It's Pie Day. It's Pie Day. Hello, welcome to Home Movies, I'm Alison
Roman. Today we are going to be making pie, which
is really exciting to me. But not just making a pie, I'm sort of walking
you through how to make a pie. From the crust to the filling and what to
look for, how to bake it, how long to rest it after it's been out of the oven. All sorts of information that I am sure that
you are simply dying to know. As always, I will offer the caveat that there
are a million different ways to make pie and many pie professionals, people that do it
every day in and day out, I'm sure would absolutely school me in making pie, although I did for
a brief time make pies professionally, I've hung up that hat and now I'm only a recreational
pie baker. Today's pie is going to be a double crust
fruit pie. And not just any fruit, but a peach pie. I think that using stone fruit like peaches,
apricots, plums, nectarines is a really excellent way to ensure that your pie is kind of fool
proof. I feel like for berry pie, there's a lot of
factors. The acidity, the juiciness, how much thickening
you're adding, the seediness of the fruit, it can be a little bit more advanced maybe
so I think that sticking with things like peaches, nectarines, plums, even apples, pears,
you're eliminating a lot of guess work from the pie experience. For my pie crust, this is something I've like,
I worked on for a very long time. I tried different ratios of butter to fat
to liquid, I tried vinegar in the water, I tried vodka in the water, I tried lard, I
tried butter, I tried a mix of both, I tried shortening. Like every which way you could do pie crust. I made it in a machine, I made it by hand,
and ultimately I felt like what is it, Occam's razor, like the most logical conclusion is
the, is that what it is? It's like the most obvious thing is the answer. Yeah the most, yeah. So it's like butter and flour and water basically
is the ingredient list for this pie crust. And I make everything by hand. I feel like you get just such a better result
when you're able to feel the butter, you're able to like smush the butter, you're able
to like really sort of be in tune with what's happening in the pie crust. When you put it in a machine, it's almost
too uniform and again like I just, the machines are taking over. I feel like one fewer machine in my life is
fine by me. So we're gonna just do this by hand. So our pie crust starts with butter and flour,
sugar, salt, water, and I use a little bit of apple cider vinegar. Could also use white wine vinegar uhh or white
distilled vinegar. The flavor of vinegar isn't gonna matter in
the end but the acidity is there to essentially tenderize your pie crust. When you think about marinating meat in acid,
that tenderizes the protein right? Same thing in this pie crust, there is protein
in our flour and so adding acidity in the form of vinegar really helps to break up that
protein which makes it tender. Two and a half cups of flour. And I am scooping the flour and I am levelling
the flour. My pie crust has salt and it has sugar. The sugar, I'm only having, it's like two
teaspoons. It's not even a full tablespoon. And that is going to promote browning. And it's just gonna make it taste balanced
in season, not especially savory. And the salt is there so that it doesn't taste
especially sweet. It's all about just making sure that it tastes
like a really good crust. Whether it's filled with like cheese and eggs
and kale or pie or pie or peaches and honey and ginger. Is quiche a pie? No, I guess not. But I'm approximating a teaspoon here. And you can just mix that together with your
hands. I don't love asking you to do things that
feel unnecessary or needless and I've made pie crust with pretty good success without
making ice water but it's always better with it. I'm just gonna let that water get as cold
as possible. If you wanna you know, like stick that in
the freezer, you can. Ice water is good too. This is regular unsalted butter. I like to bake with salted butter on occasion
but when I use it, it's for a specific purpose. I would not do it for this pie crust. I think your pie crust would be much too salty. You don't want your butter to be too tiny
or too flat, so I just kind of go in like these half-inch chunks. You don't need to be too precious with it
because we're gonna go in with our hands to like smush and crush the butter. So this to me is the fun part. I love smushing butter into flour. The first thing I'll do is I'll sort of just
toss the butter in the flour to make sure that each piece is evenly coated like that
and that's gonna prevent the butter from feeling greasy and sticking to each other. So each cube is sort of individually defined
here. They look like little sticks of butter. I mean they are little sticks of butter. I know but like they look like a stick of
