna add a little knob of butter there so it's gonna stop the cooking process a little bit .

And so it doesn't boil too much .

It's also gonna give us a little bit of that extra , that extra flavor and silkiness .

Once that butter is pretty much melted in , we're gonna take it off heat .

We want to be kind of the texture of caramel if you can see here .

So it looks like a nice thick caramel .

So coat all the apples of this mixture .

Once that's all done , we're ready to build our pie .

We're going to roll out a sheet of dough .

Same as before .

I'm not fancy with the apple pie .

We're actually not going to pre bake it because it does need a good amount of time in the oven .

You don't have to be like super crazy with laying the apples in here , but you do want to make sure that they're all flat and if you can have them be the round side out again just so that we can pack all the apples in here .

So and then push them down .

This is a lot of apples .

You wanna totally pack this guy full and if there's any extra of that like kind of caramel filling in there , go ahead and pour it on top of the apples , you shouldn't have a ton left over and we're gonna put a new sheet of pastry on top of it , cut off the excess .

So we're gonna make sure that we have a really secure seal between the top and the bottom layers .

So pinch and fold , pinch and fold .

And before you even worry about decorating the sides , you wanna make sure that that's really tight and sealed .

Do the knuckle finger all the way around and then go ahead and do an egg wash again .

We're just gonna use straight up egg here and then for a little extra crunch , we're gonna add this standing sugar and that's just gonna give us a nice texture .

Fruit pies is an apple especially has a lot of moisture in there .

So we want to cut little holes so that the steam can get out .

So we don't have our pie look literally explode when it's baking and into the oven .

It goes .

Wow .

Look how nice that is .

The food stylist trick is to cut a little sliver out first and don't worry about this one .

It's gonna be ugly so that you don't end up messing up the whole pie and you can get really nice slices .

I know it's like a lot to do with .

There's these little tips and things there .

But like if you're not gonna do it around the holidays and around Thanksgiving , like when are you gonna do it ?

Look at that .

I mean , isn't it just so cool ?

The fact that it just has so much like , um , to it , you know , so whether you're a custard fan or a fruit pie person , you've got two different really awesome pies here .

They're not too over the top .

They're relatively simple .

They're definite crowd pleasers go make this pie , do it for yourself .

Do it for the ones you love .

Be the champion of this year's Thanksgiving and bring the pie .

Insert pie pun .

Yeah , that's what we need .

What's a pie ?

You want a piece of me ?

I only have pies for you .

Be the apple of my pie .

Yeah .

Give us your best pie pun .