Claire Saffitz Makes Cherry Pie | Dessert Person

i kept getting confused that i have these frozen cranberries and i kept making more my cherries i did not get any sleep last night hey everyone i'm claire saffits i am in my home kitchen and today i am making one of my favorite recipes from dessert person like all of them but this really is one of my favorites i'm making sour cherry pie to me it really represents the top of the mountain when it comes to fruit desserts and today's episode is really going to be all about fruit pie construction how to make sure the bottom isn't soggy how to make sure it's baked through you the juices are thickened and to me there's just no more delicious fruit dessert than this one [Music] all right so before we get to the episode felix and i are here to thank honey our sponsor honey is an online shopping tool that searches for promo codes to a lot of your favorite websites and it's a great way to save money i use it all the time but more on why i love it later and now i'm going to show you the episode right kitty so i grew up in st louis and in our front yard we had a sour cherry tree that had been there for a long time eventually it died and my dad had to cut it down but for most of my childhood every summer we would get like millions of cherries and we would hang out my sister's bedroom window on the second floor to try to get as many as we could and then my mom would bake pies and it became a tradition and i still remember the flavor of those pies you can make this all year long if you just find sour cherries that are frozen you just need a rolling pin and a pie plate other than that it's a really analog recipe everything kind of gets done by hand just make sure you have a large bowl for the filling and then in terms of ingredients i have my sour cherries right here and keep them frozen don't thaw them leave them frozen it'll help you out a lot then i have my pie dough this is pie dough from dessert person this is actually a double portion so i'm going to cut it in half and i have a top crust and a bottom crust this is also the almond variation on the pie crust in dessert person which means i just took out a third of a cup of flour and added a third of a cup of almond flour so if you want to see how to make this check out our previous episode i'm starting with already chilled pie dough other ingredients i have a little bit of kosher salt raw sugar and a beaten egg for finishing the pie then for the filling besides sour cherries i have granulated sugar a cup and a quarter these cherries are very very tart so they actually require quite a bit of sugar to balance everything out cornstarch ground cardamom ground cinnamon if you like a different balance of spices you can do that there's it's subtly spiced a lemon for zest some almond extract i think that's it this recipe for sarah cherry pie uses a very i would say a large proportion of fruit the cherries cook down quite a bit and i really want all the benefits of the cherries and the flavors so it calls for eight cups i had a two pound diagonal frozen cherries and it's a little bit shy so i'm gonna supplement with the only other cherries that i have which is actually a mix of sweet and sour you can see that the difference between the sweet and the sour so sour cherries typically are smaller a little bit lighter in color sweet cherries can almost be purple and the sour cherries even at their peak ripeness are really like a sort of like pinkish lipstick red so you can see the diff sour cherries are very very juicy they have a lot of water content and it's much easier to work with them when they are frozen so even if i'm making like if i buy fresh cherries from the market i'll actually still freeze them before i make the pie sugar is hydrophilic so it attracts water it will pull moisture out of the cherries and sometimes what happens is by the time you're ready to construct the pie your filling is like swimming in liquid and then liquid is going to make it a lot harder to do your lattice and make your pie so that's why i recommend using frozen you'll get a better result okay so for the filling i have one and a quarter cups granulated sugar generally i mean you could cut that back it seems like a lot for a pie but again these are very sour and i think that they can really take the sugar so go ahead and toss that then i'm going to add my other filling ingredients and this is just sort of the flavors that i personally like in sour cherry pie i'm adding five tablespoons of corn starch maybe a little bit more than i would add for other fruit pies but sour cherries are so juicy they have so much liquid then i'm going to add some lemon zest i'm not adding juice because like there's plenty of tartness already in the sour cherries so two teaspoons which is about you know the better part of a medium lemon okay i like a tiny bit of warmth in the background so i'm adding a little bit of warm spice for my personal preference it's a half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon cardamom because cherry and almond are a natural pairing i add some almond extract not a lot just about a quarter teaspoon the pie crust that i'm using is made with a little bit of almond flour but just a tiny bit it's really kind of there in the background so i just added a pinch of salt and this is our filling so i'm just going to go ahead and mix this all together now the trick is getting the pie assembled before this thaws out you could obviously just stick this back in the freezer or the fridge i don't have room so i'm just going to leave it at a room temperature and try to work quickly okay so if you use this pie plate because i don't have another glass one well i do i don't know [Music] i actually have a swap because if i were to bake this fruit pie and wait for it to cool to cut it we would be here all day so i baked the one last night in glass i'm just using a ceramic pie plate because that's what i have and now i'm going to start to roll out my crust so i do a lot of online shopping i buy stuff for the cabin i buy things for the cats and for my kitchen and i always use honey so you hit the little button and it scans for promotion codes and in a matter of seconds you see the savings in your cart i never like to miss out on a deal and i don't think you should either so you can sign up for free so right outside the window i have this this is so funny that this cat is now here oh you came here the mic oh kitty you got to get down it's too muffled come on kitty so recently i bought some stuff to start a garden outside you can see some containers with some plants and honey saved me 15 when i went to check out honey installs in just