Simple Apple Pie Recipe (Easy Recipe for Beginners!)
This is the perfect simple Apple Pie recipe featuring classic flavors, a buttery homemade crust, and apple filling that's so easy even beginners can make!
Course Dessert
Cuisine American
Keyword Apple Pie
Prep Time 1 hourhour30 minutesminutes
Cook Time 1 hourhour15 minutesminutes
2 hourshours
Total Time 4 hourshours45 minutesminutes
Servings 12
Author Valya's Taste of Home
Ingredients
Pie the Crust Ingredients
2 cups- organic all-purpose flour + ½ cup for dusting
1tsp.- sea salt
10oz.- cold unsalted butter
½cup- cold water
For the Apple Pie Filling
3lbs.- Granny Smith apples
½cup- organic sugar
⅓cup- cane brown sugar
¼cup- organic all-purpose flour
½tbsp.- ground cinnamon
¼tsp.- ground nutmeg
3tbsp.- unsalted butter + 1 tbsp. for greasing the pie dish
Instructions
How to Make Apple Pie
Making this delicious Thanksgiving dessert at home couldn't get any easier than this! It's an incredibly easy pie crust recipe and the apple pie filling recipe is super simple too.
My apple pie recipe shares everything you need to do to make this from scratch. Let's look at how to make it step by step:
Next, drizzle cold water over the pie crumbs while mixing the crumbs with your hand. Slowly drizzle in the cold water while stirring the mixture around with your hand or a spatula. Form the dough into a ball (do not knead the dough).
Dust a bowl with a tablespoon of flour and roll the dough into a ball. Then split the ball into 2 even pieces, and flatten each piece into disks.
Wrap each dough disk with plastic wrap. Refrigerate for an hour or so.
NOTE: I have also previously refrigerated the dough overnight. You can even freeze the disks and then place them in the fridge and let them thaw overnight before using them the next day.
How to Make Apple Pie Filling
Now let's make our apple pie filling! It'll take about 45 minutes to prepare the apple filling which is perfect while you refrigerate the dough.
In a large bowl, combine all dry ingredients, namely the cane brown sugar and regular white sugar, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg spices, and sea salt. Stir with a hand whisker to combine.
Next, let's prep the apples by rinsing, peeling, and slicing the apples.
Place them in a medium glass bowl. Sprinkle the dry filling mixture over apples and toss and mix to coat all the apple slices with the filling mixture.
How to Assemble and Bake Apple Pie
Time to bake our pie! Place the rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 400 ℉.
Grease the pie dish or pie plate. This is optional but preferred to prevent from the crust sticking to the dish.
Take one of the discs of dough out of the fridge. Roll the disk using a rolling pin on a lightly floured surface till it's 12 inches in diameter.
Next, place the rolled pie dough over the pie dish and cut the edge off evenly with a pizza cutter.
Lay the apple slices compactly as possible into the pie dish on top of the bottom crust. I don't just pour the apple slices into the crust, I tuck them in tightly so there are barely any air pockets.
Dust the working surface again with flour and roll out the second disk about ⅛ of an inch thick. Cut out leaves and place them on the edge of the pie.
Now place sliced, thin pieces of butter over the top of the apples. Cover the pie with aluminum foil and bake for 1 hour covered until the juices begin to bubble, then remove the foil and bake for an additional 15 minutes uncovered until the pie is perfectly golden brown.
While the pie is baking you can work on the leave topping. Cut out the leaves and place them on a large 16 X 22 baking sheet lined with parchment paper. You should have enough dough for decoration and there shouldn't be a lot of excess dough left.
Bake the leaves at 400 ℉ for 20 min. Remove from the oven and slide the parchment paper with baked leaves onto the countertop. If you leave them on the baking sheet instead, they will continue to bake and will turn out very dark.
Remove the pie from the oven and let it cool to a warm temperature before topping it with baked pie leaves.
Insert the leaves into baked apples and serve. The leaves will be crunchy, but if you prefer the leaves soft then place the leaves while the pie is still hot and let the pie cool with leaves on top.
Slice the pie after it has cooled down. Top it off with some whipped cream or serve it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.