The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Apple Pie

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

Things we learn in this episode: Kenji has a not-so-secret secret ingredient for can’t-miss pie crust, Deb is not allowed at Thanksgiving without her pie, the birthplace of Kenji’s love of junk food, the ideal baking apple, why American apple pie reigns supreme.Radiotopia's fall fundraiser is happening now! Visit radiotopia.fm/donate.

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so we can keep doing what we're doing. So if you're able, make your tax-deductible gift today at radiotopia.fm slash donate. Thank you so much. Kenji, do you keep cooked pie on the counter or do you keep it in the fridge? I would never put pie in the fridge. Could you say that louder for my husband? Because he put the pie in the fridge last night and it's not right this morning. I'm trying to get it back to room temperature.

I would never put a pie in the fridge. I would never put a pizza in the fridge. Leftover slices, never put them in the fridge. You're just keeping cooked cheese at room temperature overnight? Absolutely, yeah. Because otherwise the crust gets ruined when you put it in the fridge. You're just keeping cooked cheese at room temperature overnight? Absolutely, yeah. Because otherwise the crust gets ruined when you put it in the fridge. What about your stomach is ruined

when you eat rancid cheese? The cheese doesn't go rancid. It's salty, it's fatty, it's totally fine. There's nothing fresh to begin with in there. So with pizza you can heat it up again and get it crispy and stuff, but then you lose the opportunity to eat cold pizza in the morning,

and cold pizza is pretty good. With pie especially though, like once you put it in the fridge, things stale faster in the fridge and the crust gets a little bit stale and you never get that same texture again, right? It's like the whole thing comes out a little bit kind of gummy and more uniform and more like you're eating semi-solid clay. I love that clay-like texture of cold pie.

I don't know, I like a cold slice of pie sometimes, but I do generally, especially if it's a fresh pie. I mean, there's no reason to refrigerate a fruit pie. You can keep it out for a couple days. What about if you put cheddar on your apple pie? Do you leave that cheese out at room temperature to go rancid? Well, that's like in the crust. It's like a cracker at that point.

It's not gonna go bad. I think of it like practically a cheese over something. So cheese on pie is safe, but cheese on pizza, not safe. I have never heard of leaving pizza out at room temperature and then just eating it in the morning, but you're alive and you're here today. So all right, Kenji, you're blowing my mind here. We've got to get back to the apple pie because we have so much to talk about today. And it's going to be a great episode. Sounds good. Let's do it.

From PRX's Radiotopia, this is the recipe with Kenji and Deb. Where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of The Food Lab and The Walk and a columnist for The New York Times. Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen and the author of three best-selling cookbooks. We've both been professional recipe developers for nearly two decades, and we've got the same basic goal, to make recipes that work for you and make you excited to get in the kitchen. But we've got very different approaches.

And on this show, we'll cook and talk about each other's recipes, comparing notes to see what we can learn from each other. This week on the recipe with Kenji and Deb, we're talking about Apple pie. That's next on the recipe with Kenji and Deb. recipe with Kenji and Deb.

Kenji, did you grow up in a pie for dessert family for Thanksgiving? Were you guys eating cheesecake or cranberry bread or were you eating pumpkin and apple pie? None of those. Sometimes we did eat cheesecake, but lemon meringue pie made with mighty fine pie, lemon meringue pie filling was the thing we had. It was always weepy.

My mom would make it two days in advance, it was always weepy. It was made with a graham cracker crust that she bought from the supermarket. You have to set out in your life to have unweepy pie toppings. In 2007, I did this pie crust recipe for Cooks Illustrated, the one that has vodka in it. I did that pie crust recipe for 2007.

I think I was maybe the perfect person to work on this recipe because I had never made pie crust before in my life. So I was starting from scratch, and so I had no biases going in. I didn't know what I was doing, and so I really learned. I spent months learning how to make pie crust, and I was like, wait a minute, why?

Well, it was a good opportunity for me to sort of explore pie crust, but that was really the first time in my life I'd ever made pie crust, and then it became one of my most popular recipes, which I thought was strange. It was an early viral moment for you. I actually, I think I ran that on my site around, like around that time. I was like, I just tried this new Cooks Illustrated.

I went back to like not using vodka a couple of years later, but it was sort of fun. It was definitely something that influenced a generation of pie makers. Revisiting that recipe, I always found that the vodka was actually, was the catchiest part, it was the easiest sell, but I don't think that was the most interesting part of the recipe. We always had pumpkin pie, although my uncle always liked the certain pumpkin chiffon pie that was like very light and fluffy,

so we didn't really do it, but my family is obsessed with apple pie. I've heard that there are people that's not their Thanksgiving dessert, and I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, if I do not bring apple pie, I can just turn around, go back in my car and go home. What was your first apple pie? I feel like I was probably making like an Ina or Martha, a very classic four

pounds of apples, you know, two crust. I love doing a lattice. I think it's kind of hard to mess up. Apple pie is hard to mess up? Well, I think there's so much going on. I think it's kind of hard to mess up. Apple pie is hard to mess up? Well, I think there's so much going on. I think my theory is that 75% of times

if a apple pie doesn't taste the way you want it to, it was because it was the wrong apples or maybe they were a little older and they kind of fell apart. I think it's like when the apples kind of fall apart, but otherwise it's kind of hard to make apples, cinnamon, sugar and a pie crust taste terrible. Yeah, it's mostly the texture that ends up ruined.

Because a bad pie, the apples turn to mush, the filling becomes very watery, kind of like apple cider just pooling at the bottom, and that makes the crust all soggy. And then a crust, though, because, well, the classic problem, at least when I was at Cooks Illustrated, when we surveyed people, the problem that most people had with crust was that their crust would come out. Either it was difficult to roll out, like so they wouldn't be able to make a great crust,

or if they made a dough that was easy to roll out, it would be really tough. Like it comes out leathery. When I was a teenager, I'm like my early twenties and I didn't want to bother actually looking up how things worked and I just wanted to try it, you know? I would make crust and they would just come out like sheets of leather because I would add way too much water. I was like, oh, it needs more water. Like, it just add a little bit more water to make it workable and then you end up with something that's more like a Like pizza dough than pie crust, right?

