10 Ways to Apple Pie With Erin Jeanne McDowell | NYT Cooking

double cross pie I wanna slice I'll work on it I'll get back to you hi I'm Erin Jean McDowell recipe developer cookbook author and New York Times recipe contributor as you may or may not know about me one of my favorite things in the entire world is pie and this time of year is sort of my ultimate pie time I get to talk about pie and eat lots of pie and make lots of pie so what we're going to do here is sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure situation with a master apple pie filling that can be used 10 different ways some of them are pie some of them are not but no matter what you choose everyone's gonna be happy [Music] so let's talk about this pie filling it is going to have one major difference from many recipes that you see which is that it involves being cooked on the stovetop pre-cooking pie fillings allows you to thicken some of the juices and concentrate some of the flavors before you even get the pie into the oven and that means you're going to have a better chance of that having a really beautiful Nice Slice with no runny pie business going on but any really good baking apple is going to work here so you know a John of gold a Gala Honeycrisp they're one of my favorites for baking with because they are a nice blend of tart and sweet they get soft but they don't break down into mush which I like for an apple pie filling I like to do diced apples for this filling and for one reason it makes it a lot more versatile it makes us able to use it in 10 ways very easily it also allows us to kind of control the juiciness aspect little bit but the size of the dice is sort of up to you I just am doing a pretty standard rustic dice here I like to be able to have some pieces that are a little softer and more broken down and some pieces that are a little bit firmer and still have some bite once you have all your ingredients ready it's really as simple as putting it all in the pot I'm gonna add some of the ingredients to the pot and save a couple for later family really smells the pie I think he wants it on this the all-purpose flour is going to provide a little bit of thickening here so I actually like to add the sugar right into the flour so that when we add it to something hot like this pot it won't Clump up it smells so good so since you have to cool your apple pie filling completely before you can use it one of my favorite ways to do this is to just spread it onto something with more surface area like a casserole dish or a baking sheet more surface area will help it cool a lot faster one of the things that's so great about this building is how versatile It Is by cutting the apples into smaller pieces it makes it more friendly for different sizes and portions of desserts including one of my all-time favorite pie recipes which is my fried apple pies I've got my cold apple pie filling ready to go and I have my mealy pie dough when it comes to something that you're frying it's actually very helpful to have the fat dispersed more evenly throughout so you don't end up with any kind of errors or problems come fry time the shape of the dough is not that important it's more the thickness of the dough that is important and we're gonna fill them basically you just want them to be plenty full but not so full that they're gonna ooze out as you start to assemble them now I'm gonna just dip my finger into a little bit of water and run it around one half of the little pie we're just trying to give the dough on the other side so something to stick to and it's important to have a good seal on Fried Pies because otherwise they're likely to first open I have a thermometer you can actually just do the way that I learned to test fryer oil which is to use a little scrap piece of dough at first it should sink to the bottom of the pot then shortly after it should rise to the surface and start slowly Browning okay I'm going to drop a few of my chilled pies in at a time and we're going to fry them until they're evenly golden brown and we want to make sure that we give them enough time because we don't want any raw dough so this is going to take several minutes you can usually fry three or four at a time in a large pot like this you just don't want them to be so close that they're touching too much of the fried ring [Music] and coat them generously these are the stuff of fast food and Carnival Dreams times a thousand they are so delicious everyone loves them and you can eat them fresh when they're warm and just freshly made and that is the best thing in the world these are perfect I can't talk to you anymore bye cobbler is such an amazing fruit dessert there are lots of different styles of toppings but I really like a biscuity topping for a cobbler and this is sort of a cinnamon biscuit and you just dollop it all over the filling that's what I like about cobbler it's really customizable really homey really comforting so this is a great dessert kind of for any level of effort even like weeknight level of effort so for these mini pies instead of using a regular pie dough I'm using kind of something with a shorter more crumbly cookie like texture rather than something light and Flaky and Airy and the main advantage of that is you can just press it into whatever your vessel is you could easily put a couple of these in a box and leave them on a neighbor's porch or something as a little treat so that way you can make a whole pan but you don't necessarily have to eat the whole pan all those flavors of apple pie but you know in a in a bar I'm like not getting tired of watching this filling go into pans yet so I'm just I'm just look at how caramelly it is and bars like this are another great way to keep it easy you know this is something that kids could really help with both in the preparation of the recipe and with the assembly I always recommend galettes for people who really like to eat pie but don't necessarily like to make it a galette is a more rustic sort of pie from the perspective of it's not made in a pie pan it doesn't require any kind of extra bake time or anything but that's one of the things that's nice about a galette is you can kind of choose if you want more filling or or a little less all right now I'm going to fold the edges over kind of letting them naturally pleat all the way around just let the crust fall where it may another really fun and easy thing that you can do with this apple filling is just leave out flour and turn it into apple butter instead and you're going to puree it it's going to get even thicker when you return it to the pot for kind of one last stage of cooking and it's going to have this really incredible deep caramel flavor from all of those other things that were going on in our apple filling I'm calling this little iteration an upside down pie because it isn't exactly a tart to tan the most traditional Upside Down Pie that butter is going to react with the other ingredients in our filling and kind of make this amazing caramelized topping so I just like to use the rolling pin to sort of guide the dough into the pan like this this is going to become the bottom of this pie so we don't really care what this looks like then we'll bake this until the pastry gets really golden brown we've got a steamy hat upside down apple pie so if you definitely have some non-apple pie lovers in your family you might want to opt for a layer cake instead then in the middle I'm just going to spoon a nice big [Music] heart eye emoji can't wait to eat it one of my other favorite things to do with this filling is to sort of take an A La Mode slice of pie but turn it on its head I'm going to start by excluding a little bit of the filling into the base of my sundae dish as many as you want no judgment here we're gonna spoon some more filling all over the surface then we're going to use some of our pie crust streusel that we made our little bits of pie dough and we are just gonna put those all over the Sunday all the flavors of apple pie without actually having to make any pie double crusted Beauty I first go all the way around the edges pinching the top crust and the bottom crust together we take that excess crust at the edges and we tuck it under itself like this and it's not only going to stay put but it's also going to give us a little bit more dough at the edge for crimping only egg wash the center of the pie because the edge is brown enough on their own already so now we'll give this a chill until it's time to bake the oven and the piece their resistance the double crust apple pie made with our Master apple pie filling thank you so much for joining me today as we made all these amazing apple desserts it was sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure apple pie situation you can make a classic apple pie you can make fried apple pies you can make little ones or free-form ones or you can skip the pie all together and go for cakes and Sundaes it's really up to you there are so many pie stabilities here and I'm so excited for you to make some of these in your kitchen this holiday season thanks so much foreign [Music]

Channel: NYT Cooking

Views: 197,821

Keywords: cooking, cooks, recipes, recipe, how-to, how to, kitchen, new york times, new york times cooking, nyt cooking, nyt, nytimes, baking, pie, apple pie, how to bake apple pie, best apple pie, erin jeanne mcdowell, apple cobbler, pie crust, how to make pie crust, best pie crust, Tarte Tatin, short crust pastry, pastry, pie filling, thanksgiving

Id: kTw4B8lPHpA

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020