Pie Baking with Domenica Marchetti: Apple Pie

Remember I wrote about making a berry & peach pie with Domenica Marchetti? Well, here's part 2. Because we did not just make one pie, we made two!

For this apple pie, we used a pie dough recipe adapted from Jacques Pepin. And, because I don't have a big food processor at home, I made the dough by hand: it was not difficult at all!

Pie dough recipe (for a 9-inch two-crust pie)
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
12 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
about 6 tablespoons ice-cold water.

Here's what you do: combine flour, salt and sugar. Add butter and with your fingertips mix the butter into the flour till you get the consistency of dry oatmeal. Add water a bit at a time until the dough comes together: don't overwork it! Form the dough into a disk, cover in wax paper and let it sit in the refrigerator for at least an hour.

For the apple filling, we combined several varieties of peeled and thinly sliced apples, 1/4 cup flour, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg.

Here are the apples mixed with the flour, sugar and spices. They smelled amazing!

You roll out half of the dough, fit it into a pie plate, crimp the edges and pile on the apples.

Instead of topping the pie with another crust or doing lattice topping, we decided to be a bit more creative. Domenica had maple leaf cutouts in different sizes and that's what I used to cover the pie. How pretty does this look?

The pie came out of the oven and had to cool down a bit. It looked gorgeous, and despite 80+ degree weather, made me think of Fall.

I did not get to try this pie because Domenica took it to a family dinner, but if it tasted nearly as good as it smelled, I'm sure it was a winner.