Pie dough can be hard to roll out from the fridge and this is you're talking about a butter pie dough because shortening isn't gonna be so hard to roll out from the fridge and right lard Can be actually it can be a little bit of a mix but most people are probably using shortening or can be actually it can be a little bit of a mix, but most people are probably using shortening or butter or some combination of, but if you're using all butter pie crust, shockingly when it comes out of the fridge,

it's going to be a solid as a stick of butter. But I just go just a little roll at a time, roll, turn, roll. I think that the pie dough, it cracks a lot and people get frustrated when they're trying to roll it out too fast. Think about taking it down like a millimeter or a quarter centimeter with each roll and it will get there.

You're gonna have patience for it because you're gonna have a beautiful pie dough in the end and it's worth doing a few extra rolls and not being impatient. So you can stretch it out into this beautiful even sheets. All right, so let's talk about pie dough to start with. When you make a pie dough, you get your flour, maybe a little sugar, a little salt, and then you put your fat in there, your butter or your shortening.

What do you use? I do all butter. I do all butter too. Because I like the flavor of butter. Shortening will make it easier to work with. It'll make for a more tender pie dough if you do it right. But you can get away with all butter if with the right technique. I would rather have the flavor than the anything that shortening provides.

I want it to taste like butter. So when you get to that phase where you're cutting your fat into the flower and you want it to look like, you know, pee meal, or you want like butter to be in pieces, no bigger than the size of like frozen peas or whatever description it is, how it like, depending on what kind of pie you're making, or like, maybe you're like snapping it in with your fingers and getting those little flakes, no matter what you're going to end up with a sort of crumbly meal-y texture, right?

And that's what you're looking for. And then you have to push it into a ball. And the idea is that you want it to like, so you add a little bit of water to it just to get it to come together into a cohesive ball, right? But you wanna add as little water as possible because the water is like what's gonna form gluten and what makes the crust,

well, that gluten makes it leathery, right? That's what makes it tough. So at least for me, the temptation early on when I was trying to figure out how to make pie dough was like, okay, this is mealy. It's not really coming together into ball. I know if I try and make it into a ball now and I try and roll it out later,

it's just gonna crumble and crack and it's gonna give me all kinds of problems. So the temptation then is to just add just a little more water, just a little more water till it comes together into like a cohesive. Yes, cause my experience with dough was play dough, right? And I expect everything to act like Play-Doh. Like I want it to be easy to roll out.

I want to be able to like shove it into a dinosaur and extrude it into spaghetti. I want to be able to put it into a mold. Dough to me is what, like Play-Doh is what dough was supposed to feel like to me. And so when I first really started working with pie, I was like, this is, this can't be right. Like this doesn't act anything like Play-Doh.

I do a classic, you know, either pinch or I love using a pastry blender to cut the butter into flour. And I do the tiny, I call it like the largest should be the size of small peas. Petit-pois. Petit-pois. It's just a good guidance

that you want kind of like this cornmeal thing. It's something you read in recipes a lot. And usually I get friends texting me the day before Thanksgiving going, what is a pea-sized meal? What are you talking about? Exactly, I know, that's what my phone is for. It's for friends texting me.

They're panic recipe questions. However, I think you did, not just with your vodka pie dough all those years ago, but you did something very cool and you're experimenting with pie dough, where you kind of threw away the idea of pea-sized bits or cornmeal-sized flakes altogether. And this is probably your most current pie dough, the one where you blend.

Yeah, so you take like half your flour and all of your butter and you blend it into like a paste. And so instead of having like pea-sized meal or whatever, like you just blend into a complete paste and then you add, and you do this in a food processor, and then you add your remaining flour and just pulse it in. And so that way, like your dough ends up, so rather like, you know, the dough structure, rather than having like layers

of flattened out bits of butter that are coated in flour, which is sort of like what the, what gives you those flaky layers in a traditional pie, all butter pie dough, instead you end up with like a layers of a flour with like a flour, butter paste that is separating the layers and that flour, butter paste does the same basic thing where, you know, the butter steams, it separates the layers and it turns it into the flaky and tender pie crust. I find at least that it makes the dough a lot more malleable and it makes the dough

almost like play dough where you can really roll it out easily without cracking. I found it very interesting that like even the dough at room temperature, it didn't really, didn't get mushy as fast because usually you need to keep the dough very cold when you have the butter bits inside. And as soon as it starts warming up, it becomes hard to roll.

It becomes a little greasy and sticky. And in my recipes, I always tell people to throw it back in the fridge or the freezer for five minutes if you need. It's just too much work and it's too difficult to work with a warm pie dough. But I was surprised the scraps I had from yours out on the counter, even an hour later were not. They're just like Play-Doh.

Yeah, they were like Play-Doh. I like made a little snowman and a little snake, a snail. I actually wanted to get, so I wanna get your honest opinion on this because I've gotten mixed feedback on this pie crust. So I find for a lot of like first time a real amateur pie makers, they like it because it's real easy to work with.

But then I talked to bakers, I talked, you know, like my friend Stella Parks, she has a separate recipe on Serious Eats that's much more traditional and all butter crust. I've talked with other people who have a lot of experience working with pie dough with traditional pie doughs like you, who don't like the recipe at all because it doesn't work the way you're the way you expect. The other thing that it's not great at is that if you like decorating your pie crust, like making like a nice fluted edge or something, it doesn't hold fluted edges very well. It kind of puffs up a little bit and gets a little bit slack. And so if you like a real pretty pie crust,

it doesn't do that. So what I found is that it was a very, it definitely expands kind of in all directions, the dough. It's definitely, yeah, it puffs. And I definitely lost the definition in the edges. In fact, some of them actually kind of went over the side of the pie pan. They kind of grew out. I felt like it expanded in all directions.

