#4 This is about what your dough should look like when you are done cutting.
Tags: pie
Cherry pie is a lot easier to make; you just open a can and dump them in. I have never used fresh cherries, the canned are so easy and they taste good, but you are at the mercy of the brand of canned cherries you use. I used to always use Wilderness cherries, but the local grocery stopped carrying them. This time I used Comstock brand, and I can't say that I liked them much. They were not very sweet.
This is two cans. Don't put too many cherries into your pie. It's just not needed; they have a strong taste. They are expensive, too. These were $3.55 a can.
I never used canned apples. You might as well just get a store-bought pie as use those.
Tags: pie cherry filling
I covered the edges of my apple pie with thin strips of aluminum foil to keep them from burning. This makes your pie a more even brown on top. You do not need to do this. I didn't do it with the cherry pie so you could see the difference.
Some cooks brush the top crust with egg and milk, or sprinkle it with sugar, but I don't bother.
Preheat the oven to 400 F degrees. I place my pie on a cookie sheet covered with aluminum foil because it is not unusual for them to boil over.
(At this point my oven coil on the bottom burned out and the stove could not get hot enough to bake the pies. Fortunately I live next door to my mother-in-law. I ran the pies to her house to bake them. She is a pie-baker extraordinaire, so I knew she would not let them burn.)
The cherry pie was done in an hour. The apple pie actually took two hours because the apples were taking forever to cook. I have never had it take that long before, but every time we checked the apples by poking them with a fork, they were still hard. And the crust wasn't burning, so we just kept baking until they gave up and became soft. A good sign that your pie is done is that the center of the filling is bubbling. Sometimes I put the pie near the bottom of the stove so the crust on the bottom will be sure to be done. The bottom crust can still be too raw if it hasn't gotten hot enough.
Tags: pie baking
Use the canvas to lift the dough and fold it over the rolling pin. Then you use the pin to transfer the dough over the pie dish, and unroll the dough gently into the dish.
Tags: pie dough