How to Make the Best Apple Pie: Food Network Kitchen's Tested, Foolproof Recipe

It smells so good. Apples, butter, fall. Now that is a very nice slice of pie. From Food Network Kitchen, this is the best apple pie. This apple pie is the best because the crust is super flaky. It's layered. The apples, of course, the most important part, are a mix of delicious, hard, sweet, and tart apples that we've tried and tested numerous times and think are the perfect combination to make your perfect apple pie. But before we get to the apples, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any of Food Network's best recipes. This is a double pie crust and it needs plenty of butter, so we have three sticks of butter. It's a standard amount for how much dough we're making, but I'm gonna cut it up into cubes. I like to put it on a parchment-lined baking sheet in a single layer so it freezes really quickly. So I'm gonna stick this in the freezer and I'll be back. The next step is we're gonna get our flour, sugar, and salt together. So we have our food processor fitted with a metal blade. We are going to put three and a half cups of flour in here. When we measure flour here at Food Network Kitchen, we always do the spoon and sweep method. So we're gonna spoon it in and then I take back my spoon and just scrape it off. If I were to scoop it, it compacts more than I want it to and then the liquid measurement can be off. And then I'm going to add two tablespoons of sugar. This is a pie dough, so we are fine with putting in plenty of sugar. It helps with browning. It also gives it a kind of tender and sweet crust. If you were to use this for something like a quiche where you don't want it so sweet, you can cut back on the sugar. And then we do one and a half teaspoons of kosher salt. You want to make sure you're using kosher salt in this recipe. If you were to use table salt, it would make it too salty. Put the top on, lock it, and then just pulse it to combine. Now I'm going to get my frozen butter. The reason you use frozen butter is you want it to not coat the flour completely. You want it to break up into pea-sized pieces. And again, I'm going to pulse because if I were to just let the motor continue to run, it could make a paste at the bottom. I'm going to check it and see where we're at. So this looks great. This has a lot of small pieces, but then some bigger pieces as well. I'm going to take this and put it in a bowl and add our wet ingredients. So I have a quarter cup of ice water, and then we're going to do a third of a cup of vodka. It's a lot of vodka, but it helps tenderize the dough. And along with the other ingredient that I'm going to add in here, which is two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. We found it really helps to break down the protein in the flour and make for an ultra light and flaky dough. And I'm going to just drizzle this over the top. And then I'm going to use a fork to combine. And you don't want to work this very much. You want to just really mix it just to get it all the flour hydrated. And then I'm going to take a handful and press it together. And if it holds, we're good. So now that we're at this point, I'm going to dump the dough out onto my cutting board. You could also just do it right on your countertop, especially if you have something like marble. Marble always stays cold. I'm not kneading it. I'm just bringing it together and bringing in any of the crumbs and working it into one ball of dough. I'm going to use this, which is my bench scraper. This is a great tool to have. It's great for transferring vegetables. We use it all the time in the kitchen, but it's also great for dough. So once this has come together, I'm going to pat it into a circle and then I'm going to cut it into quarters. I'm going to stack the layers of dough on top of each other and press it down. You're going to end up with a pie dough that almost resembles puff pastry. It gets really, really flaky. At this point in time, I've stacked it and pressed it down four times. I'm going to divide it in half, shape it into two separate disks, and I can chill it in the refrigerator overnight or freeze it. So now I'm going to transfer my dough to plastic wrap, fold it up, and then I like to just make it really even, but in the plastic, and I can make the edges really smooth. So here are my two doughs. We're going to refrigerate these until they're nice and cold and ready to be rolled out. All right, now we're going to prepare our apples. We tested this pie so many ways with so many different doughs and apples. We found that a mix of apples are best. So we have some Pink Ladies and we have Granny Smiths. Granny Smiths are kind of the traditional pie apple that a lot of people use, but we really like mixing it up to two, three, even four types of apples. A harder apple that's going to keep its shape is great, and sort of a sweet tart apple. We've used wine saps, braeburns, a combination of sweet and tart apples are great for this pie. So now we need to core our apples. So I just cut my apples in half, and then that half and a half, so into quarters, and then I just see where the core is here and take my knife and slide it down and cut the core out. When you cut the core out, you have very uniform sized pieces of apple. So when I cut these for the pie, they're all going to be the same size, which means they're all going to cook at the same time. For this pie, you're going to cook it about 90 minutes. Because it cooks so long, you want to make sure your apple slices stand up to the time and the heat. We're going to cut these pretty thick. They're about