At the very end, we're going to brush an egg white on top, which I thought was really cool. I've never brushed with an egg white before. I've usually done all eggs or I've maybe just done yolks if I'm trying to get a darker color. But okay, so I found that the parts of the crust that touched the egg white topping had nice bigger flakes the rest of it It wasn't the same kind of flakes that I'm familiar with for pie dough where you kind of have that I don't know that croissant like flake where they're flatter. Mm-hmm. It was still a very pleasant pie eating experience It wasn't like it was a little bit different, but I just mean like it didn't taste heavy. It didn't taste lead in

It didn't taste like a cracker or anything like that. It just had like, it had an all over expanses. This is all a very nice way of saying that you hated it. No, I absolutely loved it. I cannot wait to eat more right after this. It was so good. But I remember being like, oh, that did not look coming out of the oven the way it did. It's absolutely, I have like so many pictures on my phone.

I'm gonna have a video demo and I think you'll see it came out beautifully. It was really truly a stunning pie. Deb, then for you, you know, knowing that people have a little bit of difficulty working with a traditional crust, what would be like the biggest tips for cook home cooks who maybe make pie once or twice a year and every time they kind of dread it because they know they're going to run into this problem where the pie is going to crack or they don't know how to get the pea meal size right. Like what, what are your top three tips for working with pie dough?

I would say I actually only have one, which is just keep it cold. Keep it cold. Keep it cold. As soon as it gets warm, everything gets difficult. You're having troubles shitting it. And this is at all stages. At all stages.

When you're rolling it out, if you're in a sunbeam in your kitchen or your kitchen runs warm and that pie dough starts getting mushy, it's gonna get difficult to work with. This is true of a lot of cookie doughs too with butter in them. As soon as it gets too warm, it just becomes starts getting mushy, it's gonna get difficult to work with. This is true of a lot of cookie doughs too with butter in them.

As soon as it gets too warm, it just becomes oily and mushy. And you're like, I can't get this thing to do what it wants, but I do roll slow. I do a small push with each roll and I'm doing more rolls, but it keeps it from cracking and falling apart. But I basically just keep it turning

and that way I don't learn later that it was stuck. So my habit is just roll little shift Do you ever do like Parchment underneath this thing when you're to help you do that turn or I love that for cookies like I absolutely Never roll out do roll out cookies with a floured counter I always do it between two pieces of parchment and it's the most liberating thing and if we ever do a cookie episode my God, I'm not gonna shut up. I'm sure we'll get the cookie But for pie dough, I don't know,

I find that the flour counters a little easier and I find that the recipe can handle it. I tend to go a little higher on water than you do. You would probably not like that, but it allows it to pick up that flour without it ruining the dough. When I've rolled it out to that 12 inch round or whatever we're going for,

it's still cold to the touch. And that's why it's easy. And if it was warm to the touch, so what happens is if you're rolling it out and it's starting to get soft, just slide it onto a tray or a plate, pop it in the freezer for five minutes. Don't fight it.

Got it. So like an aluminum, just like a rim baking sheet, you just slide it right off the counter onto there. Exactly. Or the back of a baking sheet, fridge for 10 or 15 minutes. Or if it's nice and cold where you are at Thanksgiving, you could just pop it outside for five minutes too. My mom's nice and cold where you are at Thanksgiving,

you could just pop it outside for five minutes too. My mom's place in New York, she was in an apartment building, and the hallways were not heated or anything. It was just like, you know, basically a walk-in refrigerator. So holidays were great, because you just opened the front door,

and the hallway, the whole hallway was your walk-in. I have a terrace, which is very spoiling, because I have a pretty nice-sized terrace outside my kitchen, so I actually cool cakes out there and everything. In the winter, I actually, I remember made a friend's wedding cake a few years ago and I absolutely could not fit six cake layers in my small fridge.

I just kept them outside overnight in cake boxes. It was fine. You don't get squirrels or sparrows or pigeons out there. I haven't seen any squirrels. Not sure I've seen a lot of pigeons out there. And I'm just gonna assume there's nothing else out there. Cause New York city is a pristine place. There's no flying rats.

There's no rats on the ground. Well, the thing is it's not touching the ground. It's like in the air. So it's sort of like, shh. I like when my wedding cake has a nice peck over. It was covered anyway. Yeah. So I have a terrace and it's very useful for stuff like this. Shh, shh, shh, shh. It was covered. Anyway, yeah, so I have a terrace and it's very useful for stuff like this because my terrace is big and the fridge is small.

So my number one tip is just to keep it cold. As soon as it gets warm, it gets difficult and you're gonna hate making pie dough. But if you keep it cold and re-chill it if you need to for five or 10 minutes, I think that you'll find it is easy to work with this play dough. So I've seen a lot of people recommend also chilling, like once you've constructed the pie, like you're making a double crested pie, you roll out the bottom, you fill it, you

put the top on, maybe you lattice the top and then you chill it again before you bake it. Do you do that as well? I don't. I don't. You don't? If the crust has gotten so warm that like apples are poking through thin parts of the dough, maybe, but I'm not, I'm in the interest of you making a pie

that you don't like, is a torture, it doesn't take forever. So I would shave that off. I didn't find that it made a really significant difference in my, like the final pie. Let's say you wanted to make your pie the day before Thanksgiving. You wanted to make the pie dough, fill the pie, and get the crust on there, so that you don't have to worry about it the day of. Would you

recommend baking the pie, leaving the entire baked pie overnight to bring to Thanksgiving the next day or would you bake, would you stuff the pie, put the raw pie dough on and keep that in the fridge and then bake it the second day? Like is there any downside or upside to either of those scenarios? I would not pull the pie out of the oven an hour or two before the Thanksgiving dinner. I am with you in that it takes several hours for it to really set up and yeah I actually would say even sometimes longer than four hours. I think I did four hours yesterday and it was still really loose. That said you can always put more thickener in but you don't you think you want it. You think

you want that clean pie slice but you don't, you think you want it. You think you want that clean pie slice, but you don't, because it's not gonna taste good. That thickener to me kind of buffers the flavor of pie and it makes it taste more like jello. And so it's tempting to add more thickener so you can get that like, I don't know, photography slice, but it's not the one, the slice that spills out actually tastes much better or spills slowly cause some thickener is at play.

