Firsts: Baking a Pie — tiana is tan

I’ve slowly been trying to catch up with my long queue of unfinished posts which have started to stockpile. My boyfriend has recently started blogging, which has re-inspired me to get back into it. A goal of mine for this year (as it is every year) is to step more out of my comfort zone and try new things. Subsequently, I plan on starting a new series of posts focusing on “firsts”. So begins my first post of the series “Firsts: Baking a Pie”.

Over the past few months, my boyfriend and I have gotten more into the habit of cooking and baking together. After months of eating out, we realized that it didn’t benefit our wallets or our bodies. Cooking and grocery shopping has become a fun way for us to spend time together. I also bought him an Instant Pot for Christmas - which is amazing. Once I feel more comfortable with it and have experimented more, I will make a post about it.

Although I have dabbled with baking in the past, I had never actually attempted to make a pie before. My boyfriend and I had been craving apple pie, so he suggested that we bake one ourselves to satiate the craving.

To provide a bit of context, my boyfriend recently got his new phone, the iPhone X and has been very selective about which apps to download. Since we have gotten into cooking, he decided to try out the Tasty app, which is actually really well designed for iOs. Unfortunately, the app on Android is horrible so please fix that @buzzfeed. The app steps you through each recipe accompanied with short Tasty-style video snippets and an accessible ingredient list you can tap to view at any point. The UI and UX are both great. We decided to use the Apple Pie from scratch recipe on Tasty.

*A comparable app I discovered recently for Android is Sidechef!

When we were shopping for ingredients, the frozen aisle had a bunch of pre-made crust options. For those of you who are hesitant about making your own pie crust, or just want to save some time, this is definitely an option! I had opted out of a pre-made crust, because I decided I wanted the full pie making experience.

When I was reviewing the recipe, I was curious as to why the recipe asked for chopped up pieces of cold butter, rather than softened butter or melted butter. The answer might seem obvious to some, but for a baking novice such as myself, I wasn’t sure.

One time while watching The Great British Bake-Off, I remembered a contestant had mentioned using cold butter was essential for some reason, which was lost to me. I decided search up the answer on Google. The following excerpt is from Chatelaine, a French baking blog:

Cold butter is ideal for baked goods that should be crisp. Butter that’s straight from the fridge doesn’t get fully incorporated into a batter; instead it gets broken down into small pieces throughout your dough. Since butter is about 18 percent water, steam is released in those pockets during baking, which helps create flaky layers.

The blog also mentioned that you need to keep the dough cool in the fridge because it minimizes gluten production, preventing the dough from becoming too tough. One of my favorite parts about baking is all the science behind it. Science rules.

My biggest takeaways from this experience were:

Make sure you have a decent peeler for the apples or a sous chef boyfriend who is willing to do the peeling for you.
Don’t over-flour the surface you are rolling your dough out on - it makes it more difficult to seal together the top and bottom halves of the dough and juice will leak out from inside the pie while it is baking! (This results in a difficult clean-up after)
Definitely try it a la mode while it is still warm (vanilla ice cream highly recommended!)

Enjoy the before and after photos!