a few seconds you can also support our channel in the process so go to joinhoney.com claire that's joinhoney.com claire and thank you to honey for supporting this episode and now back to the recipe this is my almond flour pie dough i'm going to cut it in half because this is a double portion looks good just to prevent some of it from softening too much i'm going to stick half in the fridge somewhere i'm going to roll this out into a round and lay it on my pie plate as the bottom crust so i'll show you how to basically go from a square shape to something a little more round when you have just the right amount of hydration in the dough it has almost like a plastic quality it's really easy to work with it doesn't stick but it doesn't crack either and that that's really that's when you know like you really hit the hydration just right so i start by giving it a little bit of a you know thwack and what i like to do actually is concentrate on the lines running through the corners so i try to basically flatten out the pie crust along those lines and then going on the other side 90 degrees so go ahead and dust it with more flour and then what i like to do is just kind of roll out where it's thicker if you feel like when you lift up the rolling pin you're getting butter on your rolling pin like just flour it roll it out it's soft enough so i want to get this into about an eighth of an inch round and then i like to you know keep rotating it so once i get it to about a 13 inch round that's about the right thickness and this is why you have a bench gripper handy if you have any little parts that are sticking this will help you to lift and scrape up your pie dough but this looks good so i'm ready to lay it into my pie plate there's lots of methods that you can do for this and i'll show you one method is if you feel like you're confident you can truly just like lift it up with your hands and transfer to the pie plate that's often what i do another method is to use the rolling pin so you start by flipping the edge of the pastry up and then rolling it onto the pin you bring your pie plate over you unroll it the same way just like this okay another way to do it is you can just fold the pastry so it kind of depends on your comfort level you can fold it in half and transfer it you can fold it in quarter you know again and transfer it i don't really find that that's necessary half is just fine center your pastry in your pie plate and then what you want to do is you want to let it slump down to fill that corner between the bottom and the sides where those two meet rather than pushing in i'm going to actually kind of just let it slump down because you don't want to stretch the dough into the pie plate you want to just let it fill in the gaps on its own and then press really well use your fingers make sure that there is full contact all the way around and now i'm going to trim it so trying to maintain that half inch clearance you won't see this edge so it's not so important but that looks pretty good now i'm going to put this into the fridge while i roll out the second half you want this to stay cold it's already gotten a little warmer than i would like good good enough oh good so now my second half a dough is going to be the lattice so i'm going to cut this into strips so in this case i actually don't need the pie dough to be a perfect round i want it to be round ish but it actually works out well for the purpose of the lattice to have a semi square shape keeping it cold is really important you want cold pastry for maximum flakiness sometimes what happens with pastry if it gets warm is the texture suffers it's not as flaky it loses its ability to really like stand up to the filling this pie dough i made yesterday that's another good tip like don't try to make it with pie dough that you just put in the fridge because it really needs that time to rest and cool down so this is a process it's best to do it in stages i like the look of a lattice where you have two strips that are crisscrossing through the center of the pie so that generally means an odd number of strips going in each direction so for the swap i was able to cut ten strips and half going five in each direction and i really like the look of that so i'm gonna try to do that again a straight edge is really useful for this you could just freehand it sometimes i just freehand it and i you know it's like whatever i don't care um but i'm just gonna at least make sure i have a straight edge and then in terms of the width i think i'm going about like an inch between an inch and a quarter inch and a half thick all right i hope i can get 10 out of this what i like about how it's going so far is i have very little trim i'm not really throwing away a lot of pastry okay so here are my lattice strips i'm going to grab my bottom crust now and get rid of my rolling pin and i'm going to start to assemble before your filling thaws out too much go ahead and scrape this whole thing in and you can see that it has thawed like the you know there's some juiciness in there that's fine what you want to avoid is having so much liquid from the cherries that the cherries are like swimming in it and that it's pooling and that's going to make it a lot harder to complete your lattice because the liquid just gets in the way it makes the crust wet and it can also burn if it gets on the crust now that you have your cherries in go ahead and push them down really well because these cherries cook down quite a bit and so they'll lose volume i'm going to use my beaten egg and just dab a little bit of it around the rim of the bottom crust and this is just to help the lattice stick so now i have my strips i'm going to go five in one direction and five in the other i'm starting with one of my longest strips and i'm just laying it straight across the center of the pie now don't press too hard because you're going to end up having to lift up the pastry once or twice then i'm going to take my next longest strip and lay it at a right angle and across like a plus sign right over top and now i have gonna do on each side of these strips to the left and to the right two more strips in both directions so that's five total you know running one way five total running the other now as i lay each strip i'm going to do this basket weave which is a sort of an over under pattern so here you see the strip that's running for me left to right is over the vertical strip so the next one i lay down is going to go under the vertical strip just like that now i'm going to go in that direction the same way i'm going to go under and now let's go back the other way for the vertical strips so i have over under over i want