- Have you been searching for the perfect peach pie recipe?
Today's your lucky day.
Big peach flavor, a crisp homemade butter crust,
and all the flavors of summer in one package for you.
And you're watching "Preppy Kitchen"
where I, John Kanell,
teach you how to make delicious homemade dishes
to share with your family and friends.
This peach pie will be ready before you know it,
so let's get started.
First off, I'm making an easy and delicious butter crust.
I'm doing this in a food processor,
but you could totally do it by hand as well.
We're gonna use four cups or 480 grams
of all-purpose flour into your food processor's bowl,
2/3 of a cup or 133 grams of granulated sugar,
and half a teaspoon of salt.
Add that in and then just whiz it up.
Whiz, whiz, whiz.
(food processor whizzing)
After your dry ingredients are whizzed up,
it's time to add your ice-cold, but not frozen butter.
Cube it up into little one-inch pieces,
and just sprinkle it in there.
Delicious butter sprinkles.
We're gonna whiz this up now
until it's like very small pea-sized shapes.
Here's the deal.
People always say like, pea-sized lumps of butter,
but we're gonna be making a lattice top with this,
and if you have giant butter pieces in your pastry,
it'll totally melt and fall apart and be very disappointing.
Whiz this up. (food processor whizzing)
There we go.
Now I have small rough little pieces of butter in there,
and it's time to add the ice water.
For this recipe I'm gonna use
a third of a cup of ice water about,
and two tablespoons of lemon juice.
The lemon juice will help hydrate it,
but does some nice things too because of the acid there.
All right, let's add this in here.
(food processor whizzing)
And whiz as you drizzle it in.
(food processor whizzing)
And now for the lemon juice, freshly squeezed, of course,
I know this is ready because when I finished the last pulse,
all of the mixture kind of comes up in a bit of a wave,
and stops, and then falls.
So let's see. (food processor whizzing)
No, it's not ready yet.
In this case, you can add in an extra tablespoon or so
of ice water as needed.
(food processor whizzing)
Okay, let's give it a try.
The test to see if it's done is by taking a handful,
don't touch the blades,
squeeze it in your little hand,
and if it holds together like this, it's ready.
So this is holding together, it's ready right now.
I cannot roll it yet, it will have to rest.
Now for the fun part, we're gonna dump this mixture out
onto a pastry mat or a clean surface,
and we'll watch the magic happen.
Look at this. What is this?
What is this nonsense?
This does not look like pastry dough to me.
But it's nonsense will turn into dough after you,
one, squeeze it together,
and two, work it ever so slightly.
Take your pastry mat and just squeeze it together.
This is why I love having a pastry mat,
you can work it, your countertop doesn't get destroyed,
and nothing sticks either.
We can just squeeze this together just a couple of times
to help bring it together, and then we're going to slide it.
Not really a knead, but just slide it to bring it together.
So, one.
See that.
Turn it around and two.
Okay, there we go.
This is gonna come together in the refrigerator.
It needs to chill though,
and I am going to give it
just a little bit more of a squeeze.
Divide the dough equally into two batches,
one for the bottom and one for the lattice,
and just form into two discs.
It needs to rest in the refrigerator
for at least 30 minutes to come together.
I like to give it an hour usually.
Wrap each of your discs in plastic,
and then after they're loosely wrapped,
I like to give them an extra flatten.
It'll make rolling them out easier and they'll chill faster
because they have more surface area.
I pre-rolled both of my discs,
and they're ready for the fridge.
Let's put these in, and then get on to the pie filling.
Now for the fun part, the peach filling.
For this recipe, I'm using about four pounds
or that's gonna be like eight to 10 peaches,
depending on their size.
Look at your pie tin.
Some of them are a pretty deep dish like this,
some of them are smaller.
So after you cut them up,
you can just place them in here to see like,
is that about right?
And it should be almost to the top.
You can score the bottom of your peach with an X,
and it should peel like this.
This is what you're looking for, a perfectly peeled peach.