butter shrank down. Yeah, like a mini. Yes. A Smurf's stick of butter. Yes, they're very sweet.That's like actually
a cool product I think. I feel like people would buy that. I'm not gonna do that but. I love small things and round things. Like Round Boys! Oh I do love Round Boys. What are Round Boys? Oh, it's the Instagram account of... there's
like lots of gerbils and hamsters and like floofy round boys. Seals. It's a good account. Really good account. What I'm doing is, I'm kind of just like working
the butter into the flour. Basically what we're looking for are like
long, thin, sort of flat pieces of butter like that. So I'm just sort of hunting for large chunks
of butter here and flattening each one as I discover them. See right now how it's like you know, these
larger pieces of butter and flour, I want these to sort of be one so I'm gonna continue
to just work the flour and the butter together so you get like this shaggy sort of mixture. And like smushing it together between your
hands like that is gonna be really helpful. Always make sure you get to the bottom of
the bowl. That's where like most of the flour is going
to sink to. So each of these pieces of butter as it melts
in the flour is going to create steam and as it creates steam it's going to lift in
the pie crust and that's what creates the flakiness. That's like the same principle for a croissant
or any sort of laminated pastry dough. When you bite into it and you're like wow,
it's so flaky, it's like very thin pieces of flour separated by air and that's because
that butter is melting and creating steam so it's like lifting. It's creating flakes and layers. Same concept with biscuits and scones, like
the flakiness that people are obsessed with and talk about, it's from the butter sort
of being like evenly distributed. It's not like saturating the flour if that
makes sense. So our butter flour mixture is in this bowl
and I am going to add ice water and vinegar. So when I first add the water, I basically
shake the bowl and just kind of toss it gently. And this is just like, you know, encouraging
the water to evenly distribute without you having to like forcefully go in with your
hands but now I'm gonna, now I'm gonna go in with my hands. I like to do this, this is part of the reason
I enjoy working on a surface like this and why like doing pastry in general is nice when
you have a large clean countertop. See how it looks very sandy and dry in spots
and you're like is this too dry? Well yes but that's because we haven't incorporated
the wettest parts like this in with our driest parts. And this is essentially the opposite of overworking. Like we're being so careful right now. You basically just press it together a few
times. This is very meditative for me. If you don't have one of these scrapers, you
can just use your hands. You don't you know need one of those but they
are very useful. So do you see how already it's like starting
to form these layers just as the dough. You can do this right in the bowl. I think that you just kind of you run the
risk of maybe overworking it slightly in the bowl because you have less freedom to like
spread it out. But this looks good to me. I feel really happy with this. There's still like a bit of you know like
this dry, shaggy energy here but that's okay. I'm gonna cut this in half. You're eyeballing it, do it to the best of
your ability. It's not. People say baking's a perfect science but
it is absolutely not and as a general rule, any sort of dough that you're chilling in
plastic, you wanna form it to the shape that you're eventually going to need it. I want this in a round because I'm making
it in a pie plate so you want to give it that opportunity to get there without much fuss
so form it into a round while it's still malleable. And if you were making a galette, say you
only needed one pie crust, these freeze beautifully. And you wanna pat it probably like an inch-ish
thick, three quarters. You don't wanna it too thin because otherwise
the way that the dough hydrates is like very, very uneven. You wanna give it like some height but you
also don't want it too thick because when it comes time to roll out you'll have a really
tough time. So I'm gonna chill these for at least two
hours but honestly if I were you I would do this at least a day ahead before you make
your pie. What is the chilling process? So it hydrates the dough while it like, it
sits? Yeah, you'll see what it looked like when
I put it in versus what it's gonna look like when I take it out. I couldn't roll that into a pie disc right
now. It would be too soft in the butter, the flour
would be too dry, it would be too shaggy, it would leave crumbs everywhere, it wouldn't
be good but when I roll that out in a few hours, it's gonna be smooth and silky and
