We know you just got here because you’re in the middle of making a pie and Google told you we could help, so we’ll keep this short: Here are all of your Thanksgiving pie questions, answered.
Making a pie for Thanksgiving? Of course you are. Worried about making that Thanksgiving pie? We’re here to help. Consider this your handy pie FAQ, with all of your Thanksgiving pie questions answered. We hope we can help give you some peace of mind. Shall we get started?
What Do I Need to Make Pie?
This French-style rolling pin is not just the most chic—it’s the most functional. Thanks, France!
Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Food Styling by Anna Stockwell
Start with apie plateand a dream. Beyond that, you’ll probably want the following:
Most people agree that butter is best for flavor (although if you ask me, there’s a good case to be made for the flavor of lard too). Butter’s downside is that it can be difficult to work with since it warms up so quickly, causingall-butter cruststo rip or crack.
Pie crusts made with shortening are easier to work with: less likely to crack while rolling, more likely to keep their shape while baking.
Of course, you could use any fat you want for pie crust, including chicken fat or even oil. Choose your own adventure (or go rogue and do a blend of fats).
What Is the Easiest Pie Crust?
The divisions in this country over which kind of press-in crust is best run deep.
Photo by Joseph De Leo
Some may tell you the answer here isgraham cracker pie crust, but I’m not so convinced. I’ve seen a lot of crumbly grahams that didn’t even pretend to hold their shape. Instead, opt for a butterypat-in-pan crust, bonus crumble topping included.
How Do I Roll Out a Pie Crust?
Photo by Chelsea Kyle, food styling by Katherine Sacks
Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Food Styling by Katherine Sacks
Photo by Chelsea Kyle, food styling by Katherine Sacks
Hopefully, you grabbed a rolling pin when collecting your pie-making equipment. If not, find an empty wine bottle, liquor bottle, or straight-sided water bottle and make sure your pie dough is well-chilled. (Mostpie crust recipessuggest chilling for an hour, but overnight is even better.) Dust a large work surface (marble if you have it, because it has a tendency to stay cool) with all-purpose flour. Can’t perfect that pinch-and-throw technique for dusting that you’ve seen on TV? Grab a fine-mesh strainer, put a little flour in it, and dust your rolling surface that way.
Place the rolling pin in the center of the dough and roll the pin outward. Lift the pin up, place in the center again, and roll in a different direction, applying the same even, gentle pressure. After a few passes, lift the dough with one hand to ensure it isn’t sticking, turn it a quarter turn and repeat.Click here for more on perfecting your roll-out technique.
How Thin Should I Roll a Pie Crust?
如果你不能找到一个季度,我们保证你的gre考试at aunt has one in her change purse.
图片由切尔西凯尔,Kat Boytsov样式的食物a
The answer here is ⅛ of an inch. But, have you ever tried to measure dough rolled out on your counter? Figuring out ⅛ of an inch using a ruler is almost impossible, so here's a trick: ⅛ of an inch is equal totwo stacked quarters. So instead of pulling out your ruler, pull out your change purse—just make sure to wash your measuring quarters before you start handling that dough.
How Do I Transfer Pie Crust to a Baking Dish?
Usingnopressure, place a rolling pin on the dough edge furthest from you. Roll the pin toward you, gently rolling the dough up along with it. Pull your pie plate up behind the rolled up crust and gently roll it back out so that the dough sinks into the pie dish. If you find that there is excess flour while you're rolling the crust back out, use a pastry brush to dust it off.
Next, lift up the edges of the dough and gently press the dough into the base crevices of the dish. If you’re rolling out a top layer for adouble-crust pie, put the bottom layer in the fridge while you work. If you’re ready to shape the edge, read on.
Small cookie cutters make for an intriguing top-crust pattern.
Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Prop Styling by Anna Surbatovich, Food Styling by Mariana Velasquez
How Do I Flute, Crimp, or Otherwise Shape a Pie Crust?
Don’t let the first-time pie jitters crimp your style.
Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Anna Stockwell
After you’ve fit your dough into the dish, trim the edges so that there is about one-half-inch to one-inch overhang. Fold the overhang under so that there is a double-thick ridge of pie dough sitting on the lip of your pie plate.
For the most even crimping, hold up a peace sign with one hand and your index finger on the other. Place the peace sign on the inner ridge of the crust (with your hand over the pie’s center) and your index finger on the outside of the pie, pointing toward the V-shape of your peace sign. Keeping your index finger in place, press out (toward the exterior of the pie) with the peace sign so that you’re pressing dough softly around the sides of the index finger. Repeat all the way around, placing your index-peace-finger in the divot left behind by your middle-peace-finger as you move around, rotating the pie plate as necessary.
If this sounds too complicated, you can also simply pinch your way around the pie, using an index finger for spacing. You may find that your thumb causes slightly uneven divots, but it’ll still work.
After you’ve rolled out your top crust into a circle, two-stacked-quarters thick, trim the left and right sides to make two straight edges, then cut the remaining dough into eight strips. These strips will be wider than a more traditional lattice, like the one shown in the super-old video below, but there are two reasons I like it: a wider lattice will have a more modern lookandit’s easier to weave fewer strips.
Lay every other dough strip across the pie in one direction, spacing them evenly. Think of these strips as 1, 2, 3, and 4. Pull strips 1 and 3 back halfway and lay a fifth strip perpendicular to the first four, on top of strips 2 and 4. Return strips 1 and 3 back to their rightful place, over the fifth strip, on top of the pie. Next, peel back strips 2 and 4. Place another dough strip perpendicular to these on top of strips 1 and 3 and then re-place strips 2 and 4.
