Best Pie Tip: Brush the Crust with Egg

We've been reading a lot of pie recipes lately. In all of their diversity, there are a few common patterns and good tips that have turned up. Our favorite so far is this classic tip: Brush your unbaked crust with beaten egg.

We often brushed our top crusts with beaten egg, mixed with a little water, to make them shiny and glossy. But we hadn't brushed our unbaked bottom crusts with egg before the pie rush of this month. Turns out it's a great idea.

Why? It forms a moisture barrier between your potentially tender and unbaked crust and your wet filling. The egg proteins will help keep the crust from getting soggy and too soaked with filling.

We found this to be a very successful technique; this blackberry pie had a more defined bottom crust, less soggy than our previous attempts. (The crust is admittedly rather soaked with egg yolk instead, as you can see from the photos; the crust was a little lumpy and our brush made pools of egg!)

This is one of our favorite crust tips so far. Do you do this, and have you noticed a difference in your pies?

(Images: Faith Durand)

Comments (3)

Wow, that piecrust looks tough!

posted by Eddie Walker on November 19th 2008 at 12:45pm
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Haha, yeah, I think I would have thrown my hands up in frustration with that pie crust!

That's an interesting brush you have. It looks like it's a single piece of rubber rather than bristles?

posted by jamiealyse on November 20th 2008 at 1:00am
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It was actually a very wet pie crust; I used the vodka pie crust reviewed last week.

The brush is from IKEA - it came in a set. I'm not crazy about it for this kind of purpose, but I haven't got around to replacing it.

posted by faith on November 20th 2008 at 9:40am
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