Peach Custard Pie | Food Wishes

Hello this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with peach custard pie. That's right I decided to add peaches to a classic southern dessert called chess pie which as you'll see went very well and solved one of my big problems with regular peach pie which is that it contains too many peaches and besides tasting great and looking gorgeous this is one of the easiest pies you'll ever make and to get started we'll need one single shell ready to use pie crust which I made from scratch and we have plenty of videos to show you how to do that but this would absolutely be fine with a store-bought crust and what I like to do first once I lay some parchment paper in is pour in some pie baking weights since for best results we want to do something called blind baking the crust which simply means pre-baking this a little bit first before we fill it and by the way if you don't have weights you can use dry beans and while most of the recipes don't have you do this I think you're going to get a much better crust if you do and that's it once our weights are in we'll transfer that into the center of a 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes or so or until it looks like this which yes looks exactly the same but once you carefully remove the weights in the parchment you should see that the crust has indeed cooked a little bit and started to turn a very light golden brown and that's really all we need at this point since it's going to cook the rest of the way once the filling's in so we'll set that aside and let it cool while we move on to prep some peaches and the first step with that would be the optional peeling which I don't always do for peach pie but this time I did and once peeled we will carefully take our knife and cut directly around the center with the blade of the knife going all the way to the pit which theoretically protects your hand but be careful anyway and if we're lucky and we bought something called a free stone peach that should separate fairly easily at which point we can remove this stone as it's called and the riper the peach the easier this is to do although as you can see for me this wasn't super ripe and that took a little bit of effort and the good news is for this pie a firm peach is fine and that's it we'll simply take those halves now and slice them into pieces and I decided to cut these in eighths which ended up being a perfect size but of course you'll have to adjust based on the size of your fruit I mean you would attempt to get them somewhere close to this size but anyway we'll go ahead and do that to one or two peaches or whatever it takes to get enough to fill the bottom of our crust and once our fruit set we can move on to prep this very easy custard batter which starts with four whole large eggs to which we will add more than a little bit of sugar and then we'll take a whisk and give this a thorough mixing and we really don't have to get this light and fluffy but we should probably whisk this until it feels like that sugar is dissolved at which point we can stop and add most of the rest of the ingredients including some brown sugar which I could have just added to the white sugar but forgot we will also do a little bit of flour as well as some cornmeal which is one of the signature ingredients in chest pie we will also need a little touch of salt plus some real pure vanilla extract followed by one of the secret ingredients which is a nice splash of apple cider vinegar or you could use lemon juice or plain vinegar if you want and then we'll finish this with a little bit of milk before we take a whisk and mix it thoroughly and as you'll see we're also going to be adding some melted butter to this which we really could have added at any point but I just melted mine and it was really hot so I decided to add it last but as long as that gets thoroughly whisked in it really doesn't matter so we'll go ahead and pour in that melted butter and finish this batter up by whisking enthusiastically for as long as it takes for everything to look emulsified and yes I do recommend doing this all by hand since according to recent made-up studies the amount of calories you burn doing this is the exact same number of one slice of pie so that works out nicely and that's it once our batter set we can grab our now cooled pre-baked pie crust and we can arrange our peach slices on the bottom and I think we want to be careful not to put too many peaches since we are making a peach custard pie and not a peach pie and if we really load this up with peaches it's just not going to bake up right because there'll be too much moisture so I recommend spacing them just like I'm doing here and by the way how these look on the bottom now is pretty much how they're going to look on the top later so that's another reason we want these evenly spaced and that's it after we peach we will reach for our custard batter and we will use a ladle to carefully and slowly transfer it in and the reason we just don't want to pour all this in is because it's going to move our perfectly placed peach slices around and we won't end up getting that nice uniform design on the top so while this will take an extra minute it's definitely worth it oh and I didn't show it but probably should have we do want to whisk our batter thoroughly before we start ladling just in case that melted butter started to separate and that's it once all the batter's in we're ready to transfer this into the center of a 350 degree oven for about 50 to 60 minutes or until our custard is just set the top is brown and it looks like this and yes it might pop up in a few spots but don't worry everything will quickly deflate as is cool and I'm actually going to give this pie a quick shake so you can see that there still should be a little bit of a jiggle to it although if this was an actual chess pie the center would be a little more wiggly than the outside but since I did use peach here I did want to cook it a little longer just to give that fruit a little extra time to soften and that's it we'll let that cool completely before we try to slice it and serve it and as far as I'm concerned I will always chill this thoroughly before I try to eat it since I do think it's significantly better in both flavor and texture but the light was nice so I decided to serve one up even though it was still a little bit warm which some people enjoy but I don't because everything's going to be too slippery right once this chills and the butter firms up that's not going to happen but anyway I grabbed a fork and went in for a taste and speaking of slippery you can see right here that custard separated from the bottom which if cold is probably not going to happen but optimum texture aside that was absolutely amazing tasting and if you like peach pie and or custard pie I think you're going to absolutely love this and by the way the challenges of eating a too warm pie is not really considered an actual real problem especially by people that have actual real problems but I'm going to stop filming that one and switch to this slice which I cut after letting my pie chill in the fridge overnight and that my friends tasted every bit as delicious plus I got that beautiful smooth luxurious texture you get if you let a custard pie chill and if it wasn't for the way too tough crust I made this would have been perfect oh yes I have to admit I made the crust way too fast and I was in a big hurry and I over mixed it not thinking it would really matter since it has nothing to do with how to make the pie but as you know I like to admit any and all mistakes so if you do use one of our videos to make the crust please follow the direction and do it how I actually do it in the video and yours will be nice and flaky and not tough and hard like a rock and as I touched on in the intro I do enjoy a peach pie but after a few bites I get tired of it because it's so much peach which is why I enjoy this style of pie so much it has just the right amount of peach to balance with the custard and the crust and yes this will work with any summer stone fruit like plums apricots etc but no matter what you use it is beautiful and delicious and I really do hope you give it a try soon so please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts a printable written recipe and much more info as usual and as always enjoy