Apple pie from scratch...even the pie crust

I decided to try baking a pie from scratch since I had the time and I didn't feel like spending money on a pie crust. Now I know how much butter is really in a pie crust and that making pie crust is way harder than I originally thought. I have already mastered the apple pie with store-bought crust thanks to all the pie-baking I've done with my good friend Sierra. The crust tasted good, but I don't have the technique down so the texture isn't quite right. The apple filling made up for anything lacking in the crust. I wanted to do a cross-hatched/woven top crust, but I couldn't get the dough to hold properly. It kept crumbling so I just made a crumble top. Anyone trying to make the recipe better not be afraid to get their hands dirty. This is a messy process. Grating butter is harder than I originally thought. It's easy until you get close to the end you're holding that's getting all melty and hard to grate. Also, I was lucky enough to have a pie plate leftover from a store-bought pie to hold the pie since I didn't have a glass pie dish.

Grate frozen sticks of butter into the flour mixture

Mix in the butter and the flour mixture until it's all crumbly looking

Large flat surface for rolling out the dough

Thinly sliced apple arranged inside the pie. Both aesthetic and most space efficient.

Pie!

Pie crust recipe (adapted from Simply Recipes and All Recipes)

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups flour
• 2 sticks of unsalted butter frozen over night
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 7 tbsp ice cold water

Procedure

1. Mix flour, salt, sugar in large bowl.
2. Grate butter into the flour mixture and cut in the butter with two butter knives until you have coarse crumbles.
3. Stir in water a tablespoon at a time. 
4. Create two dough balls for top and bottom crust.
5. Spread one dough ball evenly over the pie pan for the bottom crust. Wrap the other dough ball in Saran wrap and refrigerate both the dough ball and the dough in the pie plate.

Apple Pie filling

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup all purpose flour
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• pinch of salt
• 6 cups of thinly sliced apples  or as much as is needed to fill the pie (I prefer Jonathan or Jonamac apples)

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 425F
2. In a medium-sized bowl, add the flour, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Mix until combined. 
3. Peel, core and thinly slice apples one at a time. Arrange the apple slices in a circular pattern in the pie dough covered pie plate. Sprinkle the flour and sugar mixture over each layer of apple slices. Do this until pie plate is full to the brim with alternating layers of apple and flour-sugar mixture. If you have remaining flour-sugar mixture, sprinkle the rest on top of the last apple slice layer.
4. Take out dough ball from fridge. To make the crumble top crust, crumble the dough ball over the top of the pie until the pie is covered in crumbled dough.
5. Bake for 40 min until crust is golden.