Best Homemade Cherry Pie Recipe

This easy Homemade Cherry Pie recipe is the best I’ve ever had. It’s made from scratch with an easy cherry pie filling using canned tart cherries, which means you can easily enjoy homemade cherry pie all year round.

Best Cherry Pie Recipe

Given the choice between cake or pie, I’m going to choose the pie every time. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against a delicious yellow cake with chocolate frosting or chocolate cupcakes with rainbow chip frosting. I mean, hey, it’s cake and obviously I love it, and besides, I’m not one to turn my nose up at dessert. 

But pie just speaks to me more than cake does.

While cakes are show-offy with their towering layers, buttercream swirls, ganache drips, and colorful sprinkles, pies are more humble and unpretentious. Sure there are lattice crusts and some people (not me – I can barely manage the lattice) do pretty incredible things with pie crust design. But for the most part, pies are unassuming with their flaky golden-brown crusts and fruit or cream fillings.

And yet, that combination of buttery, flaky crust with the often jewel-colored interior of fruit pies topped with a scoop of ice cream satisfies my tastebuds (and my soul, for that matter) like no cake ever can.

When it’s cherry season, we love to go cherry picking and make all our favorite cherry desserts! Some of our other favorite cherry recipes are Cherry Crisp, The Best Cherry Pineapple Jello Salad, and Cherry Crisp Cake.

The crust is the part that seems to give most people pause when it comes to making a homemade pie from scratch, so I’ve shared all my best tips and tricks for how to make pie crust to help you out.

As a kid, a classic, homemade cherry pie was my very favorite and I looked forward to them every 4th of July and Thanksgiving, which seem to be the two big pie occasions in my family. 

I’ve since moved on to claiming razzleberry pie as my favorite, but cherry pie is still up there and will always hold a place in my heart.

The best cherry pie recipe is simple and uses only a few simple ingredients to make the homemade filling:  canned cherries, some (but not all!) of the juice they come in, sugar, and cornstarch, with a little salt and butter for good measure. Maybe some red food coloring (affiliate link) if you want a vibrant ruby red color for the filling.

The cornstarch, sugar, and cherry juice get cooked on the stove to thicken the filling before adding the cherries and using this to fill the pie. 

Done right, and the filling will have just enough stability so that you can cut gorgeous slices of pie that will hold up while still being juicy. Too much cornstarch and the cherry pie filling ends up gummy, too little and the filling ends up runny. But no worries – follow this recipe and you’ve got cherry pie perfection every time.

What kind of cherries should I use for homemade cherry pie?

I want so badly to be able to use fresh cherries in cherry pie, but if I’m being honest, I don’t like them as well for baking as canned cherries. And I definitely do not recommend frozen cherries for pie.

The biggest problem is that the very best cherry pie is made with tart cherries, which can be near impossible to find fresh.

Some people just use sweet cherries and decrease the sugar in the recipe, but I don’t think rainier, brook, or bing cherries (all sweet cherries that are best eaten out of hand) match tart cherries (also known as sour cherries or pie cherries) for flavor and texture after being baked.

The good news is that there are two easily available options for making a pie with tart cherries:  Oregon brand tart cherries (which I think are made from Montmorency cherries) and Trader Joe’s Morello cherries (my favorite!).

The Oregon Specialty Fruit tart cherries are available in almost every grocery store I’ve been to, either in the baking aisle or in the canned fruit aisle. And they make a wonderful cherry pie. You will need three cans of Oregon tart cherries for one pie. And be sure to check the label because they also sell a sweet canned cherry version as well.

But if there is a Trader Joe’s anywhere near you, I highly recommend picking up their jarred Morello cherries, which are tart cherries that are imported from Germany. Oh my goodness, they are SO, SO GOOD. I buy extra jars to have them on hand and will totally open them and just spoon the cherries straight over ice cream with chocolate syrup and it. is. HEAVEN.

You can even order Trader Joe’s cherries online, but it’s super expensive (like $12 per jar, which is crazy). At my local Trader Joe’s, one jar is something like $2.79 or $3.00, which is super reasonable to me.

The only downside to the Trader Joe’s Morello cherries is that they are more of a dark purple than a red, so you really can’t get that classic ruby red cherry pie filling look unless you use quite a bit of red food coloring (affiliate link). I’m fine with a deeper burgundy-colored cherry pie filling, but I just wanted to give you a heads up on that.

How to Make Cherry Pie Filling

1. Whisk. In a medium saucepan, whisk together sugar, cornstarch, and salt. Add the reserved cherry juice from the canned cherries.

2. Thicken. Bring the mixture to a simmer over medium heat, stirring frequently until thick and bubbly. The cloudy liquid will into a clear gel after about 5 to 7 minutes, which is when you know the filling is ready to add the cherries.
3. Add cherries. Stir in the cherries, butter, and food coloring (affiliate link), if using, then cool completely before adding to the pie crust. This can be done up to 1 week in advance and stored in the fridge.

This cherry pie filling is AMAZING and can be used in lots of different ways, not just for pie. Use it for black forest cake or black forest cheesecake, swirl it into brownies, or use it to top cheesecake or ice cream!

This recipe makes enough for one deep dish pie, so if you only have a regular pie plate (affiliate link), you might end up with about 1 cup of leftover pie filling. But somehow it never seems to go unused.

How to Make Cherry Pie

1. Preheat oven to 425°F.
2. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the bottom pie crust and use it to line a 9-inch deep dish pie plate (affiliate link). Spoon the cherry pie filling into the bottom crust.

3. Roll out the remaining crust and use it to top the cherry pie filling. You can make a lattice crust, or just do a solid crust with slits cut in the top using a sharp knife for venting. Be sure to seal the edges, either by crimping or fluting, then brush the top crust with the beaten egg and sprinkle with sugar, if desired.

4. Bake for 10 minutes at 425°F, then decrease the oven temperature to 375°F and finish baking for 45-50 minutes, until the crust is golden brown on top and the filling is bubbling. Check the pie around 25 minutes and cover the edges with a pie protector or tinfoil if they are starting to brown too much.

Tips for the Best Cherry Pie

• Start with a homemade pie crust. They are so much easier to make than you think, if you have never made one before or made one and had it fall apart. This is my favorite double-crust pie crust that I use in all my pie recipes. It uses both butter AND shortening for the ultimate in buttery flavor and flaky texture.
• I highly recommend using a pie crust shield (affiliate link) to cover the edges of your crust partway through. It keeps them from getting burnt while the pie cooks through. But you can also just make a shield using tinfoil.
• Definitely remember to brush your pie crust with the egg wash. It makes a big difference in getting a beautifully golden brown crust.
• Be sure to let the pie cool for 3-4 hours before serving to give the filling time to set up. Otherwise, when you slice into it you will have a runny (albeit still delicious) mess.
• Store any leftover pie in the fridge for up to 5 days. Just cover it well with plastic wrap. 
• If you like eating your pie warm, you can reheat individual slices in the microwave for 20 to 25 seconds. Or if you want to warm up the entire pie, just stick it back in the oven at 350°F for about 15 minutes.

More of my Favorite Pie Recipes

• Peach Pie Perfection
• Strawberry Pie made without Jello
• Salted Caramel Apple Pie
• Homemade Blackberry Pie
• Coconut Cream Pie
• Blueberry Custard Pie
• Key Lime Pie
• Strawberry Rhubarb Pie
• and see all my pie recipes here!

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