Pie Rookies: Our First Pie

My wife and I (mostly my wife) recently ventured into the world of pie-making.

Our pie adventures started with a simple apple pie.

Crust: For the crust, we used the “Mom’s Pie Crust” recipe from allrecipes.com. Contrary to the title, it was not my mother’s pie crust. However, the recipe was relatively easy and worked well, although my wife had to add more water than the recipe called for.

Here’s a slideshow of our first pie-making experience:

Filling: It doesn’t get much simpler than this filling. We used about seven Golden Delicious apples, cinnamon and sugar. We used the following websites to guide the way, though:

- http://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Making-Apple-Pie-Filling/detail.aspx

Notes: Some apple pie filling calls for lemon juice. We didn’t use it because it is only recommended for apples that are too sweet and we didn’t think the Golden Delicious were too sweet.

Assembly: This website was very helpful in the actual “assembly” process of making a pie:

- http://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Making-a-Pie-Crust-Step-by-Step/detail.aspx
- http://www.wikihow.com/Bake-an-Apple-Pie-from-Scratch

Notes: I hadn’t ever given the assembly process much thought, but it was interesting to read the different strategies for getting the bottom crust into the pan and carefully unfolding it.

Baking: Having never baked a pie, we were a bit freaked out by how long you bake it, but we found that pie crust is very resilient to the high temperatures (we started it at 400 (F) and then brought it down to 375 (F) for the remainder).

Also, this is a pretty common tip, but we almost forgot about it – make sure to put a cookie sheet under the pie in order to catch any filling that might bubble over.

The Result: We turned out with a pretty decent apple pie. Mistakes were made and lessons were learned, but overall, it wasn’t bad for first timers.

The Bad:

- Too much crust:  I really liked the crust, but it was too thick, so next time, we’ll probably try to roll it thinner.

- Not enough filling: We didn’t pack it with enough filling. We had made too much filling overall, so we tried to stretch it into two batches, one which we would freeze and use at a later time. We didn’t follow the filling ½ inch above the crust rule, and it showed in the end result.

The Good:

- Good flavor. Though the levels of crust and filling weren’t right, it doesn’t mean it didn’t taste good! The crust had a nice level of flakiness and the outer edge was nice and crispy. And the filling, well, I think apple pie filling would be hard to mess up!

- Sugar on top. We used an egg wash on top, along with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top. It was a nice touch! We thought we may have done the egg wash wrong because we just beat an egg and some recipes indicate that you should mix it with water, but it turned out fine.

- Leftover crust! I had forgotten that the best part of making pie is the leftover crust! We baked up a few pieces with egg wash and cinnamon and sugar and they were rad. I used them as a nice morning pastry to have with my coffee.