- [Claire] All right guys, that time a year again.
It's pie season.
You want the iconic comfort, classic,
the fat, the fruit, the texture,
the crust, all of it.
I mean, pie has it all.
(upbeat music)
We tested like a million of them.
We're kind of sick of pies,
but I'm not sick of pies,
'cause even after making, like, 20 of them,
like, at the end of the day,
I still just wanna eat pie.
The thing with pie is you really have to nail the pie crust.
And don't be intimidated.
It seems like it's something
if it seems like it's something
that's gonna be difficult to work with.
But honestly, it's just three things.
Fat, flour, and water.
The thing about using, like, a liquid fat,
like a coconut oil or olive oil,
or something like that,
is honestly, I find it so hard to work with.
Jut to stick to butter or a solid fat.
So we did test shortening, butter,
and a combo of those two things.
We did a taste test.
We did, like, the tender test.
And just, like, an overall,
how was it to work with.
We found that shortening does tend
to give you a little bit more on the flaky side,
but it doesn't taste as good.
And the combo was good.
It was, you know, a good compromise.
We don't love the idea of doing combo
if it's not gonna give you a huge change in results.
Butter is not only gonna give you a great flavor,
but a great texture.
And if you're gonna do all this work,
you want it to taste as good as it possibly can.
So as you know, here at Tasty,
we love a secret ingredient.
And to do that, we added a little bit
of egg yolk into our water.
We found it really gives it just, like, that added richness
that you really, really want when you're going
for kinda that ultimate holiday pie.
And we're also gonna add ice water
to our egg yolks.
Literally, be taking the tablespoons of water
from a cup of ice water
just to make sure that your water's as cold
as it possibly can be.
This is actually the pastry recipe that I learned
in culinary school at Leiths.
It just, it's so good.
As you know, always add salt to everything that you do,
including sweets, because it is a flavor enhancer.
We are putting in cold, cold, cold cubed butter.
We have to keep everything as cold as possible always.
So you're gonna go in, and you're not gonna use your palms.
You're gonna use your fingertips as much as you can
because your palms are warmer than your fingertips.
So you're just really trying to take the big chunks
of butter and rub them into the flour.
So we're gonna kinda coat the flour with the butter.
Once I'm happy,
and I have all the butter,
is pretty well incorporated in the flour,
I'm ready to add my liquid.
We're gonna use our judgment here,
and just kind of as quickly as we can,
incorporate the liquid with the fat.
This is still looking pretty dry,
so I'm gonna go to the drier bits of the bowl
and incorporate more of that egg yolk water mixture.
How you can test that is you put some together
in your palms,
and if it's staying together
in a little dough ball,
then you're good to go.
So once I'm happy that all the liquid's incorporated,
I think that I have a good amount of moisture in here,
dump it out onto our clean work surface,
and start to bring it together.
Get it into a nice wall, if you will.
There's no dry floury bits,
there's nothing crumbling off of it.
It's gonna be a lot easier if you make it into a disc.
It's gonna be much easier to roll it out
into a circle later.
Now, I'm gonna wrap it up with cling film,
and we're gonna put it back in the fridge
and let it chill out for a second.
This is gonna let the flour and everything relax.
So the thing about pie crust
is it gets harder to work with the warmer that it is.
So if your fat is getting really, really warm,
it's gonna be hard to roll out and work with.
And what you're gonna first do,
flour the surface,
so you're gonna flour the top of the pastry dough.
Kind of push down on the dough
starting from the bottom to the top,
and shmush, shmush, shmush.
And it just kind of spreads the dough out
before you start rolling.
Every now and again, we're gonna give the dough
a quarter turn.
That's just gonna help ensure
that we have a nice, round dough,
and it's also gonna make sure
that we're double-checking that our dough
is not sticking to the surface that we're working on.
Always shmush the cracks back together
whenever you see a big one forming,
'cause it's only gonna get worse.
You wanna roll it out to, like, to an eighth of an inch.
Roll it out way bigger than your pan is.
You can put your pan over the pie crust
to make sure that you have enough.
So the easiest, safest way to move it
is to roll it up on your rolling pin.
Here we go, it's not sticking to anything.
Voila.
We don't want to stretch or tear the dough out.
And I'm going to lift the edges
and almost lower down in there.
And then I'm gonna use my knuckles to push it
into the corners.
And then any big seams, just kinda press them out
so they're not overlapping or anything.
You want a really clean side.
So first, go around, and just kind of tuck
this excess under.
And so you have one kind of cohesive wall
to work with, if you will.
And now, we're gonna go and crimp.
So we're gonna use our knuckle of your left hand
or right hand and the index finger and thumb
of your other hand.