half an inch. It also adds a nice texture to the pie when you slice. It's like a nice big chunky apple pie, which is what we prefer. So now we're going to combine our apples with all of our spices, our sugar, and our flour. We are going to put them in this bowl. This pie uses just brown sugar. We tried it with white, we tried it with a combination, but we really liked dark brown sugar. It gives a really nice depth of flavor. When we store brown sugar, we like to use little marshmallows, or you can also use a piece of bread. It keeps it soft so it doesn't get rock hard. I'm just going to move those to the side while I scoop this out. So this is going to be two-thirds cup of dark brown sugar, and it is lightly packed. And then I'm going to add a third a cup of flour. Sprinkle that over the top. We're going to do two teaspoons of cinnamon. This is a classic spice that you put in apple pie. To me, it's a really delicious warming flavor. Half a teaspoon of salt, and then we're going to do an eighth of a teaspoon of allspice and ground nutmeg. So I'm going to do about two tablespoons of lemon juice. This is a really nice juicy one, so it's about half a lemon. The lemon juice goes beautifully with the brown sugar. It balances out the sweetness, so there's a little bit of acid in here. And then we're going to add, just for a little bit of fat, two tablespoons of melted unsalted butter. We've already added in salt. You want to make sure that when you're baking, you use unsalted butter to control how much salt you have in your recipe. So that goes in, and we're going to toss this all together. Once this is all tossed together, it's going to sit and marinate while we do our dough. The sugar and the salt, it's going to pull out a lot of the moisture from the apples. That's going to combine with the flour. We're going to save all of that juice and scrape it into our pie. It's what's going to thicken when we cook. We're going to set this aside and get going on our dough. We're going to roll out the dough for the pie. I'm going to clear away my cutting board for right now. I like to have a little bit of flour out of my container in a bowl for dusting my work surface. Here's our dough that has rested in the fridge. It's been out for about five minutes to soften slightly. And then what I like to have on hand is a ruler. I want to roll this out to about 16 inches in diameter. So this is a 18-inch ruler, which is really handy to have in general in the kitchen. Here I have my rolling pin. I like this style of rolling pin. You can have the ones with the handles as well, but this works well for me. And then I'm going to flour the bottom and the top, and then I'm just going to start rolling. You start from the center, come down, and then go back to the center and press up. And then I do it a quarter turn so that we continue to roll and make it an even circle. We had padded it into a disc to begin with, so it's pretty easy to get it even. This dough has large pieces of butter that can kind of stick to the bottom, so you want to make sure that as you're rolling it, you're continuing to if you need to. Just like when we were making the dough, we want to keep this cold, so we want to work quickly. You don't want the butter to all melt into the flour. If it starts to get oval or a funny shape, you can kind of just press it back into a circle and then keep going. It starts to separate like this, no big deal. Just sort of push it back together. And we're going to be trimming the edges eventually anyway, so it does not have to be perfect. I think that's about it. Yep, we're about 16 inches right there. I have a sheet pan that has parchment on it. We don't want the dough to stick to the metal, so it's best if it's lined with a little bit of parchment. And then for transferring, I like to just roll my dough onto my rolling pin and then unroll it. We're going to refrigerate this while we roll the other biscuit dough. This is a nine-inch pie pan. This is not a deep dish pie pan. It's also glass. We like glass or metal. It gets the dough cooked quickly and browned properly. So now, just like I moved the dough before, I'm going to just roll this up, put my pie pan right in front, and unroll it right over. So it's sitting here. It is, you know, it's warmed up a little bit from me rolling it. I'm going to kind of lift it and get it to slump into the pan. And I'm going to press really well to make sure it gets into all the corners. And now I'm going to trim the excess dough. I want to leave about an inch overhang. Growing up, my mom was not a big baker, but when she did make pie, which was occasionally, she would take these scraps and put cinnamon sugar all over them and bake them off. And that was a fun little treat for us. All right, so I'm going to refrigerate this for five minutes, and I'm going to pull my other dough out to warm up just a little bit so we can work with it easier. While we wait for this to get a little bit warmer so it's easier to work with, and while we wait for our base of our pie to chill, we're going to turn on our oven, and we're going to get a baking sheet lined with foil. Whenever we bake pies here, we preheat our sheet tray. That way it's really hot and it cooks the bottom of the pie at the same time the top cooks. Thoroughly covered in flour at this point in time. All right, so the pie dough has chilled for five minutes. I'm going to make a quick egg wash. It's just one egg, a teaspoon of water, and then we're just going to beat it until it's totally mixed up. I'm going to be using the egg wash to help crimp the outside of the pie, and then we're going to