Apple Pie from Pre-Made Filling

Earlier I mentioned canning apple pie filling.  The payoff comes at times like Memorial Day weekend:  a friend was having a cookout and I volunteered to take a pie.  I have blueberries and peaches in the freezer from my own harvest last summer, but decided to use up some of the canned filling I put up a couple of years ago.  It's very easy.  I previously wrote about using the same canned filling with whole wheat pie crust, but in this case I used store-bought white flour crusts.  All I did was lard up a pie plate, dump the filling into the bottom crust, do a bad job of joining/crimping the top crust onto the bottom, and bake at about 375 for 50 minutes.


I normally do lattice-top pies, but for some reason a solid crust seems more appropriate for apple.  Assuming one has a crust that can handle being cut into strips, the lattice top is actually easier in the crimping department.  I also have a pie bird that I have never actually used in a pie; instead I cut slits--which work well.

By the way, for a pie made from raw apples, the solid crust can be problematic: the apples will cook down a lot and lose volume as they bake, leaving air spaces under the crust.  Since the pie filling is pre-cooked, that problem is more or less eliminated.

The results are decent.  I think the pie the filling makes is pretty basic, although good, but I've uniformly gotten rave reviews whenever I've taken one somewhere.  Fast and easy (setting aside the pre-work of putting up the filling) is a good combination.