Gather ’round the campfire, as I am going to reveal the secrets to an unsoggy pie crust.

I am not going to reveal the secrets to photographing food, for obvious reasons.

After four years of testing and trying and experimenting and blog-reading, I think I’ve come up with the right combination for a nicely-baked peach pie.

How I wish you could taste it!  I will try to take a picture of the remaining pieces of pie and add them on to this post.

1.   Coat your bottom pie crust with a couple of tablespoons of powdered sugar before putting in the peaches.  Pat that stuff right on there.

2.   Drain the peaches (I slice them into a colander that sits inside a bowl) before adding flour and sugar.  You can always add juice back into the mix if it seems too dry.  The peaches I used were very, very juicy.

3.   Don’t use a top crust.  Instead use a topping, as it won’t trap the steam inside the pie.  I used a Martha Stewart topping recipe, but I halved it so all of that sugar, etc. wouldn’t overwhelm the taste of the peaches.

4.   Use the rack on the lower third of the oven.  Set the oven for 400 degrees.  Some recipes tell you to lower it to 350 after 20 minutes, but I didn’t this time.  It baked, in a glass pie plate, for an hour and 20 minutes.

5.  I used flour in this pie.  I’ve also tried cornstarch and ground tapioca.  All were fine.

Adapted from Martha Stewart:  Peach Pie Topping
Mix together:  3/4 cup flour, 1/3 cup brown sugar, 1/6 cup white sugar, pinch of salt, 1/4 tsp cinnamon.  Add in 3/4 stick cold butter slices and mix with fingers ’til crumbly.

Peach Pie filling:  9 large peaches, 1/3 cup sugar, 3 TBS flour, approximately 1 TBS lemon juice.

Now, on to the Banjo-joke-of-the-day:

Why do they let banjo players play in pizza parlors?

Because pizza is the only food that you can taste over the noise.