Easy Apple Pie Recipe

Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making a perfectly delicious apple pie. So let's get started. First off, preheat your oven to 425 Fahrenheit so it's nice and hot, and you're gonna wanna grab three pounds of apples. I'm using a combination of Honeycrisp and Granny Smith, but you could use any of your favorite baking apples. Cosmic Crisp, Fuji, Cortland, Empire, the list goes on. We're gonna peel these, core them, and slice them thinly. And I should point out that for this recipe, I'm using my favorite homemade butter crust. I have a video up here showing you how to make it, and there's a link in the recipe on my website as well. If you don't wanna make your own pastry crust, you can buy it at the store. If it's frozen, make sure it's thawed out, and if you're buying it in the fridge section, just have it chilled. Honestly, this recipe is so easy. The prep here is the most time-intensive part, so if you have some helping hands in the kitchen, call them over, just make sure they're nicely washed. Once your apples are peeled, you can core them, or you can cut the flesh from the core, up to you. And by the way, if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button. There's two new recipes every week. Sometimes if I have extra time in the kitchen, I'll whip up a few batches of pastry dough. Great to have hanging around in the freezer, because when you have some fruit that you wanna make a dessert out of, you can either make a pie or a galette, and it comes together so quickly when you already have the pastry dough ready and chilled. It's time to give your apples a nice thin slice. Your apples should be about a quarter of an inch thick. They should soften, but not fall apart. We might think of apple pie as an American invention, but it's actually English. The first recipe is from the 1300s, and then the Dutch perfected that flaky pie crust. In fact, if you go to Amsterdam, you'll see tons of cafes and coffee shops that sell almost an American-style looking apple pie. They like to pile, pile apples that thick inside. Very tall. One of the reasons apples are so popular in America, I think, is because of homesteading. People would go west, claim land, and part of claiming the land was planting fruiting trees. Johnny Appleseed was actually a very canny businessman. He would send people to where he knew people were going, and they would set up a nursery with apple trees. Apples, as a former science teacher, I'll tell you, are heterogeneous, which means if I took a seed from this apple, which is so delicious, and planted it, heterozygous, sorry, probably like a 99% chance the apple that you get from the new tree would taste totally different, and most likely it would be inedible. You'd have to use it to make apple cider. No one was complaining about having apple cider though, so. As you slice your apples, transfer them into a large bowl. I finally bought a giant bowl that's appropriately sized. Most of the apples you see, I think, are made through grafting. So you take a piece of branch, and you connect it to a tree, and that tree grows from the new branch. Apples, that you know, are gonna be delicious. You're doing a lot of slicing here. It's important that you don't slice like this. Always use your knuckles as a guide. Your fingers, which are very delicate and choppable, are protected, because you've pulled them in. Sometimes I'll go to my friend's house, and non-judgmentally, I'll notice that their knife skills make them cut so slowly, and you're like, oh, this is why you don't like cooking a lot, because it takes forever to chop things. I love making food, but I don't wanna be stuck in the kitchen all day long. My apples are all chopped up. I'm done talking about things that you might not be interested in. And now we're gonna plop the rest of these into our bowl, and get them flavored. And by the way, we said three pounds of apples. That was whole apples. We now have less than three pounds of apples that have been sliced. I want some lemon juice in here, not necessarily to prevent these from browning, but for the brightness of flavor. Lemon and apple really go well together. It takes what could be a kind of dull flavor, and brings some zing into it. So grab one lemon, give it a slice, and just like that, it's ready to enjoy. I want about two tablespoons of lemon juice, so I'm just guesstimating. When I hear about two tablespoons, I hear a lot more. Okay, that's good. To sweeten things up and thicken the juices a little bit, we're gonna add one cup or 200 grams of granulated sugar. If you wanted to add some more notes of caramel, you could totally use some brown sugar here. Or go half and half, or totally brown. All right, sprinkle that over your apples. Warming spices are definitely in order here. Today I'm using one and a half teaspoons of cinnamon. If you wanted to, there's so many other spices that work well in here. A quarter teaspoon of cardamom, some allspice, maybe some ginger, and I am gonna add some nutmeg in here as well. One quarter teaspoon of nutmeg. You could use ground nutmeg or grind your nutmeg freshly. We'll want half a cup or 60 grams of flour to help thicken things up. You do not want a pie that you cut into and it's water, apple water pouring out. It should be more jelly. Gel-like. See, I'm not measuring with a scale. So, I'm sprinkling the flour in, and I'm gonna level it off with a knife. Sprinkle the flour in. I'm gonna give this a quick toss and finish adding the flour on. Now we can give this a little bit more of a toss. If you see any pieces that are stuck together, you can break them apart. And just toss so everything's nicely combined. Now, I can take this, set it aside, and we can deal with the crust. In this recipe, by the way, we're using raw apples that go into the oven and bake. If you wanna use cooked apples in your apple pie, you would use my apple pie filling recipe, and that's linked in the recipe on the website. It's time to roll our pie dough out, and it's been chilled, but if it's too cold, it'll just crack, so you kind of have to let it sit on the countertop for 10 or so minutes to warm up slightly. You'll notice I'm working on a pastry mat. I highly suggest investing in one. It's a silicone mat that really nothing sticks to. You'll still use flour, but if things get messy to that point where you're about to lose your patience because things are sticky, they warmed up, you're baking on a summer day, you lift the whole thing up, you take it to the fridge, chill it out, bring it back, and you're golden. Okay, sprinkle the top with flour as well, and your goal is to keep things moving. Things should not stick here. A little cracking is okay. Just pinch that back together and keep it moving. Pinch, pinch, pinch. So every once in a while, just give this a shimmy, move it around, rotate it, and make sure it's not stuck. You can