So my opinion is that you should, if you want to bake it the day of Thanksgiving, bake it in the morning so it can set till the afternoon unless you're one of those people who eats at 11 in the morning, in which case definitely bake it the day. Otherwise I think the day before and just leave it at room temperature is fine. And if your family likes it warm, you can rewarm it.

Rewarmed apple pie is better than apple pie that's just been straight out of the oven and it's still warm from the oven. I think it's better set. I'm not the food scientist here, but I have found in my many years of pie making that the pectin doesn't really set. It doesn't really thicken until it has fully cooled.

Once it's cooled, you can rewarm it and it won't go as liquid as it was when it came out of the oven. But if you don't first get it cool to room temperature or close to room temperature, it's going to be sloshy inside. So bake it in the morning if you're going to eat in the afternoon or evening, or just bake it the day before and leave it at room temperature. You can always warm it for 10 minutes at 350 and have a nice slice. When I was at Cooks Illustrated and I was working on my pie apple pie recipe there for there maybe 15 years ago, whenever it was, I had some pretty heated debates

with Chris Kimball about this because Chris Kimball was like, wants almost no thickener and he ends the apple pies that he makes are thin sliced actually similar, very similar to your perfect apple pie recipe, but less thickener. But he has, you know, he would use apple slices sliced real thin, stacked real high, very little thickener and then very little spicing also, you know, he would use apple slices sliced real thin, stacked real high, very little thickener and then very little spicing. Also, you know, like he's from the middle of like the whitest part of Vermont. So like a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon was too spicy. So very, it's like just app basically just thinly sliced apples.

And when you bake it that way and it tastes very like sort of fresh apple flavor, but it's also real watery. And it's like, it's just sloshy inside. You cut it open. It's just like sloshes out and the apples turn to mush. Yeah, I had big debates with him about that because like I like my apple pies a little bit more spiced and I like them like with enough thickener

that it doesn't slosh. And yet your gooey apple pie had only, it had some lemon zest, a little lemon juice and half a teaspoon of cinnamon for the whole five pounds of pie. And I was like, this is an apple pie that tastes like apples. Yeah, I think I left that one minimally spiced.

We're talking about the crust and we're talking about keeping it crisp. And when I picture apple pie filling, I think there's like three ways to do it. The first way is you just kind of take your chunks of apple, you mix it with the spices, thickener, and then you put it right into the pie crust and you bake it. That's like the simplest way.

The very classic way. This is the one where people tend to complain the most about the soggy bottom on the pie because there's no protection. The next thing you could do is that same filling and you can par bake the bottom crust, either waiting it with pie weights or pennies or I could point you to my weird technique online that I use. I actually don't use pie weights. I actually take the bottom crust, I freeze it.

It just takes like 10 minutes. I press like a sprayed or nonstick foil against it to like mold it almost like a second cake pan. And I bake that on it for the par baking. And I love it because I don't have to have weights. I'm not dealing with hot pennies. I'm not dealing with like, I don't know, those expensive fancy bags of pie weights.

And why can't you just use beans? You can use dry beans. You just have to make sure you clearly mark that those are the beans that are not for cooking because they'll take 55 hours to cook. So the first way is to just, you kind of mix the apples, the spices, the thickener, you put it in and you either par bake the crust or you don't. The second method, and this is what you do with your gooey apple pie, and this is actually my hunch from talking to bakers and working in bakeries over the years, what most professionals are doing is they're pre-cooking the apple filling, at least part of the way.

And in doing this, it doesn't take as long to soften the apples in the oven. They don't lose as much liquid. And why don't you tell us about why you do it? Can't you? Cause I know why bakers do it, but I want to hear your theory too. The most important part is that counter-intuitively, par-baking apples, par-cooking apples actually helps them keep their shape better when you bake them. So if you take raw apples and you slice them and you put them in an apple pie and you bake them, they turn a little

bit mushy as they lose moisture and they turn a little bit mushy as you cook. But by par baking them and cooking them to a certain temperature, so you don't want to cook them until they're mush, but you cook them till I think they're around like 160, 180 degrees. There's an enzyme in the apples that will break down that will break down the pectin in the apples as they bake. However, when you cook them to a certain temperature and you hold them there, so you cook them say to 180 degrees and then you let it cool before putting it back in the pie crust, the pectin in the apple actually converts to a form that doesn't break down when you then subsequently cook it. So you end up with chunks of apples that maintain their shape. So like in my gooey apple pie recipe, and I don't know if this worked out for you,

but ideally what happens is that when you slice into it, the apple chunks still have, they still maintain their shape and they still have some kind of integrity. And they get that specific kind of, I don't know, it tastes almost like the way like a poached apple or a poached pear does, you know, where it gets that like a little bit of like toothiness to it and it holds a shape and you can bite into it and you still feel a little bit of texture in there. And it's not, it just doesn't,

it doesn't turn just into applesauce. And so part cooking an apple and letting it cool before putting it back into the pie crust ends up giving you, it makes it much, much more predictable. Cause you don't, you know that there's not gonna be a ton of liquid that's gonna slosh out, but it actually helps the apples maintain their structural integrity because the pectin doesn't break down

when you subsequently bake it. So that's why I do it. You use half inch slices of apple, which is a little thicker, but because you're cooking them for longer, it's not gonna be too chunky for the pie. Like you get these nice chunks, but they're perfectly cooked through

and I'll show through and it looks gorgeous. So we were talking about par baking the crust and how crust gets soggy. I feel that when you pre cook the filling in some way, it frees you from having to par bake the crust or deal with a soggy bottom. It did not have to me a soggy crust and I didn't par bake it. I used your recipe to the letter. And because the filling is a little bit thicker, the thickener has been activated. There's no liquid sloshing around. It just doesn't soothe the bottom crust the same way.

