I don't usually do "how-to" blogs, but I LOVE this pie, and apparently I give really poor over-the-phone directions. The ONE time I tried to tell somehow how to make this amazing freezer pie... well, I promised not to tell the story, but it was catastrophic. So I am trying again, with pictures to cover all the gaps I must have left in my original explanation.
During the summer, I used to make freezer peach pie filling so that we could enjoy one of my favorite fruits in the winter. But freezer pie filling isn't exactly ready-to-use, being frozen in a cube and all. Besides, Alton Brown does the best job explaining what the freezing/thawing process does to fruit cells, watch it here
or just take my word for it. Basically, once you cook the peaches to thicken the filling, freeze them, thaw them, and cook them into pie, they are really mushy peaches. Not at all the summer fresh fruit experience we miss during winter, not to mention mushy food is, well, not delicious. Canned pie filling is yummy, but once the peaches undergo the processing needed for canning THEN get cooked into a pie...still not that fresh peach taste I hoped for.
Then my mother-in-law told me how to make ready-to-bake freezer pie filling. No thawing means you skip that damaging thawing step AND since the baking does the thawing, the actual cooking is minimal - hello, fresh peach pie in February.
Enough talking. Here's how (with pics)
1) start with your favorite freezer-ready pie filling recipe. Peach is my favorite, so I have included the recipe from the Ball Blue Book, which makes about 4 9" pies
6 lbs peaches
2 1/4 cups sugar
1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
pinch each nutmeg, ginger and cardamom
1/4 cup lemon juice
Wash, peel and slice peaches. Treat to preserve color (crushed vitamin C tablets are the exact same ascorbic acid as that Fresh Fruit mess we have all wasted $ on the past, just sayin'). Combine sugar, flour and spices. Stir sugar mixture into peaches and let sit until juice starts developing, about half an hour. Add lemon juice and cook over medium heat until the mixture begins to thicken. DO NOT OVERCOOK, remember you are going for fresh peach taste.
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| This has already thickened, without damaging the peaches |
Now to put the peach filling into the "molds". Select your pie pans, you will need at least 4. If they are not all the same size, you will need to write on your ziptop bag which pie plate was used ("purple pyrex" vs "clear deep dish" and so on).
Measure each pie plate's capacity by filling it with rice (pretend it is pie filling), then measuring the rice used. Now you know how much pie filling to put in each pie plate.
Fill each ziptop bag to the premeasured amount, then remove all air from the bag and press the filling OUT of the corners, INTO the pie plate. You are trying to make a pre-shaped pie filling disc that you can just wrap in dough and bake, so don't waste filling by letting it fill the corners of the bag.
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| this is a fresh (unfrozen) batch of filling |
Then freeze them FLAT for at least overnight, until they are hard as rocks, IN THE PANS. Once they are hard, remove the pie filling discs from the pans and return the shaped filling to the freezer
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| This is a frozen filling disc that I am about to remove from the pan |
And below is an unwrapped disc from last year - see how well it fits? Now all you have to do is make a regular pie crust, drop in the frozen filling disc, cover with a top crust, and bake at 400 for about an hour. Or you can be lazy like me and just top the still-frozen disc with your favorite crisp/crumble topping and bake it the same way. Peach crisp is my favorite cheat for dessert when we have unexpected company. Enjoy!
