How do you say I love you without saying I love you? Make a gluten free person you love this homemade apple pie. That will do it - no words required (your mouths will be too full of pie anyway)!
Apple pie filling ingredients:
Plus one of these thickeners. Either -
Other ingredients needed:
Cook the apple pie filling first. Cooking evaporates excess water so the crust won’t get soggy. Also raw apples in a pie tend to turn mushy as they bake. Apples contain a natural enzyme that, when heated, changes that pectin into a heat stable form which allows the apples to cook thoroughly as they bake without turning mushy.
Slice the apples fairly thin so they will cook all the way through. Thick chunks of apple leave room for more air pockets, where steam will collect during baking. Then when the steam escapes it leaves gaps between the apples and the crust.
Include the thickener - this would be flour or cornstarch or tapioca. I like to add butter too - this adds richness in much the same way that adding butter to gravy gives the perfect finish. It creates a really smooth and velvety gel.
Make sure the filling is cold when you add it to the pie crust. Crust should stay cold right up until you put it in the oven, otherwise the warm filling could make the crust soggy on the bottom. Cold pie crust will also start to become flaky as soon as it hits that hot oven.
Chill the pie dough before rolling it out, and again after filling the pie while you heat up the oven. Chilling the dough gives the gluten free flours time to get hydrated. Gluten free flour doesn’t absorb liquids very well so it needs more time than regular wheat based flour to soak up the liquids - the egg and water. Chilling also lets the dough relax and be less stiff when you roll it out. The dough might initially be stiff because the butter is cold, but the chilling time allowed the liquids/moisture in the dough to slowly work their way all the way through the parts of the dough evenly, so it will be much more elastic. So after letting it sit at room temperature for about 10 minutes, it should be ready to roll out. A well hydrated pie dough with well-developed elasticity will roll out well, and won’t shrink as it bakes.