Our favorite recipe for making a classic apple pie from scratch. This recipe guarantees apple pie with perfectly cooked (not mushy) apples surrounded by a thickened and gently spiced sauce all baked inside a flaky, golden-brown crust.
How to Make Perfect Homemade Apple Pie
It’s taken us a while to zero in on our favorite method for making apple pie, but I think we’ve finally nailed it. This simple recipe guarantees perfectly cooked apples surrounded with a thick gently spiced sauce. There’s no need for precooking the sauce or apples and the steps to make this pie are simple, you just need a little time.
As with all of the pie recipes on Inspired Taste, we start with this Homemade Pie Crust. I’m a stickler on this one. It has never failed us and is our go-to recipe for Pumpkin pie, this Apple Tart, and other fruit pies like Blueberry Pie.
You can make the crust in advance. It can be refrigerated or frozen. Definitely check our Pie Crust Recipe for our tips on making it (it even has a video).
As for the apples, we use a lot of them and like to use two or more varieties for the most apple-flavored pie. I’ve listed some of our favorites below. It isn’t a complete list, but it should give you some inspiration when shopping for your homemade pie. If you find yourself with extra apples, try making Homemade Applesauce or these Extra Easy Cinnamon Apples.
We don’t precook the apples before adding them to the crust. Instead, we toss peeled and sliced apples with sugar, salt, and spices in a large bowl. When the apples are well coated, we set the bowl aside and let the apples sit for about an hour.
In this hour, the sugar and salt work on the apples to help them release their delicious liquid (you can see how much in our photos and the video). The apples also soften quite a bit. We do this when making apple bread, too.
Here are the apples after one hour of sitting in the salt, sugar, and spice mixture:
Then just before adding the apples to the prepared pie dish, we toss in some starch — I usually use cornstarch, but tapioca starch works, too. This starch mixes with all that liquid released by the apples and will help thicken it as the pie bakes in the oven.
I’ve followed a few pie recipes that ask you to throw away some or all of that delicious liquid before filling the pie. There’s so much flavor there!Thankfully, with our pie-making method, you can use all of the liquid, which with our slightly longer bake time will turn into a thickened sauce. I’ve measured how much liquid is released from the apples over 1 hour and consistently get about 3/4 cup. A little more or a little less is fine, though.
If you find that your apples released much more, you might want to consider leaving a little behind. (When apples are overripe, they can release more liquid than usual, which can make your pie a bit more runny.)
On this subject, make sure to read our tips below for cooling the pie. The cooling step is crucial with fruit pies and goes a long way to making sure the filling is actually thick and won’t run out onto your plate the moment you cut it.