And it also allows you to just bake it until it's done and not like what sometimes feels like extra time to get those apples nice and soft. Yeah, no, I mean, I find it makes it all much, much more predictable. And I don't know what method you used. I have a couple different recipes. I'm sure you didn't do the sous vide method. No, I did not do find it makes it all much more predictable. And I don't know what method you used. I have a couple different recipes. I'm sure you didn't do the sous vide method.

No, I did not do the sous vide filling, Kenji. And I also did not attach a candy thermometer to make sure it stayed at 160 degrees steady. I did, however, and you said don't let it simmer. I did it in my, I'm sorry to do this. I did it in my Stoob Smitten Kitchen Braiser because it was the perfect size. Okay, Dev, you sent me one of those stove brazers. It is by far my most used like Dutch oven style pan now. Like I use it all the time.

It's the perfect size. It is the perfect shape. I can't believe that this is not just like the standard shape for like a brazing vessel on top. I'm so glad you agree. It's got maybe like three inches tall sides, something like that. It's about three and three quarter

to four inch tall sides. It's 11 inches in diameter inches tall sides, something like that. It's about three and three quarter to four inches tall sides. It's 11 inches in diameter and it holds four quarts, which is to say that you're going to think it doesn't hold as much as most of your Dutch ovens, but what you will realize is that most of the time you're not using your full Dutch oven and a shallower pan gives you better ventilation. This is the style of the Smitten Kitchen collaboration. It's a four quart, I don't know what you call it, brazier. It's a brazier. We call it a brazier. It's basically a shallow Dutch oven. Get is the Stalb-Smitten Kitchen collaboration. It's a four quart, I don't know what you call it, brazier. It's a brazier.

We call it a brazier. It's basically a shallow Dutch oven. Get it from Stalb, it's good. That's what I used. It was the perfect size for sauteing the filling. I did not keep it at 160, but I did keep it like on the lowest gas flame to just keep it barely bubbling for the first 20 minutes

with the lid on. And then I did, it said, I think you called for 10 more minutes at a higher simmer until the juices were thickened. But I found that mine already were, I probably only did about five minutes. I just felt like they were in a good place. I just, I went on vibes. I was like, this is good enough. So I did about five more minutes, but it was perfect. And then you spread it out a sheet pan to cool it off for an hour. And since I was running out of time,

I was very happy it was cooled in 45 minutes instead. Right, well the thing is you don't wanna put it into the pie crust hot. Because you'll melt the pie crust. Because it'll melt the butter. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it needs to be cooled before. But the pie filling, that's the thing you can do

like days in advance. Because once the apples are cooked, they're not gonna oxidize anymore. So you can make the pie filling whenever you want. You can make it on Monday before Thanksgiving, right? And get into your pie crust on Wednesday and bake it. Yeah, I always think your pie fillings are a great thing to make ahead.

And so when you asked about whether you would make it in advance, if I was doing your pie, I would feel completely comfortable, you know, with the filling already made, knowing that I wasn't gonna be peeling and slicing apples that morning. And that it's not gonna get slushy day of.

Exactly, especially if you're gonna not eat it for several hours. Everybody wants things out of the oven anyway. The recipe will be back after a quick break. Don't go anywhere. So Deb, let me now go back to you again as someone with a lot of experience making pies and your more traditional filling, which is raw apples that are thinly sliced. Tell us about your technique.

This is my 2018 even more perfect apple pie. It's on smittenkitchen.com. And what happened was I was very influenced by Estella Park's apple pie. She has two things that I was, that caused me to make mine a little differently and I really liked it And now I've really only made apple pie that way since the two things she does a little differently one is not really that radical She cuts the apples a little thinner. They're about a quarter inch slices Mm-hmm. What she does is she mixes the filling and now how you're gonna pre cook yours She actually has you just keep it together in a bag or a bowl for one to four hours at room temperature.

I find this to be so brilliant. I don't have to precook the filling, but I get the softened apple effect. The apples have broken down a little bit. All the thickener has... It's going to activate the heat. Yeah, it's hydrated. And it allows you to put so much more apples in the pie. So the apples break down because as they're macerating in that sugar mixture the sugar draws the moisture out of them

And so the apples kind of soften up a little bit and I think you can see even from the top photos on the site like Where I photographed it is probably the tallest apple pie like egregiously tall and because you can fit so many more apples and with these planks of apple They just nest. And so what happens if you start an apple pie with chunks of apples, and this is like for the raw classic where you just mix the apples raw and you put it into the, you're going to have a lot of shrinkage. Because there's a lot of air in there, right? Exactly. Because the apple slices are still firm and so they don't stack perfectly well. And so it's like, it's like you got a bag of Legos,

right? Where you end up with like an empty cage on top sometimes as it's lapsed well. And so it's like you got a bag of Legos, right? Where- Yeah, you end up with like an empty cage on top sometimes as it's lapsed down. And both your and my pies use, I think a kind of classic apple pie might use like four pounds of apples. I think I'm using four and a half and you're using five pounds. Because you cook them down a little bit

so they lose some moisture first. So you can fit more in. And I'm using, oh, I'm calling for four and a quarter to four and a half, but I'm always putting in a couple of extras in because I'm always snacking on the apples covered in the sugar and the cinnamon. How can you not eat that? They're so good.

Yeah. So I'm using about four and a half pounds of apples. And it's the same thing where it's more and you can just fit more in. I love it because I don't have to par cook it. It's not really any extra work. It's just letting it sit there. Just letting it do its thing. It solves that empty crust problem. There's no empty cages. I'm just thinking a question I always get from people when they

make pie, this one and others is, say you've mixed up your apples. This is just for a straight raw apple filling. You end up with a lot of liquid in the bottom of the bowl and people tell me they poured it off and I'm like no no no that's the sugar and the spices don't pour it off don't worry the thickener is in there too just don't pour it off and in this recipe specifically I make it very clear pour all of those juices every single the idea of pouring off sugar or cinnamon or thickener that's gonna make the pie taste amazing makes me so sad. This is like people who blot their pepperoni pizza slices. You're like that's the whole point.

