Welcome to Bon Appétit Bake Club, a community of curious bakers. Each month senior test kitchen editors Jesse Szewczyk and Shilpa Uskokovic share a must-make recipe and dive deep on why it works. Come bake and learn with us—ask questions, share pics, listen to our podcast, and lots more here. And don’t forget to join the Bake Club Group chat over on Substack.
The hardest part about making a fruit pie isn’t the crust (especially not with a recipe as reliable as this one). The hardest part about making a fruit pie is waiting for it to properly cool before you can slice it open. It takes hours. Yes, plural. One hour? That’s a rookie mistake. Four is better, with a six-to-eight-hour wait being downright pro chef behavior. Fruit pies are often thickened with starch (cornstarch, in this case) and starches need a long resting period to cool down and set up (the technical term is retrogradation). Without a long rest, a fruit pie will be nearly impossible to slice, the warm filling pouring out of it like an inflatable pool that’s sprung a leak. So let it sit for longer than you can bear. If you’d like to receive a gold star, chill the pie in the fridge for a few hours before cutting and serving. It’ll be especially tidy.
Two more valuable lessons in pie making: The best peaches for a pie are the worst for eating out of hand. You want peaches that are slightly underripe as they have a better balance of acid and pectin and will hold up well to the long bake. Very ripe peaches will simply turn to mush. If your peaches are crunchy like apples, congratulations! You can make excellent peach pie. The sugar, lemon, and spices, though dealt with a light hand, immensely help in transforming even mediocre fruit into a fragrant jammy filling. You can also use an equal amount of unthawed frozen peaches in place of fresh. Cook them as you would for fresh, knowing that it may take a few minutes longer for the liquid to release.
The secret to fruit pie with a crisp, not soggy, bottom is to precook the fruit on the stove first. Precooking releases the moisture from the fruit, which is then bound into a thick well-mannered gel thanks to a modest (for a fruit pie) amount of cornstarch. Pies made by simply dumping raw fruit into the pie shell often suffer from soft crusts and an overload of starch or thickener to compensate for the liquid released as the pie bakes.
