Skip to content Skip to sidebar Skip to footer

Real Simple Apple Pie Recipe

 

Simple Apple Pie Recipe

- Hi everyone, I am John Kanell teach you how to make delicious home-cooked dishes to share with your friends and family. Today we're making this insanely indulgent apple pies. The perfect balance of sweetness and acidity. Like bursts in your mouth and you're like, ah, oh my gosh, what's happening? I'm in love, thank you. This is the best thing ever so let's get started. 

I'm using my all-time favorite pie crust recipe. I just doubled it for two discs because I need one for the bottom and one for the lattice on top. You can click up here for the full how-to video all the ins and outs everything you need to know. I also have that full recipe in the blog post as well so you can click on that in the description below.

 - Is basically 300 grams of all-purpose flour, a quarter cup of sugar or 50 grams. Into the bowl of your food processor along with a quarter teaspoon of salt whiz it up and then you add-in one cup of unsalted butter at room temperature. That's 226 grams if you're counting. Whiz, whiz, whiz, and then we're gonna add-in one-quarter cup of ice water in a drizzle along with two tablespoons of vodka. 

Don't worry, it'll burn off. Whiz it a couple of times until you get a rough shaggy dough. Pop it onto the pastry mart, work it over just three or four times and then you're gonna have your disk that you can wrap in plastic and chill. It is that easy. Okay, this needs to go back into the fridge so it's nice and cold while we work on our filling in you go. To make the apple pie filling for your apple pie. You can do two things, you can make it pop it into that pastry or you can make it cook it all the way down and save it for later. This is delicious on any number of desserts eaten by the spoonful, topping for ice cream, you name it. Let me know in the comments what you put apple pie filling on, really tasty. Just gotta put that out there. Okay to make our apple pie filling we need three pounds of apples that you love. Personally, 

I like Honey Crisp apples but they're like super expensive. So you could use as your favorite Gala apple, you're favorite. Whatever you want as long as it is not Red Delicious because those are the most disgusting fruit I have ever seen in my life. All right, back to business, three pounds of apples. We'd appeal them get the flesh off and chop them up. So let's get started. If you have children with clean hands, this is a perfect activity for them as long as they don't cut themselves. Keep these in a bowl while we peel. This amount of filling will make a regular nine-inch pie. 

If you have a deep-dish pie or maybe a 10 inch or go ahead and add an extra 50% or you could even double it and have a little bit of apple pie filling for later. Apple Pie is one of my favorite desserts and my mom used to make it all the time but it was like her version of a French macaron for me. Where it was kind of impossible to get it right or to meet her own expectations. She was almost annoyed that her pie crust wasn't flaky enough. This apple pie is nice and flaky, however. (upbeat music) Alright rounding the corner. Okay, the apples have been peeled, thank goodness. 

So in case you're not an apple flush cutter offer, just go ahead and chop away from the core, hopefully not getting too much of it. Give extra pieces you can just flick them off. And same goes for any extra skin that you neglected to remove. So we're just making a nice little like one-inch dices basically with our apple a little bigger, smaller doesn't matter. And you will continue this process until all of your apples have just the cores left. Last Apple. Oh my gosh, I thought I was done. 

Right now I need about a quarter of a cup of lemon juice. Right here, the acidity will really wake up the apples give you a nice contrast to the sweetness. And I wanna zest half of a lemon. So a good thing. I didn't finish juicing it right. So let's get the zest off. This is not the ideal way to zest a lemon, but it'll work. Save this for a minute and then add-in. Give us a quick toss. Now we're gonna add in two-thirds of a cup of sugar. That's one third and two thirds. Yes, that's a lot of sugar, but it's a pie people. All right, toss us one more time.

 I'm using my clean hands. Okay, we're gonna set this aside and do some skillet work now. These need to get washed. Placing one-quarter of a cup of unsalted butter onto a large skillet and let it get nice and melted. Once your butter is all melted and delicious, it's time to add in the apples, carefully. We're gonna cook these apples on medium-high for maybe two to three minutes. We want them to start really releasing their juices. So Cook on medium-high and then move them around occasionally. 

