The Perfect Apple Pie Recipe

Who doesn’t love juicy, flaky, buttery apple pie? It’s one of the oldest and tastiest dishes around. Although the recipe is fairly simple, the slightest changes can significantly transform your pie.

Here’s how to make a flaky and buttery apple pie your whole family will enjoy.

Ingredient brands matter

Baking an apple pie is not a time to be cheap. If you want to end up with the best-tasting pie, you have to have high-quality ingredients.

For example, the eggs you choose can significantly alter the flavor of your finished pie. Each country has its own favored brand of eggs, and most provide customers with eggs set at a variety of differing price points.

For instance, in Australia, egg supplier Pace Farm provides some of the best eggs. In America, Vital Farms is a popular choice.

Both of these companies offer organic and non-organic versions of their products. Before baking your apple pie, be sure to taste-test several kinds of eggs to find the richest flavor.

When you find a rich, flavorful egg, that’s what you want to use in your pie.

Aim for free-range, organic eggs

The tastiest eggs tend to come from free-range chickens fed an organic, vegetarian diet. Chickens naturally supplement their diet by eating bugs, and that keeps them healthy.

Healthy chickens lay tasty eggs. You can tell your eggs come from happy, healthy chickens when the yolks are thick and dark.

Let’s talk about sugar

These days, people want to cut down on white, refined sugar and replace it with substitutes like raw sugar and stevia. Although this sentiment might work for snacks and beverages, it won’t for apple pie.

You just can’t make a good apple pie without white sugar; it’s impossible. Now, with that being said, the perfect sugar for apple pie may be a blend of white, granulated sugar and light brown sugar.

When it comes to pie filling, apple variety matters

Some people are convinced that it’s unacceptable to bake with green apples. While that’s true in some cases, green apples – specifically, Granny Smith – can make the best apple pie.

You may have heard some people assert they make the best apple pie with sweet apples like Red Delicious. That’s possible, but Red Delicious apples don’t hold their shape very well, so the end result is more of an applesauce pie. Fuji apples are even worse since they are full of water.

To make the ultimate apple pie filling, you should use about ¾ Granny Smith and ¼ Golden Delicious for sweetness. You can use the same combination in your caramel apple pie bombs.

Five things you should not do when making apple pie filling

These five choices will ruin your apple pie filling:

Using overripe apples. This will turn your pie into mush.
Cutting apple slices randomly. A delicious apple pie requires peeled, thin wedges. Thick slices will create air pockets that create gaps between your filling and crust.
Skipping the step of blanching your apples first. There are several methods people use to prepare their apple slices, but you should never put raw apples into your pie crust.
Going overboard with spices. Adding too much cinnamon or nutmeg will destroy an apple pie.
Skipping the use of a thickener. Pie filling needs a thickening agent to keep it from turning into applesauce. Most people use cornstarch or flour.

Make an all-butter pie crust

Butter will absolutely make your apple pie a success. If you’ve been cutting butter into flour and then adding water to make your crust, there’s a better way.

To understand how to make the ultimate pie crust, you have to reverse what you know about gluten. In most recipes, gluten holds everything together. Without gluten, cookies and cakes crumble easily.

Nobody wants cookies that fall apart in their hands. But when it comes to pie crust, gluten is the enemy. Pie crust is supposed to be flaky and crumbly.

While you want a small amount of gluten to maintain some structure, you don’t want much. Less gluten means a flaky pie crust.

The secret to flaky pie crust

The folks at inspiredtaste.net discovered the secret to flaky pie crust. You have to thoroughly mix a portion of your crust flour with the butter to make a consistent flour-butter paste.

That way, every particle of flour is coated in the butter. This coating prevents the flour from absorbing water, which limits the gluten content.

Once your flour-butter paste is made, you can add the rest of your flour. The result is a perfect pie crust.

Don’t forget to criss-cross your crust. When your crust has more surface area, it will be flakier and taste buttery with every bite.