to then do under over under that makes sense so i'm going to lift up this one to go under and then lift up this one so i'm going to do it on the other side again over under what i'm trying to do as i lay down each strip is make sure that the spacing is even so that there's the same like width of a gap in between the strips and that one isn't like way over to the side okay so this is the last strip and i have my lattice with my basket weave in between the strips i form these little squares i'm just looking to see that those squares are about the same size that all of them are parallel and then once i see that i can start to press around the edge and make sure that they are stuck to that bottom crust along the edge and once i do that i'm going to actually go in with my scissors and trim because now i have a little bit of excess that i want to get rid of i'm basically trimming it off where i can feel the rim of the pie plate end and then a little bit of pastry extends beyond that so i'm going to just give a little more egg wash around the border because the idea is that i'm going to fold that little overhang up and over the lattice and now i'm taking this overhang and i'm folding it up so one thing you can do is really press and like thin out the area of the lattice where it hits the bottom crust and make sure that the bottom and the lattice are fully connected bottom crust to work with but that's it i mean you could leave it here like there's a lot to like about the way that this looks this is a pretty thick layer of dough along the border the problem with that is it might not bake through in the oven and you might end up with this thick gummy edge of undercooked pastry and we don't want that so at the very least what you want to do is thin out that layer and you could do that simply by using this technique with a fork and pressing the tines of the fork into the pastry i'm using a little bit of flour to prevent sticking it is thinning out and extending the edge of the pastry a little bit so i tend to do a little bit of a wider crimp and i use my thumb and forefinger on one hand and my forefinger on the other hand and creating this you see that that wave pattern okay it's like a zigzag whatever you want to call it so you want to go all the way around dusting my fingers in a little bit of flour and you don't want to stick any pie like this where i'm not par baking the bottom crust so any double crust pie really get it very cold and give it a chance to rest a little bit before you put it in the oven for me that means freezer and then you can do the egg wash when it comes out right before it goes in the oven but i'm going to go ahead and just give it a little egg wash now so i'm using my beaten egg and my pastry brush and i'm trying to really only paint the pastry part so paint every surface of the exposed pastry one of the things you want to avoid is getting a lot of pooling egg into the little like divots of the crust just because that can sometimes burn and we're gonna bake this pie for like an incredibly long time so now that i have everything glazed my final final touch is some raw sugar on the crust this adds sparkle it adds crunch it adds a little bit of extra sweetness obviously it's just always the finishing touch on a fruit pie i'm not doing this on the baking sheet and that's because i could get egg drips and some excess sugar on the surface and i don't want that to be on the baking sheet that then goes in the oven because that can burn as well i mean look the whole thing is going to burn you're going to get crazy fruit juice everywhere but you know as much as i can avoid it i will so i have this on the baking sheet i don't normally bake with this much foil but in this case you're really going to want it and then this goes into an oven 425 with any kind of pastry situation you want to bake really hot at the beginning so i put it 425 for about 20 minutes and that helps to initiate this puffing action of the pastry and then once i start to see some color on it after about 20 minutes i drop the temp to 350 and it goes 350 the rest of the way and i bake this pie for two hours maybe even two hours and 30 minutes that long and don't confuse the burning juices on the on the baking sheet with burning the pie those are different sometimes like i have crazy smoke billing out of my oven because the juices on the baking sheet are burning but the pie is fine pie is just you know like chugging a lot i just want to say i get really happy when a photo matches the recipe and i think that's very important to me that there's truth in advertising so you know the photo should somewhat look like your final result but in this case i'm like it's pretty close you'll see that where i had the crimps that there's like a valley at the end of each crimp and that's where the juices found their little runoff area and so in some of those areas it got really dark because the juices have sugar in them it evaporates you end up with some burning right but even then i don't really mind you want to really let it set so like 24 hours later that's a fine time to eat your pie you don't want to cover it because it's going to soften your crust but try to put it in like a a dry location so i'm going to just go in a little sawing action this is what i like to see it is juicy but it's not liquid you see the flakes in the crust for the most part i have a really cooked through pastry along the edge it's nice when you fork into it that you hear the pastry shatter it's a good sign the flavor of sour cherries just will always remind me of my childhood and picking the cherries and trying to beat the birds you know to get all the cherries off the branches it's just an amazing fruit and it makes to me the all-time greatest pie filling and there's just maybe no other recipe that makes me happier than a sour cherry pie thank you for watching i love that i now have an entire cherry pie i'm gonna go eat my slice and um like and subscribe [Music]

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 468,504

Keywords: claire saffitz, claire makes, cherry pie, how to make cherry pie, how to make pie, pie dough, claire saffitz makes, sour cherry pie, Claire makes cherry pie, the best cherry pie, bon appetit, gourmet makes, claire saffitz dessert person, dessert person, how to bake a pie, how to bake, homemade pie, cherry, cherries, easy pie recipe, how to recipe, baking recipe, dessert, pie dough from scratch, pie, pie recipe, cherry pie recipe, classic cherry pie, warrant cherry pie, pies

Id: -srudZAM3U4

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mezasu123]

Enjoyed hearing her childhood stories how it connects to this recipe.