How to Make the Perfect Summer Pie | Home Movies with Alison Roman

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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.
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Channel: Alison Roman
Views: 363,749
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: pie alison roman, pie, peach pie, pie crust, pie recipe, peach pie recipe, pie crust recipe, perfect pie, perfect peach pie, perfect pie crust, homemade pie, homemade peach pie, easy pie recipe, easy peach pie recipe, how to make pie, how to make peach pie, pie 101, dessert recipes, fruit pie, how to make pie crust, pie crust from scratch, alison roman, home movies with alison roman, a newsletter, nothing fancy, dining in, recipes, recipe, kitchen, chef, baking, baking show
Id: 14jbItlc8S8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 30min 35sec (1835 seconds)
Published: Wed Jul 28 2021
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