Is there anything more wonderful than areally good apple pie? A tender crust and a sweet fruit filling combine to form a powerful synergy that's hard to beat. But not all apple pies are created equal. Some have mushy fruit that bakes up more like applesauce than apple slices. Some mask the pure apple flavor with too much cinnamon, or end up tasting too sweet or too tart. Some have a soggy bottom crust or a too-juicy apple filling.
So the Epicurious Test Kitchen decided to examine the apple pie from top to bottom crust and, with help from some of the classic recipes on our site, we created a brand-newultimate recipeyou'll turn to again and again.
Interested in making the perfect pie at home? Of course you are. Here's how.
When it comes to pie dough, everyone loves the flavor of butter. But an all-butter pie dough can be difficult to work with, because its melting temperature is lower than other fats, making it more likely to stick and trickier to roll out.
So we took a cue from thisFlaky Pie Crust Doughand tried a combination of butter and shortening. A butter and shortening combination made for a dough that was easy to roll out, and while that's ideal for tricky lattice crusts, it just doesn't have the same rich, buttery flavor as the all-butter dough. Some bakers like to use lard in their pie dough, but we found the standard grocery-store variety a bit gamey in flavor.
We decided to go with the all-butter crust, stealing a trick from the recipe forFrozen Butter Pastry Dough—cutting and freezing the butter before making the dough helped it stay easy to work with.
