I am Petra from Mom's Apple Pie Company in Occoquan, Virginia, and we are making a butter crust apple pie today and just to help you with one of the most common problems in using a nice, delicate butter crust pie. It's when a crust breaks, when you are trying to put it into the pie tin, it's such a delicate crust that it happens really easily that you need to know how to patch it up if that does happen. So there's some extra crust kind of hanging around here that you can use.

You just get a small piece and you put it in where the crack happens. The reason you don't want to just let the crack go is that the fruit juices will go under the crust and sort of caramelize and get really sticky and ruin your pie crust. So you want to take a little oversize piece of dough there and stick it in there. You don't want to work it too hard; you just want to mend the edges just a little bit so that you can still use that bottom crust, it's perfectly usable. And you might have a few cracks that you need to do that with, but you just take any extra little piece of dough and put it in there and gently work it in.

Also, if there is a part where the dough has become a little bit thinner and you are afraid that the juices from the fruit will kind of break it apart of it, you can just patch it up with a tiny little piece of dough and just be very gentle so that you don't cause any more cracks and that is how you patch your pie crust.