like the flour will have been given time to relax, hydrate, rest, just like all of us
need to hydrate and relax and rest. So I know I said I was gonna chill this for
two hours which I did but this is one that I made the other day because we don't have
that kind of time here at Home Movies. Before I roll it out, I like to let it sit
out on the counter for like 5 - 10 minutes depending on how warm it is in your kitchen,
so when I'm ready to assemble the pie, I gather my things, I prep my space, I pull the dough
out, let that sit, I get a little dish, I fill it with some flour so I can use it to
dust my work surface. I get my fruit. I get my rolling pin. Don't you dare. One thing you don't wanna do is, and take
it from me, a person who does this, is you don't wanna be scrambling for anything when
it comes time to assemble the pie. Because as you roll that dough out and it's
thin, it's gonna get soft really quickly especially if it's warm in here. Right now we're at 79 degrees. We're at 1 degree away from the danger zone
people. Before we do anything, I'm going to line a
half sheet tray with tin foil and the reason I'm doing that is because your pies will almost
certainly spill over with juices. I line my tray with a little tray of foil. Just little sides so that when the juices
spill over, it's not the end of the world and if I get some on the tray fine but it
just makes clean up much, much easier. I think there's this misconception that if
your pie leaks or that the juices spill or something happens that you've somehow done
something wrong and it's not, the fruit is juicy, the juices need somewhere to go and
theoretically they stay in the pie and thicken and they become perfect but most of the time
they're going to spill out a little bit. They're gonna become so excited to be juicy
that they're gonna escape the pie for a second and that's okay so don't worry about it. Just know that it's probably gonna happen,
take the precaution, line your sheet pan with foil, so that when it does happen, you're
not upset because it's just tin foil. Umm, the second thing I'll do to prepare is
make my egg wash and that is what we're going to use to brush the sides of our pie crust. It's what we'll use to seal up any patches,
it's gonna be sort of like the glue that holds things together on the outside. I would say that of all the things that I
don't want you to skip, this is one of them. This is a boiled egg. There we go. I'm gonna put a splash of water in this to
make it easier to loosen up. Too much egg wash will create a really unappealing
thick layer on the top and it will also potentially make your sugar fall off because there's so
much liquid and it's so thick, it just kind of melts away. That's better. Our crust is here. It's hanging out. We're gonna roll it out in a second but first
we're gonna prepare our filling. This could mean tossing fruit that's been
cut for you. Frozen peaches are great for this but fresh
peaches are really spectacular. These are regular, sort of juicy, in season
now peaches. So for any pie, no matter what filling you're
using, you need three things: you need a thickener and that's gonna be either cornstarch or flour
or tapioca starch or potato starch. I like using cornstarch because you can find
it really easily but also I feel like it doesn't leave you with that gummy sort of tackiness
with the fruit that sometimes flour can. There's sweetness and that can come from brown
sugar, from white sugar, from honey, from maple syrup. I'm using a combination of honey and sugar
in this because I feel like peaches and honey to me are a very natural marriage of flavors,
whereas honey might be too assertive for other fruits. I don't actually enjoy honey and berries that
much. And then there's acidity. Sometimes I'll use vinegar, like apple pie,
I love using apple cider vinegar in that but for this, for peaches, I'm gonna use limes. You could also use apple cider vinegar, you
could also use lemon. We're gonna add some freshly grated ginger,
we're not adding so much that it's gonna read as overpowering or especially spiced, and
if you can't find fresh ginger, I would not substitute dry, I would just leave it out. Each time I make a pie, apple, pear, peach,
plum, berry, whatever, I like to make sort of like a slurry with all of those other ingredients,
the thickener, the sweetener, the acidity, in a bowl and then I just toss the fruit in
that. To me, that's like the easiest and most foolproof
way to execute this, mostly so that you dissolve things like the cornstarch or whatever thickener
you're using. Which can get a little lumpy. You wanna make sure it's like evenly distributed
among the fruit, not like clumps of it hiding somewhere. Three tablespoons of cornstarch. A quarter cup of sugar. I'm gonna keep the sugar and the honey out. I'm not gonna put it away just yet because