We're gonna peel all these peaches,
so let's go into super drive.
By the by, if you have any favorite peach recipes
you'd like me to try out, lemme know in the comments,
I'd be happy to give them a whirl.
Set these skins aside, I will be putting that to use.
Now we're going to half the peaches,
and they should pull apart nicely unless the pit breaks,
which happens.
You wanna remove the pit
without really damaging the flesh too much.
Okay. Pie dish totally full.
All I'm gonna do is take my pieces, give them a slice.
These peaches are really ripe and juicy,
so much so in fact, that our pie would be a soggy mess
if we just baked them right away.
We need to coax some liquids out of them.
And then don't waste the liquids,
thicken them up and reintroduce them.
If you've watched my apple pie video,
you can click up here for that.
It is a very similar technique,
except we're not gonna cook the peaches
'cause they're so tender, just their juices.
So now into our giant bowl of delicious peaches,
I'm adding 1/4 cup of packed brown sugar,
sprinkle it in there.
There you go. That'll give it some nice deep flavor.
And 1/2 of a cup or a hundred grams of granulated sugar.
Gently mix this together just a little bit. That's good.
After you've mixed the sugar in, it's time to step away,
these peaches need at least 30 minutes or up to 90 minutes,
I'll give them 60, of resting time.
It'll pull the juices out of there,
and then we can go on to the next step.
So I'll see you in a bit.
All right, one hour later,
enough time to say hi to the kids,
have a nice lunch together,
and I wanna show you this is full of juice.
Do you see how much juice is in there?
Look. All juice.
That would have been a soggy mess in your pie.
So here's the deal,
we're gonna take this onto a pan over medium heat,
and add a little bit of corn starch,
but let's go over there I'll show you.
All right. So we're gonna strain this juice
into a largish pan.
Put this over medium heat.
And right now I'm gonna whisk in
a quarter cup of corn starch.
Don't worry if it clumps up a bit, it'll all work out.
So after the corn starch dissolves,
just give it an occasional whisk and keep an eye on it.
When it warms up to a certain temperature,
it will thicken right away,
and then you wanna whisk, whisk, whisk,
do not leave it unattended.
This whole process will take about three minutes.
But once it's off heat,
I'm gonna whisk in a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice,
then whisk in two teaspoons of vanilla, that's 10 mL.
Take that pan off of heat.
And now you're gonna fold in the peaches really gently,
just so that they're mixed in
with that delicious slurry we made.
The idea is just to distribute the thickened juices
so that everything is gonna have a nice coating of it
because it will help sop up some of that extra moisture.
This is ready to set aside now,
and we can finish our pastry crust.
So set it aside, let it cool down a bit,
and let's get to rolling.
Okay. So my pie crust was ice-cold,
and this counter is also ice-cold,
I left it outside for three minutes on the dot,
and it warmed up nicely.
All you want is to have it be chilled so it comes together,
but then it has to warm up a little bit
so it doesn't turn into cracked nonsense
when you try and roll it out.
Lightly flour your surface, I'm using a pastry mat again.
Lightly flour the top, and we're gonna start rolling it out.
Change directions as you roll.
And then if you see any cracks,
just go ahead and pinch them together.
One thing I will say for this,
is you want a thinner pie crust.
If it's really thick, it'll just be doughy
no matter how long you bake it,
especially with all the juice in those peaches.
So go ahead and go for a little bit less
than a quarter of an inch.
At this stage of the recipe,
you really wanna work fairly quickly,
don't dilly-dally because as this warms up,
it'll become less workable and it won't be as fun.
Sorry, I put it that way.
You want this pie crust to be an inch or so
bigger than your pie tin.
Okay. This looks pretty thin, so I'm gonna roll it back on.
That's one of the nice things about having a pastry mat.
Set this aside for a few moments.
Get your pie dish out and just roll it over.
There we go. That's nice.
Here's another tip. Do not press in.
You don't wanna stretch the pie dough like that, push it in.
Just maneuver it in like this.