Like it literally has the cuppy chalice in the pepperoni for that reason. I mentioned that I had made your pie with Mutsu apples because that's what we had picked very late in the season which are like a Granny Smith golden delicious hybrid. There's a I feel like some apple varieties are just kind of regional. So I try not to get too specific in recommending ones, but it helps to ask somebody at the farmer's market or at the orchard, like what's a good baking apple?

Or, you know, King Arthur Flower, I'm sure Serious Eats and other websites also have a lot of guides online. What's your, do you have a go-to baking apple? I do. I mean, so generally Golden Delicious would be mine, maybe a Granny Smith, but you know, in the testing I've done, and this you can actually find on Serious Eats

unless it got pulled off the website for whatever reason, the way pectin works is that when it's, the more acidic it is, the more firm it is, you know, the harder it is to break it down. And so like a real sweet apple, that's almost, that all has like a kind of, like a red delicious, something like that, almost no tartness to it all,

that just turns completely mushy, completely mealy. Whereas has like a kind of, like a red delicious, something like that. Almost no tartness to it all. That just turns completely mushy, completely mealy. Whereas something like a Granny Smith, because it's very tart, the pectin holds. The pectin is like the glue, the cellular glue that holds apple, you know, that sells together. A tartar apple holds. And so something like a Golden Delicious, or a mix of Golden Delicious, Granny Smith,

has a nice balance of flavor and sweetness and tartness. And the tartness is actually what holds the apple shaped together a little bit better. So for me, yeah, like something, what you just described, like a Mutsu being a cross somewhere between a Granny Smith and a Golden Delicious, that sounds like the perfect baking apple to me. Because I think you also want enough tartness in the flavor.

The tartness is not just about keeping the structure. It's also like the flavor. You want enough tartness in there to really sort of keep the pie bright tasting and not tasting cloying or not, because you're adding some sugar in there as well you're baking it down so the flavor concentrates and with the sweeter apple I find it just becomes a little bit too kind of like toothache you know like you need to add more acidity and salt almost to balance it. Gulf of Delicious tends to be

more weakly flavored apple especially from the grocery store I'd say if you buy it from a farm it can taste a lot more interesting but in general it's not the most strongly flavored apple. So if I'm using that, I love using a blend of apples too. Like you just throw your apples in the blender or? No, like if I'm using Golden Delicious, I also wanna use Granny Smith and there's some other baking apple that's recommended.

I will definitely use that because I feel like you just get more of a fuller, rounder apple flavor if you're using a mix of apples. But again, you don't want any that are gonna fall apart or you're gonna be like, why do I have bushy applesauce? Why did I work so hard on peeling and cutting for this? Apple pies do originate in the UK. It's not as American as apple pie.

It's as British or maybe Dutch. Yeah, British or Dutch. I'd say, but American pie crust is uniquely American. Like the way we make our pie crust is different from how pie crusts are made in Europe. But in the UK, they make apple pie with Bramley apples, which are these kind of brown apples that turn, they actually do turn to kind of apple sauce inside.

Like they don't hold their shape as well. They're known as pie apples, but I personally don't like the way Bramley apples come out. And I'm sure all four of our listeners in the UK are going to complain about me saying this. But, and maybe it's just that I've been dealing with them wrong, but you know, but I lived in the UK for a few months and had my share of apple desserts there. And I find, you know, American apple pies have a very different texture to them. Both the pie crust and the filling is different from the type of apple desserts that you get in the UK. And I

think it comes down to the type of apple. So we talked about filling, we talked about apple types. Why don't you give us like the rundown of your famous, was it like 2008, 2007 vodka pie? 2007, yeah. November, December Cooks Illustrated 2007. Are these recipes making us look old? Yeah. This recipe, you can find it anywhere online now,

pretty much. I think it ran on New York Times, it ran on Serious Eats, it ran on Cooks Illustrated. So this was a recipe, the first time it anywhere online now, pretty much. I think it ran on New York Times, it ran on Serious Eats, it ran on Cooks Illustrated. So this was a recipe, the first time I'd ever made pie crust, but I made it, we did, I mean, I did like, I worked on it for like two months, I did 135 different tests on it,

including like, I built like a humidity controlled container, like what you do in a lab where you stick your hands through with gloves, you know, so you can control the humidity inside and test it, you know. Anyhow, the vodka trick was basically, it's like to solve this problem where people have this temptation to add more water, to make the pie dough more workable. And the more water you add to a pie dough, the tougher it ends up being, um, because the water activates gluten and it makes it more tough.

And so the idea is that instead of using water to hydrate your pie dough, you use liquor, like hard liquor, like vodka like vodka, because gluten doesn't get activated, doesn't form in alcohol. So by using vodka you can get basically twice as much liquid in there and hydrate your flour, make it really easy to roll out, but you're only forming half as much gluten as you would normally because vodka is about 50% alcohol, 40% alcohol. And so you can get dough that's really easy to roll out, but that comes out a lot more tender than if you were to use the exact same amount of water. And then as it bakes, the vodka all evaporates, it bakes off.

That's the number one question. It's always like, is it gonna taste like vodka? I don't wanna have alcohol at the table. I don't wanna feed kids a pie dough with vodka in it. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't bake off. Some of it bakes off, but not all of it bakes off? That's different.

Yeah, soaking rum into a cake is different from having a tablespoon of vodka in a pie dough that is not the same as cake texture. No, it doesn't all bake up in the same way that like when you put wine into a stew, it doesn't all the alcohol, not all the alcohol bakes up. If you're comfortable feeding your kids bread, which has alcohol in it, you know,

like you should be fine feeding them a little, feeding them a slice. I'll feed my kids anything, so don't worry about me. I'm just telling you questions I get on the internet. Yeah, anything that's even slightly fermented is gonna have alcohol in it, right? Like alcohol just exists in nature, in a lot of the foods we eat.