So you can see a ton of juices are coming out right now all the juices will be reduced and form almost a caramel. It's gonna be amazing. Reducing to medium-low right now and I'm adding in half a teaspoon of cinnamon. Get in there you, give the apples a toss. That reserved lemon zest goes in there too now, and this is somewhat optional, but I'm gonna be adding in a little grate of nutmeg. Look how pretty that is the inside of a nutmeg nut. 

To this one last twirl around the pan and we're gonna cover this and let it cook for about seven or eight minutes. You can stir it once or twice but it's really just gonna be reducing softening up the apples and becoming more delicious, okay. Give it that time. The apple pie fillings have been cooking for about five or so minutes. So I'm gonna sprinkle in my corn starch right now and then mix it up. Don't worry about the lumps they'll all get dissolved. 

After that corn starch has worked in a bit you can close it back up, it'll continue cooking and thickening up and gaining all that delicious flavor. Why did I use this heavy, heavy cast-iron pan? Carefully separate your apples from the juices use a lighter pan unless you're strong. And oh my God, it's like 30 pounds or something. When you cook your apples down if you're baking them in the pie crust, you want them to be at this point, softened but when you take a bite, it still has a lot of mouthfeels it's not like a mushy apple. You know making applesauce here. 

If you're making the apple pie filling go ahead and just continue to cook it down a bit. You don't have to separate the juices or anything, because they'll thicken up as you cook the apples down. One, two, three. These juices are gonna go back on the pan at medium-low heat, we wanna thicken them up just a bit so that our pie isn't like a runny mess we cut into it basically. But by the by do you see this beautiful color? Look at all that cinnamon, apple, this is like I go drink this plane, or maybe you could add some rum to it. Bourbon, let me know in the comments how to turn this an apple pie cocktail, oh my God, that's genius. Okay, just cook it until you see it thicken up a bit. 

You don't wanna make it into like a thick caramel. It's more of a sauce. And we're doing this over medium-low heat. Right now we're just letting some of the water reduce out of the liquid, so it's really more concentrated flavor. You can see the steam coming up. That's the water. Right now we can transfer those apple pieces back into our bowl. These juices thickened up really nicely. You can see here, it's taking a while for them to, you know, cover their tracks so to speak. We're gonna pour this over our apples. Oh my gosh, this pan. 

 I kept telling myself like, oh, I'll get back in shape. When the kids get heavier, which they're doing. Course get to lift them up all the time. But I don't know, hasn't helped everything. Mix this caramel in with the apples. And if you cook your apples down long enough, initially, it's apple pie filling. So set this aside to cool down we want to be really close to room temperature. So this could actually go hang out in the fridge and make some friends, while we work on our pie crust. I'll be right back. Back to our chilled pie dough, I'm very excited. You can see all the beautiful little pieces of butter in here. That's exactly how it should be. Let's give this a nice liberal sprinkling of flour, this goes on here. More flour spread it around, move it around. 

Our goal is not happening stick using a pastry mart helps because you can kinda like move them around flour is your friend here, all right. And now we're gonna start in the center and move out. Then change the direction of your rolling pin as well. And then after a couple of roles, you're going to like lift your butt up, sprinkle some more flour, just keep it moving. It's like a shark. It can't stay still it has to keep moving. I go over all of this in my how to make pie crust recipe that we talked about, but that video keeps going on for a no-bake pie crust talking about blind baking. You know how to get things to hold their shape in the oven. 

Okay, 'cause I glasses is so slick and slippery. It's like Washington politicians. (laughing) I'm ready for my talk radio here. Okay, sprinkle, sprinkle, change your directions. This is looking nice. You can still see the butter coming through. It's a happy malleable high crust. Take a rolling pin and one a final dusting of flour right there. And now we can just roll it up, transfer it to onto our pie dish. Before you start moving things around, make sure it's kinda more centered to the notch. And then what I like to do is push in the pie dough, especially from those sides where you have like extra hanging off. That way you're not stretching it out. You're pushing it in and I find that shrinks less. 

 Okay, let's tap this up, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. We don't want wrinkles. We wanna have a nice even surface to play with. And the last step is that we can just trim the excess, you can use scissors or a knife and overhang is fine. This gets set aside now. We can roll these up for later, more flour. Now we're gonna rule out that second batch of dough and cut it into strips for the lattice. You want your strips to be about, oh, maybe 11 inches long for a nine to 10-inch pie crust. A knife is totally fine for this or you can also use a pizza cutter. And your strips don't even have to be all the same thickness it could have a little bit of play in it. We can set these strips aside. 