My pie crust is halfway ready,
and my filling is all the way cool,
so let's add the filling into your pie,
and then just remember to get the rest of that reduced juice
out of the pan as well,
'cause it's gonna be your friend later on.
Last step here is just to smooth it out.
If you have any crazy voids in this pie,
your lattice will collapse,
and it's not gonna look really nice.
It'll taste delicious, but it won't look its best.
We can set this aside.
If it's really hot where you're working,
go ahead and just put this in the fridge to hang out
while we do our lattice.
Now we're gonna repeat the same process
for our lattice top.
This batch of pie dough is gonna get rolled out
to more or less a quarter of an inch exactly.
I wanna have it be just thick enough to hold it's structure.
And if it's too thin, it'll just dissolve.
Getting that perfect country rustic crust
just has a couple of rules.
Pinch those edges together.
This is my trick for getting less cracks on the edge.
You also wanna make sure that you can lift your pastry off
before you start cutting it,
because if you can't, you're in trouble.
This is ready to go.
I usually use a knife to cut the lattice for my pie.
However, today I'm gonna use a pasta cutter.
(rolls pasta cutter)
It's a crimped edge, so you just run it across the top,
and you get that nice country lattice,
like I love the frilled edge.
You're gonna cut roughly one inch pieces,
and don't stress about getting them perfect,
it's not that kind of pie.
Okay. After you've cut your lattice,
it's time to assemble it.
So here's the fun part.
The fun part where you can't dilly-dally,
and you have to get it right the first time. (laughs)
To make a lattice, you're gonna put one row of strips down
in one direction.
This is a peach pie, so we're leaving big gaps,
so you can see that beautiful peach filling come through.
There we go.
Now lift up every other strip halfway,
and place one in the opposite direction.
Perpendicular if you will.
Replace those strips,
and repeat with the alternating strips.
Oh my gosh. This is just about done.
That looks wonderful.
And if you have a strip or two extra of pie dough,
just go ahead and I like to roll it in cinnamon sugar,
and bake it separately.
It is a delicious treat to have with your coffee.
I have some trimming to do for this pie.
So let's just take the edge off like this.
To finish this pie off
I'm just going to crimp the edges with my finger,
it's gonna finish the rustic look.
So this pie would look horrible
if it didn't have an egg wash.
You need a little brushing of egg here,
mixed in with some milk, cream, or water.
I like to use milk or cream.
And we're gonna give it a gentle but thorough brushing.
Any bit that doesn't have the egg wash
is gonna be like really white, not golden and pretty.
So you wanna have a nice golden brown,
and shiny lattice top.
Once your egg wash is done,
I'm gonna finish this off with a sprinkle of sanding sugar.
Sanding sugar has a really big crystal shape,
and it is just gonna give you a lot of sparkle and crunch.
Perfect finish for our peach pie.
This is gonna go into the oven, 400 degrees,
for 40 to 45 minutes, maybe even longer,
it kind of depends on your oven and your baking dish.
But if you just baked it the whole time,
burnt on the edge, it wouldn't look attractive.
So what you wanna do is,
pick a piece of tin foil and loosely wrap around.
So just make a little tent, if you will.
This is called tenting your pie crust,
and it just protects the edge from burning.
The edge will bake much faster.
So the center will get nice and golden,
the edge will be protected, and you'll be really happy.
You can take your tenting off after half an hour or so,
user discretion.
And if it needs a little bit more golden on the outside,
take the tenting off after 30 minutes.
Once your pie is cool enough to cut,
go ahead and get a big piece for yourself,
pull up on a scoop of vanilla ice cream carefully,
and then it's time for a bite.
Before I take one, if you like this recipe,
check out my pie playlist,
all my favorite pies in one playlist for you.
But now it's all about me and this bite.
That was so good.
Big peach flavor, a crisp butter crust,
and it's basically just summer on a plate.
I really hope you get a chance to make this.
If you like my recipes, hit that like button and subscribe,
and I'll see you in the next pie video.