Like I, you know, I'm recovering alcohol. I don't drink alcohol at all, but I have no problem eating foods that are cooked with it because the vast majority of that alcohol dissipates. I compare it to about having the same as like a slice of sourdough bread, which has some alcohol in it. You do the thing where you start at a higher temperature when you bake your pie and then

you reduce it somewhat through. I used to do that and then when I redid my pie in 2018, I started doing a steady 400 and that works for me. But I think yours was 425 to 375, I think. So I think it really depends on your pie dough recipe. I think your dough recipe probably works because it's a little sturdier You know whereas mine kind of tends to slump a little bit And so what I find is that by starting it at a higher temperature you can get the set a little bit faster

So you get that initial set and then you lower the temperature so that the filling can heat all the way through and that the pie Goes pie dough can cook all the way through but it's really just for me It's just about keeping the shape to be honest It's like most people's ovens at home are probably not accurately calibrated enough for it to really make much of a difference, you know? And especially recipes where the oven temperature changes part way through baking, like the heat curve that a home oven has is gonna vary so much

from oven to oven and it's gonna vary hugely whether it's like a gas oven or an electric oven. Like electric ovens tend to keep their temperature more steady than gas ovens do, mainly because gas ovens vent, right? So they're open to the outside and so they fluctuate a lot more, whereas electric ovens seal better. And so, you know, so any recipe where you're changing the temperature halfway through,

it's like, it's all kind of just like ballpark anyway. So it's not going to make a huge difference, but it depends on the pie. You know, the golden rule of recipes is like, just follow the recipe. Because you designed your recipe to work with your pie dough. I designed my recipe to work with my pie dough. And only use Kenji or Deb recipes because we test our recipes insanely. Just trying to help you out here to make it really simple. Kenji, how do you feel about like a pie crust, you know, the double crust pie,

either lattice or a whole one versus crumb or crumble topping? Because I have a theory that like we all do this classic, beautiful lattice or double crust pie, but I have a theory that people actually prefer crumb pie. Like I think it's just, yes, it's so good. Like with or without nuts or oats, but I think that it's like a more enjoyable contrast to the filling.

I guess I would say if you're gonna have the crumbly topping, like why not just make a, like why bother making pie crust? Cause like making a crumble is way, way easier to begin filling. I guess I would say if you're gonna have the crumbly topping, like why bother making pie crust? Because making a crumble is way, way easier to begin with. So if I'm making the pie crust, I'm just gonna go ahead and make the double crust. I'm not gonna complain.

If someone's feeding me pie, there's nothing to complain about. I realize we didn't talk about thickener. It's not like a huge thing, but I started using tapioca starch for a thickener or also sold as tapioca flour maybe five or 10 years ago. And I really like it. I feel like it has a sturdier set with less of it I was using tapioca starch for a thickener or also sold as tapioca flour, maybe five or 10 years ago. And I really like it.

I feel like it has a sturdier set with less of it. And to me, there's a clearness to the thickener. I'm not saying this right. It gels in a more clear way. Like it's more, it's like a glazy, like it glazes the apple pieces as opposed to being like a, like, well, flour I think is the opposite end of that spectrum, right?

If you just straight up flour it. Yeah, the heaviest. Yeah, and it's a little pastier and it makes the filling a little bit cloudier looking. Cornstarch is somewhere in the middle. And I found that tapioca's smaller amount gives you a really nice set. And I just felt like it was a very clear set to it.

Again, I don't know the chemistry of this. I only have my observations. I get a lot of like, where do I find this? But at this point, I can find it from any like Bob's Red Mill. You're not going to like a separate grocery store or anything to find it. And also when I buy a bag, it lasts like 10 years. You wanna know the honest truth for me?

Like my pantry is so disorganized that I will, when I'm making a pie like this, I'm never gonna be able to like locate exactly where my tapioca flour, whatever. Like I'll just grab the closest thickener I have. So sometimes it'll be cornstarch, sometimes it'll be tapioca flour, whatever. Like I'll just grab the closest thickener I have. So sometimes it'll be cornstarch, sometimes it'll be tapioca flour, sometimes it'll just be straight up flour.

They give you slightly different looks, but none of them are gonna ruin your pie I've found. See, we're back to my first theory that the only bad pie is when the apples fall apart. I'm with you there. Unless the apples turn into like mush and you have like a flowery applesauce filling, I don't

really think that most variations on baked apples with a buttery crust and cinnamon and spice could be bad. I have had pies where people would make like a crumble topping that turned real greasy. So we really don't like crumble toppings is what I'm learning here. If your butter leaks out and it turns greasy and this can happen with a regular pie crust as well where if you haven't chilled it properly and your butter kind of starts to melt out before before the pie crust sets, that pie crust pies can get a little bit sort of heavy and greasy tasting. Or you can sometimes see like a visible layer of grease on them, which I think is another way to ruin a pie. But people see the butter leaking out as it bakes and they imagine that they've done

something wrong. And my feeling is that anytime you have butter bits, some are gonna leak out. If you've ever watched a video up close of a croissant baking or a scone or a biscuit, you're always going to see some butter spilling out onto the tray. As long as the scone biscuit or pie crust you have at the end has the correct texture, don't worry about any bits that were closer

to the edge that spilled out. Is this the pie police coming to take you away right now? I know. In the background? It was gonna happen sooner or later. This is just New York City. But, so my feeling is like, as long as the results is fine, don't worry about what leaks out,

that there's always gonna be a little bit of leakage. And this is true of any buttery baker. Do you agree or disagree? I agree. As long as at the end, when you're baking something with chunks of butter, a pie crust or whatever it is, if you're following a good recipe, a little bit of that butter might leak out, but it's going to get reabsorbed. It's going to get sort of incorporated

back into the finished dish. If at the end you end up with greasy pools of butter, then I think you might be in a little bit of trouble. But yes, there's never a reason to panic when you've got a pie in the oven. What's the correct apple pie topping? Is it nothing? Is it whipped cream? Or is it vanilla ice cream? Or is it like creme fraiche? Or a slice of cheese? Usually it's grated into the crust, right? You can grate it into the crust but you can also just cut a slice of it and put a piece of cheese on top and then when you're reheating it just let it kind of like ooze over the side. I've seen it with American cheese even. I'm not making an apple pie melt, you can't make me. But I like the idea of working it

into the crust like cheese it style. I think I have a recipe on serious cheese maybe even for a pie where you do the apple filling and then you do a layer of grated cheese before you put the second crust on top and that comes out nicely. The cheese kind of more melts into it and you don't really you don't really get that distinct layer, but I like having a slice of apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese melted on top of it just before eating you know like having that real distinct sharp cheddar bit you know with bite, I like it. I have no poker face.