Spin the pie around. Peel back 2 and 4, place another strip. Re-place 2 and 4. Peel back 1 and 3, place the final dough strip. Re-place 1 and 3. Trim the excess dough strips to the same circumference as the bottom crust, gently pinch the pieces together, fold underneath, and crimp the edges as described above.
How Do I Fix a Cracked Pie Crust?
Don’t fret, just patch.
If your pie crust cracked while you were rolling it out, try to nudge the crevice back together. If it cracked while you were fitting the dough into the pie plate, use the scraps you’ll cut from the edges to do a little patchwork. If you have an egg wash, brush a little onto the underside of the scrap and fit it onto the crack. No egg wash? Use just a small amount of water—it’ll help the scrap adhere. Press it into the crust so that the thickness matches the rest of the dough’s surface.
Blind-baking—or the act of cooking a pie shell before it’s filled—is an important step to take anytime your pie filling requires less time to cook than your crust needs. Anapple pie, for instance, cooks for over an hour—more than enough time for the crust to cook through.Pumpkin pie(which is technically a custard pie), on the other hand, cooks for just about 45 minutes. That means the crust needs a 30- to 35-minute head start.
As for pudding pies and cream pies, the filling is generally added after the shell is totally baked through. So blind baking is imperative since the pie won’t cook at all once the filling is added.
Do I Really Need Pie Weights?
If you’re blind-baking, the answer is yes—pie weights, piled high on top of a lining of parchment or foil, help keep your bottom crust from puffing up in the oven or shrinking down the sides of your dish while the shell sets. But that doesn’t mean you need specialtyceramicpie weights. Your pie weights could be a jar of rice or dried beans that you use over and over again to make pie. ALERT: Do not try to make a side dish with rice or beans after using them as pie weights. Not gonna happen.
One reason we often reach for beans or rice instead of fancy weights is that a pack of specialty pie weights is never enough to fill your pie shell to the very top edge. Filling it to the top encourages the pie shell to stay in place and cook evenly.
Glossy or matte, make your pie your own.
Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Food Styling by Katherine Sacks
Do I Really Need an Egg Wash?
Technically, no. An egg wash’s primary purpose is to make a top crust look shiny and beautiful. If that’s not something you care about, skip it. An egg wash does add a layer of protection to a blind-baked crust, preventing the bottom from getting soggy once the filling is added.
One other thing: a wash doesn’t have to be made with eggs. While using egg and a splash of milk is perhaps most traditional, resulting in a glossy, golden brown crust, using just egg white will provide more gloss and less browning. Using just milk will leave the crust matte with a toasty brown appearance. Here aredetails for these and four other ways to “wash” a pie, each with its own result.
How Do I Make Apple Pie Filling?
You know you want your pie to look this good.
Photo by Charles Masters, food styling by Sue Li
Thin slices of apple cook down in a more aesthetically pleasing way when layered into a pie than chunks or wedges. To make them, quarter the apple and remove the core, then slice each quarter horizontally into ¼" to ½"trapezoids.
Next, follow Epi contributor Sam Worley’ssuggestionof macerating the apples, cooking down their juice, and then reuniting juice with apple slices, spices, and other filling ingredients to stuff into the pie shell. This method concentrates flavor and helps keep the apples from shrinking too much while they bake under their cozy crust-blanket.
How Do I Know When Pumpkin Pie Is Done?
The center should jiggle slightly, but the perimeter of the pie should be set. If the center is still sloshing around, keep baking. If you go to check your pie and the whole thing is set, it could be overcooked and may crack as it cools. But there’s an easy fix for that: Keep reading.
How Do I Fix a Cracked Pumpkin (or Other Custard) Pie?
It’s already baked? Um. Pile somewhipped creamon top and don’t tell anyone about the fissure underneath.
No one ever said “no” to more whipped cream.
Photo by Tara Donne, Prop Styling by Alex Brannian, Food Styling by Cyd McDowell
How Do I Fix a Soggy Bottom?
Honestly, once the pie is cooked, you can’t. Your best bet is to ward off soggy bottoms in the first place. Before you start baking, make sure your oven is set to the right temperature by using two oven thermometers to verify that the oven temperatureiswhat it says it is. Bake your pie in a glass pie dish so that you can peek at the bottom when checking the pie’s doneness. If the pie’s edge is golden but the base still looks like raw dough, use apie shield(or make one out of foil) to keep the crust’s edge from burning, and pop that pie back in the oven.
How Do I Make Multiple Pies With Only One Pie Plate?
My favorite solution: Skip the whole pie altogether. When you have multiple desserts, someone is always going to try to slice off a thinner piece, no matter how thinly the pie is sliced in the first place. Head those sliver-slicers off at the pass and make aDIY piebarinstead of a bunch of individual pies. Just set out a bunch of pie cookies (that is, circles of baked pie dough) alongside gooey pecans, pumpkin mousse, stewed apples, whipped cream, and whatever other pie filling–inspired toppings your family likes. Is it not Thanksgiving without lemon meringue pie? Addlemon curdandSwiss meringueto the make-your-own-pie buffet lineup.
Does My Pie Need to Be Refrigerated?
Custard pies (pumpkin, sweet potato, chocolate pudding), cream pies, and fruit pies should all generally be refrigerated. But if you make any non-cream pie Wednesday night and leave it to cool overnight on the counter, it’s fine for it to stay out until dessert time rolls around Thursday. Pecan pies can be kept at room temperature for several days.
Can I Freeze My Pie?
Custard and cream pies won’t fare very well in the freezer.
Apple pie can be frozen after it’s assembled, butbeforebaking. To bake, thaw overnight in the refrigerator and proceed with the recipe.
Pecan pie can totally be frozen after baking. Leave at room temperature to thaw.
Fresh or frozen berries? Whole berry or jellied sauce? Relish or chutney? Don't worry, we've got all the answers to your frequently asked questions here.