what I'll do is after I've cut the peaches, toss em in everything, I'll taste one, if
they happen to be really under-ripened or really acidic or if you're using something
like a really tart apricot, you may wanna adjust with more sugar. Similarly if your fruit is like not acidic
at all and you're wanting it to be a little more flavorful, you can add some more lime
juice. So adjust your fruit with the flavor that
it needs because not all fruit is, especially stone fruit, is created equal. Cool, I'm gonna zest the limes in here as
well. You don't have to zest, I like to zest. The zest gives obviously some good lime flavor,
but also gives a little bitterness to it which I'm into. And then I'm gonna grate the ginger. I don't peel my ginger, you can if you want. Then I'm gonna add about a quarter cup of
lime juice. These limes feel pretty juicy and each lime
is about two tablespoons so two limes, might need three, you might need four, depending
on how good your limes are. Alright so you see in here? It's our sugar, it's our honey, it's our cornstarch,
it's our ginger, it's our lime zest, it's our lime juice. And we'll just let that sit while we cut our
peaches. Umm I've never peeled a peach in my life. I'm not gonna start today and I don't think
you need to either. I know this because I ate one this morning,
these are not freestone peaches. A freestone peach is one you can just twist
off each piece and the pit falls out and it looks kind of like spiky. But so you have to uh cut around it, it's
called a cling peach. There's freestone and cling. Cling clings to the pit and freestone it frees
itself from the stone. How I do this is not un-similar to how I would
cut an apple. You sort of estimate where the pit is and
then you try to cut as close to it as possible. On either side, there's the pit and then you
have that little piece and then I cut on either side and then I still have that little piece
of fruit. So you're just kind of cutting around. I really like having thicker, big pieces so
I'm gonna cut these into pretty large slices. It's obviously much easier to do this with
a freestone peach but you don't always know what they are when you're buying them. I was out last night and I walked by a billboard
and it was like six million whatever people streamed Peaches last year or this month or
something like, looks like Justin Bieber fans are getting their fair dose of vitamin C.
And I was like peaches are not like known for their vitamin C. I'm probably not the
only person who looked at that billboard and was like, you gotta get it together. That is not factually accurate. I thought you meant Peaches by the Presidents
of the United States of America. Or Peaces & Cream by 112. Wow how many hours have I been doing this
for? What other songs are about peaches? I'm gonna put this away because we're done
here and I want as much space humanly possible for rolling out this pie crust. You do not want roll out your crust for pie
time in like a cluttered space and I know that sometimes it's not an option but even
if it means moving things off your countertop temporarily to give you the space you need
to roll your pie crust, you will be so grateful to have it. I've done this on a coffee table before just
because I didn't have it in the kitchen. Like you really do need to like give yourself
the space. A little bit of flour. I like to roll my pie crust directly on the
surface. I find that when you do it on a piece of parchment,
it slides around too much and I don't like it. It's 80 degrees. So I've just floured both sides of this but
now the flour has hydrated. It's not so cold that I can't roll it out. You kind of just start at the biggest parts
and you wanna encourage its round shape. Picking it up occasionally to make sure that
it's not sticking. And if you need to add a little more flour
you can. It's not so precious that if you like don't
add too much flour, you don't wanna dump it on there, but adding a light dusting here
and there at this stage is more than fine. The warmer it is in your house, the quicker
you'll have to be here. A good option though is always to roll it
out and you can keep it in the fridge if it is feeling too soft. The thinner that it becomes as you roll it,
the more in danger you are of having it be too soft. Really what we're making sure is it's evenly
thick. We're not looking for a perfect circle because
we're gonna trim it later anyway. Don't worry I just moved, I have a ruler. It's about 14 inches in diameter. This is a 9 inch pie plate. Roll the first one into the pie plate, move
it around so that it feels like it has equal overhang on all sides, kind of encouraging
it to slump into the corners. And while I do that one, I'm gonna put this
