Easy homemade cherry pie made with fresh cherries bubbling in a thick rich filling inside a flaky buttery crust. A delicious summer all-American dessert!
Combine cherries, water, lemon juice, sugar and cornstarch in a medium saucepan. Bring the ingredients to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat to low. Stirring frequently, cook for about 10 minutes. Remove the filling mixture from the heat and stir in almond extract. Allow the filling to cool before using.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
Use your favorite pie dough recipe. Prepare your crust. Divide in half. Roll out each piece large enough to fit into a 10-inch pan. Pour cooled cherry mixture into the crust. Dot with butter. Add top crust.
Brush with egg wash and sprinkle with coarse sugar (optional).
Bake the pie for about 45 to 50 minutes. Remove the pie from the oven and place on a wire cooling rack. Allow the pie to cool several hours before serving with the optional vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.
Notes
What Kind of Cherries Do I Use To Make This Pie? There are 5 different types of cherries: Bing, Rainier, Queen Anne, Montmorency, and Morello. You can most certainly use your favorite variety of cherry for making cherry pie. However, Bing and Rainier are the most common. I always use Bing cherries when I make a cherry pie. A combination of the two maybe even better, but I haven’t tried that yet.About Pitting Cherries: Cherry juice will stain your fingers and your clothes. Do not wear anything that you care about people seeing in public when pitting cherries without a cherry pitter. Wear rubber gloves to keep your fingers from being stained OR do what I did and keep rinsing them off after every 3 to 5 cherries. Allowing the juice to stay in place for too long makes the stain harder to remove.Pie Crust Options: Make the pie crust from scratch. If you want to make homemade cherry pie completely from scratch, then you need to make the pie crust from scratch too. I highly recommend using this recipe for the Perfect Pie Crust I shared eons ago from Ina Garten. This recipe makes the best pie crust I have ever made. It’s a lot of work, but totally worth it in the end. ORUse frozen and refrigerated pie crust. I recommend using a frozen tinned deep dish pie crust such as Marie Callender's for the bottom crust and Pillsbury™ Refrigerated Pie Crust for the top crustAdditional Ingredients:Butter: You’ll notice that this recipe says to “dot with butter”. This means to literally place "dots" of butter on top of the filling underneath the top crust. Adding dots of butter on top of the filling makes the pie extra rich and according to Sally’s Baking Addiction helps to prevent lots of bubbles from forming on the surface of the pie.Egg Wash: In the culinary arts, the term “egg wash” refers to a mixture of beaten eggs and some sort of liquid that is brushed onto food, such as pastry, before baking to add a golden color and sheen to the cooked pastry. It can also be used as glue to seal two edges of pastry together. I wrote more about egg wash HERE in this popular blog post. Coarse Sugar: If you want to add some sparkle to your pie crust, sprinkle it with coarse sugar. Coarse sugar is commonly used for decorating desserts. The granules of sugar are larger, which means they will not melt quickly when heated. I tried regular fine sugar. It cannot withstand the heat and melts without a trace. I recommend getting some to have on hand like Bob's Red Mill Decorative Sparkling Sugar. Get a bag HERE. Ice Cream or Whipping Cream: Summer months scream for something cold, so I prefer a scoop of ice-cold vanilla ice cream for topping the pie. Although, feel free to top the pie with whipped cream if you prefer. Both are delicious but totally optional.Storage: Cherry pie is food-safe at room temperature for up to two days but will keep up to 5 days when stored in the refrigerator.Nutritional Information: Calories are based on pie ingredients without ice cream or whipped cream. See more about Nutrition HERE.
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