brush it all over to make the pie really shiny and also to make the demerara sugar stick. Demerara. Demerara. Demerara. So here are our apples. They have sat while we were doing all of our dough. And as you can see, there's like a lot of juice at the bottom. That is exactly what we want. And we have seen some comments at foodnetwork.com about the juices at the bottom of apple pies, but just pies in general, and whether or not people should be using them. Absolutely. You want to use all the juice. You want to dump it all in here. And you want to scrape every last bit of juice and flavor into your pie and get every last bit. You also want to get all the flour because that's going to be the thickener for all these juices. And then I'm going to use my same spoon and just sort of pat everything down. Press it. You want it mounded in the center. We're going to take this and just brush the edges here. And this is going to help the top layer stick. I always like to go with a little extra overhang because I can always trim it once I put the top layer on. I'm going to grab my rolling pin one more time because I just really like how it helps when you're transferring the dough. I'm going to roll it right up and then I'm going to sort of try to center it as much as possible and roll it right over. Perfect. The top layer is large enough and I can feel the bottom layer right underneath. I'm going to pat it down all over and then I'm going to pinch it all the way around to get it to seal. We have an overhang of dough here just like we had before with the base layer and I'm going to trim it about an inch and take your time. You can only cut once. So I like to run my fingers around. It's a little hard to see. You can't see the edge obviously but I like to know that it's even all the way around. If there's one part that's like sticking way out I feel like there's going to be too much dough. I just trim it off but this feels really nice and then I'm going to just tuck it under to seal. When this is finished it's going to be very puffy and flaky so this edge is going to be is going to expand and be really really crispy and delicious but because it is going to puff up a lot we want to make sure it is very well sealed so all the juices don't bubble out the side. So now at this point in time you can crimp this however you like. Some people like to use a fork to go all the way around. I like to use my knuckle and then use these two fingers and go around by pressing down with my knuckle and then I go to the next one. It's not going to stay exactly like this. It's going to puff and be puffy and flaky which is delicious so you don't have to be too concerned with this being exactly right. Now the next thing I'm going to do is brush the whole thing all over with egg wash and then top with sugar. So we just want a nice thin coating of egg everywhere enough to make it shiny and beautiful and let the sugar stick and I'm going to go all the way around the outside and I love a really sugary crunchy crust. I'm going to generously sprinkle it with all the sugar all the way to the edges and now I'm going to cut a few venting holes. I'm going to grab my paring knife. It's going to be really steamy in there so you want to make sure you make holes that are adequate to let out all of that steam as it cooks. I usually just do four nice slits. You also want to do the slits after you do the egg wash. If I were to make these slits before the egg wash and then brush the egg wash over there's a good chance that they will stick back together from the egg wash and close up. So we're just going to do that and then also sometimes I just like to ensure that it's going to stay open by wiggling my knife back and forth. We're going to put this in the freezer for about 10 to 15 minutes. Again it's because we want the dough to get really really cold before we put it into a hot oven. So it's at 425 right now we're going to leave it for five minutes and then turn it down to 375 for the rest of the time. It's been 90 minutes we're going to check on the pie. It smells so good like apples and butter fall. It's nice and golden. The best part about a glass pie pan is you can see that the underside is cooked. If your pie starts to get too dark in the oven you can always tent it with a piece of foil. You don't want to wrap it with a piece of foil but you kind of loosely lay a piece of foil over so it doesn't get too dark. This one we didn't have a problem with but oftentimes you cook it for so long it can happen. We're going to let it chill on a cooling rack and here's the hardest part of the whole pie making experience is waiting. You have to wait until it's totally set up. This pie because it's nice and thick it has so much fruit in it it'll take about four hours for it to come to full room temperature. Okay it's finally been long enough it's cooled down I can pick it up but you can still feel it's a little bit warm in there. We're gonna cut into it and see what we think. There we go. That is a very nice slice of pie. All right now I'm gonna try it. I got a little bit of everything let's see how it is. That is so good. The apples have retained their shape even though they've cooked for almost an hour and a half but they're super tender. The lemon juice is really lovely it's nice and bright it doesn't taste too sweet at all. The crust is absolutely flaky and crunchy really really light. It's comforting, it's classic, it's delicious, it's Food Network's best. It's really a perfect pie. Don't forget to subscribe for more of Food Network Kitchen's best recipes. Let me know what you'd like me to cook next in the comments.