Repeat the process with the rest of your dough. If you're a responsible person and made one big disc like I did not for this then you'd be done by now. If I need any extra dough, I have my scraps that I can roll out in an emergency but for now, I think we're ready to assemble, so excited. The filling has cooled down enough that I won't melt all the pastry, so let's add that in there. Look at this delicious filling, what? Catching the light, nice caramel color. Smooth out all that pie filling smooth, smooth. This is important because we're laying our lattice down and I don't wanna have any crazy divots. All righty then. Time to layout our lattice, nice big overlapping pieces, you can leave as much space in between the strips as you'd like. 

I'm going for maybe like a quarter of an inch. You can go right to the edges if you want as well. It's always better to have more than less. Once your first layer is laid down. You're gonna flip up every other strip. Place another one in between and then the strips go back down. Lots of you probably already have made a lattice but some of you haven't and so easy and fun to do really. Okay, one side has done, time for the other. Very excited 'cause I thought I might not have enough dough and would have to use the scraps but the scraps will remain scraps. We're all done but what about the edge? Well, you can do whatever you want for the edge, but I think it looks nicest when you fold everything underneath, which we have enough to do. We have enough space here. So you can cut off some excess you wanna keep maybe about an inch left of overhang. 

Don't worry if it's not like perfect looking because no one's gonna notice. Okay, now let's fold underneath. So here, just lift and fold. (upbeat music) Okay, that looks pretty nice. We are so close to being done for the egg wash, one egg, splash of cream, a tablespoon if you're measuring. And now you wanna give it a really good whisk. So I like to be totally homogenous. No random egg white bits left there. That's it. Brush the egg wash on gently. I actually have a soft sable brush that I use because it really doesn't mush down the pastry. It's very gentle. It's like a gentle kiss from your lover, but with egg wash instead.

 Get all those corners. So hit those corners, the sides everywhere with the egg wash. If you miss any part of it, it'll be like you put sunscreen on one part of your body and went and got a tan. It's like a bad white spot. So just take your time. Be in the moment. Listen to your favorite podcast and brush egg wash on all over gently. That likes just about right I think I got every little last bit for the cinnamon sugar and taking a quarter cup of granulated sugar. You could also use sanding sugar if you want it to be like extra sparkly crunchy. And then maybe half a teaspoon or less of cinnamon it gives you a nice--- I'll go for the full half teaspoon I'm living large. Evenly sprinkle it on. This is an optional step but I just love it.

 There we go. Nice American desert. I wasn't counting on her being sugar all over that.  Thank goodness, I was wearing glasses. So what's gonna happen is we're gonna attend to the pie crust. Get a length of tin foil and we're gonna wrap it around the pie. You can fold over just like a little corner so it sticks. You can even give it a tear like that. Now gently, all is gentle fold the top so you're protecting the edge of your pie, because this has to bake for like an hour almost. so tempting the pie crusts like so makes a huge difference. It lets the edge cook really nice and slow. And then the middle will be a nice and beautiful golden color. Cinnamon goes into the oven at 400 degrees fear heat for about 30 minutes. 

You can give it a check if it's looking a little crispy, lower to 375 but if not, just keep baking it for 400 until the center is nice and golden. And by that point the insides really bubbling up and delicious. The pie filling is already basically done, so you don't have to do that much. It's really the pastry we're worrying about. And this, by the way, was a deep dish. Big pie so heavy. I wanna take a moment just to appreciate that perfect scoop of ice cream. It's the most perfect scoop of ice cream I've ever made in my life. All right, I'm gonna take a bite just for you. That is so good. It is the perfect, perfect balance of sweet and zingy. And has the right mouthfeel the apples are just cooked enough. 

They're not like falling apart, but they're not crunchy. They just like to have a little bit of spring back in your mouth. And it's just like zingy sweet, perfectly spiced. You'll never have a store-bought pie again. They're almost like so like sweet doll flat. Not like this baby. (laughing) If you like this recipe and I don't know how you can't, check out my playlist that has my perfect pie crust recipe how to. All my favorite pies and you are gonna be baking up a storm I promise. Alright, if you like my videos, hit that like button and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video.

news sources :