into the fridge because it needs to be kept chilled. If your pie dough cracks like that, just literally
shove it together. If you've ever worked with like play-doh,
this should not be that challenging. Okay, so that's our top. Making sure that it's not sticky. I'm just gonna leave it right there. I'm going to toss our peaches. Forgot there was a spoon in there. Tossing our peaches in that liquid. I'm just making sure that all the fruit feels
evenly coated. That's not good. That happened in the fridge. That's a casualty. It's fine. So I'm gonna brush the edges here with a little
bit of egg wash before I add the filling and that's just gonna help the top stick to the
bottom. The fruits gonna go in and it's gonna look
like a lot of fruit but the fruit cooks down. If you've ever made jam, you know that you
start with a lot more than you end up with. And the same principle applies to pie. Boop. Peach down. You wanna make sure that it's like obviously
mounded in the center and that's just gonna make it easier to put the top on. So now basically comes the time where we join
the two crusts. It's pretty simple at this stage. We're literally just pinching together. So we're taking the bottom piece and we're
pressing it into the top piece. If you're feeling very rustic or casual or
maybe you don't have as much overhang as I do, you could rip this with your hands. I'm gonna do scissors. Don't go too close if you're worried at all,
err on the side of doing less. Which is a good lesson for us all. But you can see it's just kind of like a gentle
overhang. Save this dough because you never know when
you're gonna need to patch up something, a hole that shows up somewhere, but now flour
your little hands and we're gonna pinch it on top of each other and this is creating
a seal. There are a bagillion ways to make a pie crust
but I like this because I enjoy thickness. You just don't want it too, too thick. But this is like a basic pretty foolproof
crimp. And then we're actually gonna go one more
time, just kind of lifting it up even more. I worked at Pies N Thighs for a few months. I like was in between jobs and I met the owner
Sarah and she basically like let me work there. I was like please. But she taught me a lot about making pies
and whenever I crimp a pie I think of her. She did it so much better and so much faster
than me. Umm okay. You could bake this now as is but I like to
do the like the fork thing. The important part here is that we're making
sure that the dough is resting on the lip of the pie plate, that it's not hanging over. Because the second that pie crust hangs over,
it's gonna bake, fall, and rip and all the juices will come escaping. That's like a dealbreaker. And if you see any little holes in the periphery,
I recommend patching them up. You're gonna go ahead and brush the whole
thing with egg wash anyway but if you're working on like a patchwork situation, do the egg
wash and then patch it. Pies I think are best when they are imperfect. I think that putting too much pressure on
something like this to look flawless is like a silly fools errand because when they bake,
they like really do their own thing in that oven. And I would never sacrifice aesthetic for
taste, especially in pie, which again is why I like this crust, why I like this method. The last thing we're gonna do, we're gonna
make some vents in the top. And you can do whatever kind of design or
pattern you like. I'm doing a simple like one slit on the top
there and then two on each side that are a little bit smaller. But you could cut holes out of the top. Basically I avoid any holes where it breaches
the crust because that's where the juices first escape but these vents are here to let
steam escape which is what's going to help the juices concentrate and the fruit evaporate
like the juices evaporate. And then for the topping you can sprinkle
it with regular sugar. I like to use Sugar in the Raw or Demerara
sugar. This is not just for aesthetics although it
does look really nice. This gives it such like a beautiful, crispy,
crunchy texture which you're already getting because of the pie crust but this takes it
to like an entirely different level. And then we're going to put it in the oven
for almost two hours. Don't yell at me it's two hours. I'm gonna set a timer for an hour. Do not look at that pie for an hour. Nothing is going to happen to that pie. You're not gonna burn it. It's not gonna over bake. It doesn't need you. Walk away, go for a walk, go do something. Now we're back. Through the magic of time and space, we've
finished the pie. It's been two hours almost exactly at 375
and it looks amazing. As noted, it has done the thing where it drips. A little bit over here, a little bit over
here. The color of this pie us to me perfect and
