Buttery and Flaky Cherry Hand Pies

Turning pie into a handheld package puts all the best qualities of fruit-filled pastry within your grasp.

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(upbeat music) – When I was a kid back in the ’70s, I was allowed to eat a Hostess cherry fruit pie once in a great while as a real treat, and I loved them in those little waxed paper packages. Now, I haven’t had one of those pies in years, and that’s probably a good thing, because today Lan’s gonna show me how to make one from scratch. – Oh Julia, hand pies are so much better than regular pies, right? – Well, I like that you don’t need a fork or a plate, you just maybe need a napkin. – We’re gonna make hand pies today that are really neat to eat, and they’re gonna be packed with flavor, lots and lots of flaky, buttery crust. – Mm, I’m in. – All right, let’s start with the filling. – Okay. – I’ve got sweet cherries here, and I’m actually using frozen cherries. I let these defrost. I cut them into half inch pieces, and they’re just gonna go in a medium saucepan. That was 10 ounces. I’m adding a third of a cup of sugar and 1/8th of a teaspoon of salt. Now I’m gonna mash about a third of this mixture, and the reason I’m doing that is if you leave all of the cherries whole, they don’t pack as tightly and so you can’t cram quite as much filling into each hand pie. But we only want to mash about a third of this. That looks pretty good. Turn this up to medium, and we’re just gonna let this cook for about five minutes. I’m looking for the cherries to warm through and the sugar to dissolve. And the reason I love using frozen cherries, all the juices come out when they defrost, so you don’t really have to be as careful about heating things through. If we were using fresh cherries, which you can do, you’d have to cook them more carefully to make sure those juices get drawn out. Now, I’m thickening those juices with corn starch. I’m gonna take my four teaspoons of corn starch and stir it into two tablespoons of lemon juice. So it’s been five minutes. This sugar is totally dissolved, and I’m just going to add my cornstarch slurry. And I’m gonna let this come back up to a simmer. After it does that, I’ll cook it for 30 to 60 seconds, just until that juice thickens up. You can see it bubbling, and those juices are already thickening. This looks great. – Looks delicious. – Yeah, let’s get this out of here. Now, when I was working on this, I actually developed a couple of different fillings. There’s a peach one that I just love, and there’s a pineapple one that you should not sleep on. – [Julia] And you can find those variations on our website. – Now, this has to cool before we can work with it so it doesn’t melt the butter in the pastry. I’m gonna pop this in the fridge for an hour and a half. You can make this up to two days in advance. – [Julia] Okay. – Hey there fellow fans of cooking. Want to stay in the know? Visit AmericasTestKitchen.com and sign up for our free "Notes from the Test Kitchen" email newsletter. Get exclusive tips, seasonal recipes, product reviews, and more delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free at AmericasTestKitchen.com. – Are you ready to make some pie dough? – I am. – All right. We’re gonna do this by hand. – Okay. – This is a rough puff. You kind of have stacks of flakes rather than perfect layers and I’m starting with a one gallon heavy duty zipper lock bag. – You’re making the dough in the bag. – Yes. – That’s interesting. I’ve never seen this done before. – It’s a lot of fun. You’ll like this. I’ve got two and a half cups of flour, and I like to actually weight the flour here because using the right amount of flour is really important. – [Julia] It’s all purpose flour? – Yes, so 12 and a half ounces, two and a half cups. Next up, two tablespoons of granulated sugar and 1 teaspoon of table salt. – Okay, I’m with you. – (laughs) We’ll just give this a shake to mix. (bag crinkling) Next up, our butter. This is two and half sticks of unsalted butter. Cut it the long way. It’s straight from the fridge, nice and cold. Now, I’ll seal this up, and I’m gonna work most of the air out. You don’t have to get all the air out. And we’ll give this a shake to coat the butter with flour. (bag crinkling) Now that my butter is coated, I’m gonna start at the bottom of the bag, and I’m just gonna rock, because this butter’s still fairly hard. Rolling the pin would just kind of skate over the top, and I want to flatten this