And just go in, and pinch in.
So once it's crimped, we're gonna chill it down.
And we want it to be as cold as humanly possible
before we throw it into a super hot oven.
So now that we have a crust, let's talk pumpkin filling.
So when it comes to dairy,
when we're looking at a lot of different recipes,
a lot of them have sweetened condensed milk,
evaporated milk, and then some combo of fresh dairy as well.
The sweetened condensed milk,
it's got a ton of sugar.
It's this really thick, interesting product.
Evaporated milk is a lot thinner than it.
It has a little bit of sugar,
not nearly as much as sweetened condensed milk.
But why not just use a fresh product?
We can understand it a little bit more.
So we decided to go with half-and-half.
We want to test three different things.
So we wanted to test canned pumpkin as it is,
roasting the canned puree,
and then we also wanted to try fresh pumpkin.
When we were first testing canned roasted,
we wanted to put everything in the filling
and roast it aside from the dairies.
But we kind of made like a pumpkin caramel on accident.
There's a lit bit more margin error there.
We actually ended up just doing the spices
and the pumpkin puree.
That gave us an awesome pumpkin flavor.
It kind of did the double work
of not only roasting the pumpkin puree,
but also really just enhance everything
that's going into this,
and make it a really intense, complex flavor,
which is so good and so worth it.
Cool, so scrape it all to one side,
put it back in your bowl.
So we're gonna throw in the granulated sugar,
the dark brown sugar.
Just giving us a little bit of that molassesy flavor.
Give it a lit bit of vanilla for that flavor enhancer,
three eggs, and one egg yolk.
And that egg yolk's just for a little bit
of extra richness without too much extra moisture.
And then just whisk this until it's completely smooth.
And it's gonna be, like, this really nice, gorgeous custard.
So what we're gonna do is pre-bake the pie shell.
We need to fold up a big piece of parchment,
and then we're gonna throw in,
we just had some dried chickpeas that we use.
These are our baking beans, if you will.
So kind of push them off to the side
to hold up the walls,
and we're good to go.
You're gonna put this in about 400 degrees Fahrenheit
for about 15, 20 minutes or so,
depending on the pie dish that you're using.
And to know that it's done, pull back the sheet of parchment
with the beans inside.
And you just wanna make sure there's no undercooked
or raw pastry left.
So we have our pre-baked pie crust.
Let's pour it all in there,
get every little bit.
There's gonna be a little bit of bubbles.
And what you can try and do
is kinda carefully plop it on the table
and see if you can get out any of those bubbles.
With a lot of custard pies,
it's pretty common to start with a really hot oven,
and then it lower it down.
And what it's gonna do is that really instant heat
to get everything started.
So I know that this might seem crazy,
but roasting a real, whole pumpkin
and making this into your pie,
this is so good.
So cut it up, get it in big chunks.
Don't go crazy with this.
All we're really trying to do is get out the seeds
and that little pulpy bit in the middle.
I'm using a little paring knife.
It makes it really easy to get all that stuff out.
Get these big chunks onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.
Have a little fun with it.
Just dry roast those suckers in a really high heat.
Like, I don't know, 400 for 15, 20 minutes
'til you can really smell 'em.
Again, developing that flavor.
We're gonna throw the flush of the pumpkin
into a food processor
with everything else that we need.
The sugars, the eggs, the heavy cream,
the vanilla, the salt, all the good stuff.
And give it a whiz.
It's not gonna be as smooth and kind of mush, I guess,
as the puree that comes out of a can,
which is really nice actually.
Like, it has a little bit more of a bite to it,
but it's still super creamy and delicious.
Honestly, with the food processor,
do this more than you think,
'cause you do want a pretty smooth texture.
So once we're to a good place,
pour that into your pre-baked crust.
If you really wanna do something a little bit extra,
like, these steps don't take a ton of extra time.
They give you a very complex and very unique take
on a pumpkin pie.
And same deal.
We're gonna do a nice, high heat to start,
and then we're gonna lower it down
to finish the cooking.
All right, so again, we just could not decide
between apple and pumpkin,
so we gave you both.
Guys, there are tons of different varieties of apples.
The only thing that you really need to know for this one.
Like, we're using Granny Smiths
because they're easily accessible,
gotta a great tart flavor,
they really work well in pies.
But if you have different ones in your grocery store,
as long as you're using cooking apples
that'll hold up to cooking, doesn't matter.
For apple pie, we tested three different preparations.
We tested fresh apples, putting in macerated apples,
which just means they sat in sugar and salt for a bit
to draw out the extra moisture.
And then we also tested a cooked apple recipe.