also add more flour to your rolling pin. Move it, move it, move it. Roll, roll, roll. I wanna roll this out to about 12 inches. It could be up to 14. And something very important. I'm using a metal pie dish. The ceramic ones are so pretty. The glass ones are nice too. These work the best. They conduct heat, and you're gonna get a nice golden, crisp pie crust. If you're using glass or ceramic, you'll probably have to add some bake time. Do, do, do. Okay, let's roll our pie dough up, lift it, bring your pan in, and then place it. Don't press down in the center. Push the edges in. You don't want things to tear, and it's less likely to shrink if it's not been pulled. There we go. Time for our apples to go in. So grab your reasonably sized bowl, and we're gonna plop those in. Now, there's been some chatter online lately from apple purists. They claim that using warming spices takes away from the apple flavor. Now, I don't necessarily agree with that. I love warming spices so much, but if you feel that way, you can make this without the spices, and enjoy the pure apple flavor coming through. So the deal is, you're gonna have a mountain of apples here, but when they cook down, things will become more reasonable. Switching to using my hands. More control. That's what I call an apple pie. So I always forget to dot my pies with butter, so I'm gonna do that now. This will give us a little bit of extra richness. I mean, this is basically a salad right now. So grab two tablespoons of butter, and we're just gonna dot that all over the top. You can also fit it into any nooks and crannies that you see. This will melt in, mix with those delicious apple juices with our spices, and make for a richer, more delicious pie. Adding just a tiny bit of fat totally changes the way flavors melt on your tongue, and it changes the way things taste in a really significant way. So while this might seem like gilding the lily since we already have sugar, and there's fat that's in the pie crust, this will make a difference. You really notice this when you're making pastry cream, or creme patissiere. If you taste it right after making it, it tastes good, not gonna lie. But then you finish it off with a tablespoon or two of butter, and it is so much better, like silk. Okay, nicely dotted. Now we're gonna set this aside, and roll out our remaining pie crust. Flour, flour, roll-a-rolla. We wanna have an 11-inch circle this time. 11 to 12 inches. Just keep it moving, and pinch any cracks together. Now, lift that up. Pastry mat's done. Pie comes back, and we can roll this out again. Normally, if you know me, I will do a lattice. I love a lattice. But because this is piled up so high, and because it's been a while, didn't do a slab top. It's so much faster, way less stress, and I think it looks really rustic and homey, and I love seeing the slits with the apple juices bubbling out. Makes me happy. If you have any excess, you can trim it now. I only have like a tiny little piece or two. So, I'm just gonna press really lightly with my thumbs, mostly so I can make sure there's no apple pieces sticking out. I do not want that to happen. Now we can fold this under, and then crimp. I love the way things look when they're just like not finished. This looks nice to me. Just gonna remove some of the excess flour. We don't need that. And now it's time to crimp. Thumb on one hand, index and thumb on the other. We're just gonna press together. Tons of different styles. You could even just use a fork and mash it down. Okay, just keep going. This does not have to look perfect, by the way. I think some people get trapped into thinking things have to look stunning and perfect every single time. It doesn't. That's stress you don't need. There's enough stressors on in life. This should just kind of come together and work and make you happy. So if you wanna be a pie artist and that makes you happy, go at it. But if you're feeling stressed out about your crimp, grab a fork. Does that look horrible? I'm stressed. If you see any cracks, you can just mend them together. But honestly, we're gonna add a lot of color and texture with some egg wash and sugar. There'll be bubbling stuff happening. No one's gonna notice. We need some slits to vent out the excess air, to vent out the juices so things don't explode. So with a sharp knife, we're gonna cut some holes. It's kind of up to you. I'm doing four big slits and four little ones. We definitely want an egg wash here, so one egg into a small bowl. Mix it up. And now we're gonna brush this over the surface. This will give us a golden, more shiny finish, but also act as glue for the sugar we're gonna sprinkle on top. Don't think I forgot about that. I'm gonna tell you the baking instructions in a minute, but before I forget, it's so important to know that if you just bake this pie, or literally any pie, burnt to a crisp. So the outside will cook faster, it'll burn faster, and it's quite frustrating. You'll want to tent your pie. And you can buy a pie tent, which is like a little silicone wrapper that wraps around the edge to protect it. Or you can just grab some foil and loosely drape the foil around the edge to protect it. I'll give you more instructions on that right after this, but so important to do that. Otherwise, you will be very sad. Okay, now you can grab sanding, granulated, or demerara sugar, and sprinkle it over the top. Sanding sugar is just jumbo granulated sugar. It's a little bit bigger, more sparkle, more crunch. This pie is ready to go into the oven, but we want a rimmed baking sheet. Those delicious juices that might come out will burn and scorch your oven and smell horrible. So this fixes that problem. My pie is gonna bake at 425 for 20 minutes. Then we will reduce to 375, and we'll bake for 50 minutes to an hour or so, or until it's a deep golden brown and the filling is bubbly. If you see the pie is taking on color, you're gonna tent it. So you'll make your tent ahead of time to have just in case. Grab a length of foil, fold it in half. So I folded it in half and folded it a little bit extra. Wrap it around your pie loosely, and then you can just kind of fold the edge together and bring it in. That'll protect the edge if it takes on too much color, and you'll have it at the ready formed so it can be added on quickly. In you go. My pie baked up beautifully, and I let it cool on a wire rack for about four hours so it comes to room temperature. Of course, if you cut it hot, it'll be a mess. Needs to cool down so the juices can really set up. Give it a slice, and just like that, it's ready to enjoy. It tastes so fresh and appley. It has some crunch, but it has some soft parts. The buttery crust is firm and flaky, and it comes together in the perfect fall bite. I hope you get a chance to make this delicious recipe, and if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button and check out my Apple playlist.