How to bake a pie for this Fourth of July

Fourth of July means burgers and hot dogs on the grill. It also means pie — fruit pie as opposed to cream or nut pie. Apple is considered America’s favorite fruit pie, but cherry, blueberry and peach, all plentiful in summer and in season now, rank highly as well. With so much fruit available, a Fourth of July party is an excellent excuse to bake a pie. If baking a fresh fruit pie sounds at all intimidating, check out Noelle Carter’s pie crust best practices. You’ll be making professional-looking and tasting pie crusts in no time.

When it comes to fillings, the trick is to balance the moisture of a particular fruit with whatever — if any thickener one chooses to elicit juiciness rather than gloppiness. For this Apple Pie, leaving the fruit in large chunks reduces the surface area that gets sprinkled with the sugar and spice. The result is that less liquid is expressed while cooking and no thickening agent is needed. Alternatively, this Oven-Fried Apple Pie uses smaller apple chunks and adds cornstarch to thicken the juices. It is also double-crusted for those who like more pastry. Apple Hand Pies, also double-crusted in their own way, have you partially cook the apples to release some of the moisture prior to wrapping them in the pastry, so no thickener is needed. Sweet Cherry Pie uses cornstarch to thicken the juices and adds some Grand Marnier to brighten the cherry flavor.

If you are all about the crust, you will surely want to try this Peach Pie With Duck Fat Crust. Thanks to duck fat, it practically shatters when you cut into it. The juices here are thickened with cornstarch.

The filling is made entirely on the stove top for this Fresh Blueberry Pie. It has you make a blueberry jam, which gets mixed with fresh blueberries and poured into the prepared crust (which you can bake the day before). Topped with fresh whipped cream, it is sort of like a deconstructed blueberry Pop-Tart.

Even simpler, is this Fresh Raspberry Pie which treats the berries similarly and then skips the pastry altogether and uses a graham cracker crust instead. Strawberries are treated similarly in this Vintage Strawberry Pie, though here you have to allow some time for the pureed strawberry mixture to cool before tossing it with the fresh berries and piling them into the prepared crust. The mountain of glazed strawberries makes a striking presentation.

If you like to mix things up a bit, a Three-Berry Pie spikes a mixture of raspberries, blackberries and blueberries with sweet white wine to bring out the flavors of the berries. It uses tapioca as a thickener for the berry juice. The recipe also walks you through making a decorative upper crust. For an even more distinctive crust, add a pinch of black pepper to the crust, as with this Nectarine-Berry Pie. It adds a note of intrigue to the striking mix of nectarines and blackberries.