We found that we preferred the macerated method
because we had lot of good bite still to the apples,
but since we took care of a lot of that moisture loss,
we didn't have huge gaps in our pie.
You have a little bit of bite,
but they're cooked enough that it's not
you're biting into raw apple.
And as you're peeling them,
it's a really good idea to have a big bowl of water.
If you have some lemons, pop a little in the water, too.
That'll just keep 'em from browning.
So we're gonna use so many apples
'cause they do have a lot of moisture in them,
and they are gonna bake down.
Core 'em, cut 'em into those little cheeks,
and then slice 'em super thinly.
So we're gonna macerate these apples.
And what we're gonna do is put salt and sugar,
which are both desiccants.
And that's just way of saying
that they draw out moisture
from what they come in contact with.
And the salt is not only gonna draw out moisture,
but it's also gonna help enhance the flavors
that are in there.
I'm gonna put in cinnamon here
and a little bit of lemon juice.
So what we're just adding,
aside from the desiccants,
are just a little bit of flavor
that'll just kind of marinate a little bit.
We're also gonna add half of our cornstarch now.
So we're gonna toss all the apples and all this stuff.
And we're gonna actually gonna let it sit
for about 30 minutes.
It's a good idea to stir it every, like, 10 minutes or so
just so the apples on the top or in the middle
can really drain out all that extra moisture.
After that 30 minutes, we're gonna let it sit
in a colander over another bowl.
And we're actually gonna just draw out all that liquid.
So we really wanna make sure
that we're getting out as much moisture
from these apples as we can right now.
So as you can see, I mean, look at all this moisture
that came out of these apples.
Like, holy moly.
So we're gonna boil this down.
There is a bit of cornstarch,
so this mixture should thicken up a good amount right away.
So we're gonna take the rest of that cornstarch,
add a few tablespoons of water to make a slurry
so we don't have big chunks of cornstarch.
And we're gonna throw our slurry in here
and just thicken this up.
We don't wanna boil it too much,
but we're gonna add a little knob of butter there.
So that's gonna stop the cooking process a little bit
so it doesn't boil too much.
It's also gonna give us a little bit
of that extra oomph, that extra flavor and silkiness.
Once that butter is pretty much melted in,
we're gonna take it off heat.
We want it to be kind of the texture of caramel,
if you can see here.
So it looks like a nice, thick caramel.
So coat all the apples with this mixture.
Once that's all done, we're ready to build our pie.
We are going to roll out a sheet of dough.
Same as before.
I'm not that fancy with the apple pie.
We're actually not gonna pre-bake it
'cause it does need a good amount of time in the oven.
You don't have to be super crazy with laying
the apples in here,
but you do want to make sure that they're all flat.
And if you can, have them be the round side out
again, just so that we can pack all the apples in here.
So every now and then, push 'em down.
This is a lot of apples.
We wanna totally pack this guy full.
And if there's any extra of that caramely filling in there,
go ahead and pour it on top of the apples.
You shouldn't have a ton left over.
And we're gonna put a new sheet of pastry on top of it.
Cut off the excess.
So we're gonna make sure that we have a really secure seal
between the top and the bottom layers.
So pinch and fold, pinch and fold.
And before you even worry about decorating the sides,
you wanna make sure that that's really tight and sealed.
Do the knuckle finger all the way around.
And then go ahead and do an egg wash.
Again, we're just gonna use straight up egg here.
And then for a little extra crunch,
we're gonna add this sanding sugar.
And that's just gonna give us a nice texture.
Fruit pies, and apple especially,
has a lot of moisture in there.
So we wanna cut little holes
so that the steam can get out
so we don't have our pie literally explode
when it's baking.
And into the oven it goes.
Wow, look how nice that is.
The food stylist trick is to cut
a little sliver out first.
And don't worry about this one.
It's gonna be ugly.
So that you don't end up messing up the whole pie,
you can get really nice slices.
I know it's a lot to do.
These little tips and things there,
but if you're not gonna do it around the holidays
and around Thanksgiving, when are you gonna do it?
Look at that.
I mean, isn't it just so cool,
the fact that it just so much oomph to it, ya know?
So whether you're a custard fan or a fruit pie person,
you've got two different really awesome pies here.
They're not too over the top.
They're relatively simple.
They're definite crowd pleasers.
Go make this pie.
Do it for yourself, do it for the ones you love.
Be the champion of this year's Thanksgiving,
and bring the pie.
Insert pie pun.
Yeah, that's what we need.
What's a pie pun?
You wanna piece of me?
I only have pies for you.
Ha, ha, ha.
Be the apple of my pie.
Yeah, give us your best pie pun.
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