You can see I'm like, what are you talking about? No, vanilla ice cream, can't you? If you're not going for cheese, then I would put a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I would have it on the side so that I could, like I would have my slice of pie, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, like nestled up against it on the side, not on top,

so that I could take a spoonful of, cause I don't want to crush my pie going through the vanilla ice cream, but I want to take a spoonful of vanilla ice cream then a spoonful of pie on the same spoon and have them melt together on the spoon. And I would do it on a per bite basis. Although for most baked fruit desserts,

I really like a creme fraiche. I love like that sort of sour or a barely sweetened whipped cream. I would say if the pie was sweeter, if you like a sweeter apple pie. Yeah, or even just like a spoonful of it. Do people know that you can take creme fraiche and whip it just like whipped cream? Like it breaks down?

I don't know that I've ever whipped it, but I'm not surprised. But I usually just kind of whisk it up so it's loose, and then I just spoon it on, and I like the way it sort of trickles and melts. Oh, it's like it turns really melts. Oh, well, because if you put creme fraiche and in like a stand mixer with your hand mixer,

or just a whisk, you can whisk it just like regular whipped cream and it'll form stiff peaks, just like regular whipped cream does. I mean, if anything fattier than heavy cream, so I'm not surprised that it whips so well. Yeah. Is it time for me to get a slice of pie?

Oh yeah, get your pie. Okay. I wanted to show you these ridiculous Mutsu apples we picked. Again, it was very late in the season when we picked them and I told you they were enormous. Look how big this apple is. That is like literally, easily a pound. Like three quarter the size of your face.

Yeah, I know. I mean, my face isn't that big, but yeah. If you listening at home have ever seen Deb, but Deb's head is about the size of an apple. No, this is a seriously large apple. This is insane. So this is like almost a pound, but let's say you need five pounds of apples. You're probably gonna get it from five to six of these, which means you have less peeling.

Finally, this is Kenji's gooey apple pie. Look at that. Look at the apple slices holding their shape. Now this did go in the fridge overnight. It's really beautiful, gorgeous. That looks better than when I make it. I actually kind of thought it did. I was like, I don't mean to brag, but I might have killed it here.

It came out so nice. The crust is really nicely flaky. I love what the egg white did to the topping. You can see there's these like flaky layers and the gleam of sunlight coming in and it has a really nice flavor. ["The Glamour of the Sun"] Can you waffle an apple pie, Deb? ["The Glamour of the Sun"]

Maybe one of those McDonald's ones, but I don't think it would be an improvement. Yeah, leftover McDonald's apple pie in a waffle iron. That would be good. I wonder if you McDonald's apple pie in a waffle iron, that would be good. I wonder if you could make just like a hot pocket style, you know, like a little empanada style apple pie and just stick that into a waffle iron, if that would come out good.

I bet it would come out good. I would definitely eat that. If you start with raw pie dough, or if it's been cooked and chilled overnight and just kind of shove it down into a pie and like squeeze the waffle iron over it. I would eat it. So that it kind of breaks up. I bet it'd be good.

Haven't tried it. I'm sure it would be good. I think the next one is does it taco? I think a pie is technically a taco. A bottom crust only pie is a taco. If you eat your pie where you kind of scoop out a lot of the filling and then you end up with that kind of like the crook of the bottom crust where it curves

up the side at the end and you just pick it up. It almost is already like a crispy taco shell with a bit of filling left in it. Can you fry apple pie in butter in a pan? Maybe with a really well set apple pie, you'd be able to. I have a feeling that what's gonna happen is that the filling is just gonna slop out, do that sputtering thing that sometimes happens

when you have too much liquid with butter. I'm not sure it's gonna work out, but maybe it'll be real delicious. It might be good, but it may not improve it. I'll try it if you try it. Oh, does it leftover? Yes, this is my leftover apple pie, and it's phenomenal.

Day two apple pie is, I actually call the day after Thanksgiving national pie for breakfast day. Like you definitely have to go in the fridge. If it's not a cold slice of pie from the fridge, I don't want it. Years ago at Serious Eats, Ed Levine asked if we could do an all pie Thanksgiving.

So we made like turkey pie, stuffing pie, green bean casserole pie, apple pie. And that was real good next day stuff. All leftover pie. But yeah, I think a pie is like something that's made for leftovers. In fact, apple pie is better when it's not fresh. Absolutely.

Does it come out of kids' clothes easily? Absolutely. I mean, the crust could definitely leave some greasy stains, but in general, I think you're in good shape. It's not marinara sauce. [♪ MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN AND OUTah-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e- at therecipepodcast.com or follow us on Instagram at Kenji and Deb and shoot us a message. We have a phone number where you can call us. It's 202-709-7607 and you can leave us a voicemail.

The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Jay Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions. Edwin Ochoa is the project manager. The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Mardovich and Yori Lissardo is the director of network operations. Cher Delva, Apu Gotay, Emmanuel Johnson and Mike Russo handle our social media.

See you next time on The Recipe with Deb and Kenji. The recipe with Kenji and Deb is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. Hi, it's me, Jesse Tyler Ferguson. In case you haven't heard, and I don't know how that's possible, you're obviously not seeing my Instagram stories, but I have a podcast. I know, I know, I know.

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