butter into large flakes. And as we’re doing this, if I notice the butter sticking to the bag, I’ll just pick it up and give it a shake to move it around. Then we can just roll large flakes, maybe an eighth of an inch thick. – [Julia] Okay. – [Lan] Once it’s gotten flatter, you can feel how it’s softened up a little bit. – [Julia] Oh yeah. – Now rolling is really easy, and we’re gonna switch to that. I’m gonna continue to flatten the butter, make butter sheets in here, and it’s those sheets that will puff when we bake this to give us our flaky layers. This looks great. Let me dump this out into a bowl. I have three quarters of a cup of ice water. Because we weighed the flour, we can just add all of this all at once. – [Julia] I love that. – Now I’ll give this a quick toss to mix in that water. So now that I don’t have any pockets of water in here, we’re gonna work this on the board. We’re gonna generously flour this counter, and what I want to do is pat this mixture into an eight inch square, kind of roughly. I’m gonna roll this into a 10 by 15 inch rectangle. I’m gonna keep the short side near me and roll that way. And I’m not worried about the fact that it’s looking a little ragged right now. Now I’ll use that same bench scraper to do a tri fold, and it’s kind of the fold you’d use with a business letter. So let’s give this a quick spin, and we’re gonna repeat that folding step, and that’s gonna build layers into our pastry. So it’s a 90 degree rotation, and you can see this has already come together a little bit more. You don’t see discrete pieces of butter. When you have a discrete chunk of butter and you go to bake it, that butter melts out and you’re left with kind of a hole. – [Julia] A hole that the filling could leak out of. – [Lan] Exactly, and we don’t want that. – [Julia] Yeah, you can see it’s really quite swirled in there. – Yeah, and I’m not super concerned with this being a perfect rectangle. We’re gonna keep working this and rolling it some more. So all right, one more fold. So this amount of dough makes eight hand pies. I’m gonna divide it in half to make rolling this out a little bit easier. And we’ll wrap this up and pop it in the fridge for an hour. During that time, the flour’s gonna absorb some of that water, the dough will firm up a little bit, the gluten relaxes, and it makes rolling this dough out a dream. All right, Julia, it’s been an hour since we popped these in the fridge. – [Julia] Nice and chilled. – They really are, so let’s get started. I’m actually gonna start with our egg wash. I’ve got one whole egg here, and I’m adding a pinch of salt. And I’m just gonna beat this. (fork clinking) So we’ll set this aside and let the salt do its job, and roll out some pie dough. – All right. I see two rolling pins. – Yeah, so each of these is gonna make four. I thought it’d be fun if you made some and I made some. – Yeah, I love it. – I’m gonna flour my work surface, and you are shooting for a 9 by 17 inch rectangle. – [Julia] Okay, a little flour on top I see. Okay. – When pie doughs are really firm, I like to do that rock and roll thing again. So just kind of a little bit of mushing to thin it out and soften it. – [Julia] All right, this dough is easy to roll. My goodness. – So we want this dough nice and thin. 17, great. So now we’re gonna rotate this. I think it’s easiest to roll the dough onto the pin, and then you rotate it and unroll. We’re actually gonna use this egg wash to mark where we want to place the filling. I’m gonna put a one inch wide strip right down the center of the dough. And then I’m gonna put more egg wash along the sides and the bottom, but just the bottom half. And now we’re gonna divide this area into four because we’re making four hand pies. So once right down the center, down the sides, and that is where our filling will go. – [Julia] Oh, okay. – I want to pump up the flavor just a little bit. I’m using an eighth of a teaspoon of almond extract here, but you can use lemon zest, you can use dried spices. We’re gonna put two tablespoons of filling into each of these squares, and them I’m gonna spread it out not all the way to the edge, but I want to shape it into a square and flatten it slightly. That will make folding the dough over a lot easier. – [Julia] Okay. – A little bit of smooshing out just to make a nice square, and flatten it. Instead of folding this entire sheet of dough over, I’m gonna cut it into four pieces so that we’re working with just one hand pie at a time. And I’m