I love apple pie so much that when I decided to make my first apple pie from scratch, I researched it for two weeks before I tried. In particular, I read lots of recipes, especially on crusts, that had very high ratings. I learned very quickly that the most helpful reviews came from reading the negative/low reviews. It turns out that most of the people who gave the raved about the recipes didn’t actually make the recipe. They made substitutions, additions, and removals based on their extensive prior experience. The people who gave low ratings were people who actually tried to make the recipe, but didn’t know the hidden secrets that the experts had internalized. Therefore, they made all the mistakes. From these low-raters, I learned all the pitfalls! Sometimes they provided tips on how to avoid the pitfall in the future, but mostly they gave me the information I needed to go out and look more broadly for help with all the things that can go wrong. So after my two weeks of research, here is a pic of my first apple pie!

It was wonderful! The crust is made with half butter and half shortening to get a crust that was somewhere between biscuit-y (all butter) and super flaky (all shortening). The pie is made with honey crisp apples in order to get a pie-filling that was firm and little tart, but not so tart that it required lots of sugar. There is just enough brown sugar to create the caramel sauce. The only thing that didn’t come out right the first time is that I didn’t know what a standard pie dish diameter was and no body mentioned it as an issue. It turned out that at the time, Pampered Chef’s pie dish was 11″. It turns out that a standard size is either 8″ or 9″, so my crust was a bit thin on the bottom. Other than that, I had a tasty and beautiful first apple pie!