I feel like it's exactly what we're looking for. It looks like a really well baked croissant
and when you go to a bakery, those croissants are like deeply golden brown. They're like graham cracker brown and that
to me is what we're looking for. It should be like that all over. You can see the steam starting to escape here. And this needs to cool for, you're gonna hate
me for this, it needs to cool for like six to eight hours. I've already cut into this pie right now but
what would happen is the filling would just be too juicy and it would just leak everywhere
and be too hot and it would be too hot for my little hands to cut into slices, it would
crumble, it's just, it's not, it's not good, it's not good for anyone. The pie needs to rest. If you have like a screen porch that feels
breezy then that's a good place but any place that's gonna cool faster. Don't put it on top of the stove if your stove
is still hot. You can also transfer it over to a wire rack
and that will help it cool a little bit faster. If you wanted to do that you could. And that just helps the air circulate above
and below it. Will someone? Careful of that pan though. So this is all the gooey stuff and this could
have been baked onto our sheet pan which would have been fine. It wouldn't be the end of the world but our
sheet pan is clean. Because again we do not have this kind of
time at Home Movies, bring her in, wow look at that, another pie. Uh this one dripped a little bit more. This is a pie that I made this morning. Uh oh, these drippies escaped, we had escaped
drippies. That sucks. You know why this happened? It's because I didn't layer the foil properly. I learned the hard way. I'm just gonna soak this in hot water and
this will lift right off. The sugar will just melt. And to slice the pie, the first slice is always
like the first pancake. Yes. God that makes me so happy. I am thrilled to see this. See in here? There's like a gap between the fruit and the
crust. There are ways to mitigate that, that involve
like pre-cooking your fruit, cooking your pie for less time, using a different type
of fruit. That's not for me. I like it. It doesn't bother me either. When you make a slice and you put it on a
plate it looks like that, the crust sits on top of the fruit. Like it's not to me a dealbreaker at all. It doesn't mean anything's wrong with your
pie. Pies one of those things that like I feel
like we've seen so many pictures of a pie both in like a cartoon and in like a Betty
Crocker ad from the fifties, and they always look so perfect. They always look so set and like pristine
and like you slice it. Like cherry pie is like, you like slice it
and see the cross section of the cherry and just it doesn't look like that in real life. And I think if it does you're like doing something
to the pie that's like almost unnatural. To make it that set. To make it that perfect. Pies shouldn't be perfect. Pie is messy, pie is casual and should like
look so delicious and part of that to me is imperfection. Want a piece? That looks good as hell. When you look in there, the peaches are still
pretty whole. The juices have come out and they've like
sauced themselves. Mmm and it's not too sweet at all and you
could taste the ginger but not too much. The crust is baked all the way through and
you can tell because when you look at the side into the pie, you can tell that it's
golden brown on the sides. You want it on top, eat it on top. Umm I'm gonna eat this pie. Mmm it's really good. Honestly the crust does help. Even I was saying the peaches could use a
little more sugar. It's the first of the season and they weren't
that tasty but the crust like really brings them home. Honestly. Thank you all so much for coming to Pie 101. I hope that you go forth and bake your own
pie with confidence. And if there's one thing that you take away
from this, it's that you bake your pie long enough and I'm telling you to do this because
I've had pie that's under baked and it tastes like a floury mess. And I don't want that for you. Get you know creative with your fillings if
you want. Add ginger, don't add ginger. If you have like a family recipe whatever
that's fine just consider the time that you're baking it and consider the time that you're
resting it and then I think it will change the game for you entirely. I just moved into this place and when I moved
in I was so anxious to like get stuff unpacked and to like declutter so that the space itself
looked nice that like every time I opened like a closet or drawer there's just [-] in
it. There's like stuff and none of it was put
away right. Like what a missed opportunity to like really
start fresh. With like organization and a rhyme and a reason,
but not me, not this girl, I just shoved it all in there and I will deal with it later.