using a pizza wheel, but a sharp knife will do just fine. – [Julia] A pizza wheel makes it easy though. – [Lan] That looks great. – [Julia] Yeah. – [Lan] Yeah. Now we fold. The only trick here is I like to push that down first to anchor it. – [Julia] The fold? – [Lan] Yeah. – [Julia] All right, press on the fold. – [Lan] And then you want to make sure you get as much air out of here as you can. We’ll vent it later, so if it’s not perfect, it’s not a problem. – [Julia] All right, I think I’m good. – Yeah, nice job. Okay, now we trim. Since they’re all lined up, you can just run your cutter or your knife right across the top. Getting rid of that fold allows the dough to puff a little bit taller. – [Julia] Right. – [Lan] I’m gonna clean up the edges. – [Julia] I’m gonna use this fluted cutter because I love the tidy edges it makes. – [Lan] This is kind of the fun part, because you can finish these however you want. I’m actually gonna do a nice fork crimp on this. I think it’s such a lovely traditional hand pie look. – [Julia] Yes. – Totally fine to skip this, because that egg wash is the thing that’s holding the filling in place, not the crimp. Now, to vent these, I’d like to put a one inch or so slit in. It almost doesn’t matter the shape of the slit. You can use a little decorative cutter and put shapes on top if you’d like. Now, these hand pies, you can actually freeze and then pack up into an air tight container, keep them in the freezer for a month or two and bake them off one at a time if you wanted to. – [Julia] Oh, that’s cool. – I’m gonna move these to the fridge. I want to let them firm up a little bit. That helps the dough hold its edges when we bake it. Just 15 minutes in the fridge is plenty of time. – [Julia] Okay. – [Lan] All right, Julia, one last thing before we bake these. – [Julia] Okay. – I want to add one more bit of gilding. I’m gonna egg wash these. It’s gonna give these a beautiful sheen, and it’ll help the browning a lot. But that egg wash will also be the glue. I’m gonna sprinkle a little coarse sugar over the top. I like to use demerara or turbinado for that extra molassesy flavor. – [Julia] Mm-hmm. – [Lan] I’ve got two tablespoons overall. It’s kind of up to you how much you want to use. And the sugar doesn’t melt. It crunches really nicely. So Julia, these will bake in a 400 degree oven on the upper and lower middle racks, and they go for 20 to 25 minutes until they’re golden brown. About half way through, I’m gonna go in and rotate those trays and swap them as well so they bake evenly. After they come out, they’ll rest for about 20 minutes before we can dig in. – Mm-mm, they look ready to eat. And they’re still warm. – [Lan] Yeah. They are best served warm. – [Julia] Oh, just slightly warm, so you can still pick them up. – [Lan] Yeah, but didn’t they hold their shape well? That little chill really kind of give them a little bit of extra. – [Julia] They are lookers. – [Lan] Yeah. – [Julia] So sweet. All right, I can’t wait any longer. Mm, mm, that dough is so delicious. It just tastes like butter. It’s flaky. You can actually see the flakes in the dough. – That’s so tasty. – Mm, mm, mm, the filling. – You’ve got to try the other fillings. You’re gonna love them. – That filling has so much flavor. You can taste that little bit of almond. – It doesn’t make a mess when you eat it. There’s no filling dripping on you. – Wow. – It’s a hand pie. It needs to stay in your hand. – You have no idea. For me, that’s a huge achievement. – Win. – Lan, these are delicious. Thank you. – You’re welcome. – So if you want to make these delicious, sweet little hand pies, start by using frozen cherries to make a filling, make a quick puff pastry dough in a plastic bag, and seal the edges of the pie with egg. From America’s Test Kitchen, a delicious recipe for cherry hand pies that won’t get on your shirt. (both laughing) Big points in my world. We hope you enjoyed this video as much as we enjoyed making it. – Don’t forget to hit that like button and subscribe to our channel. – And if you’re ready to take your cooking to the next level, head over to AmericasTestKitchen.com and get a free all access trial membership. – While you’re there, you can sign up for our free email newsletters and download our app. – [Julia] With unlimited access to over 14,000 of our test kitchen recipes and 8,000 product reviews, you’ll have everything you need to cook and learn. – So I ask what are you waiting for? – Let’s make something great together.