Learn how to make the easiest and best vegan cherry pie. Make our homemade pie crust recipe included in the post or use your favorite store-bought pie crust. You can use fresh or frozen cherries to make this delicious vegan pie. This recipe is vegan, nut-free, dairy-free, and soy-free. Learn how to make this easy vegan cherry pie down below.
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Vegan Cherry Pie Filling:
Vegan cherry pie ingredients:
My favorite thing about fruit pies is how simple they are to make. No fancy or long list of ingredients is needed to make a delicious vegan pie in your own home. This is what you’ll need to make a vegan cherry pie:
- Cherries pitted. You can use fresh or frozen cherries.
- Sugar
- Cornstarch
- Lemon Juice
- Vanilla Extract
- Almond Extract (optional)
How to make a vegan cherry pie?
Making a fruit pie filling is very easy. I don’t see myself buying a frozen fruit pie in the future after learning how easy it is to make a delicious, sweet, and subtly tart filling.
- In a saucepan over medium heat add your cherries, sugar, lemon juice, and cornstarch. Stir your mixture as it heats to ensure the sugar and cornstarch are evenly distributed throughout the sauce and so you don’t have any balls of cornstarch in the pie.
- Continue to heat and stir the filling until it comes to a boil, then allow the filling to simmer for 10 minutes while it thickens, stir occasionally.
- Once the mixture has thickened, remove from the heat, stir in the vanilla and optional almond extract. Place to the side until the pie crust is ready to be filled.
Vegan Pie Crust:
While I made the statement earlier that I might not ever buy a frozen fruit pie again, I must admit that the pie crust can be a little more time-consuming. There’s no shame in buying a store-bought pie crust. With that said, there is something extremely satisfying about making your own pie crust. Learn how to make my easy vegan pie crust down below:
Vegan pie crust ingredients:
- All-Purpose Flour
- Sugar
- Salt
- Vegan Butter, cold
- Ice water
How to make a vegan pie crust:
The hardest part of the pie crust is just making sure your dough and butter stay as cold as possible. Keeping the vegan butter cold now will allow those bits in the flour to melt while baking, creating a flaky crust and a buttery melt in your mouth flavor.
If your butter does melt more than desired while making the dough it is not a big deal. You will still have a delicious pie crust. You won’t really know if the butter melted more than it should have till after it’s baked.
- In a food processor add your flour, sugar, and salt to the blender and pulse a few times until combined.
- Next, add cold and cubed butter to the food processor. Process for around 10 seconds or until you’re left with a crumbly consistency.
- Next, turn the food processor on and slowly add 3 tablespoons of ice water to the dough and process just until it begins to form/clump together. You can use 1-2 tbsp more of ice-cold water. Careful not to add too much water. The dough shouldn’t be wet, it should be able to hold together without any remaining large bits of flour.
- Divide the dough into 2 discs, wrap tightly with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes or overnight.
Vegan store-bought pie crust:
Sometimes we want to speed up the pie-making process by buying a store-bought crust. Here are a few options you may be able to find at your local supermarkets.
Vegan Pie Shell:
- Marie Callender’s Frozen Pastry Pie Shells
- Wholly Wholesome Organic Pie Shells
- Mrs. Smith’s Deep Dish Pie Crusts
- Great Value Deep Dish 9″ Pie Crusts
- Kroger® Deep Dish 9-Inch Pie Crusts 2 Count
Vegan Pie Crust:
- Wholly Wholesome Organic Pie Dough
- Simple Truth Organic™ Unroll & Bake 9″ Pie Crusts
Assembling the vegan cherry pie:
Here’s the fun part. Now we will put all the parts together, bake, and allow it to cool. It’s important to plan baking your pie accordingly as you want to allow your pie to cool so the cherry filling sets before serving.
- Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F.
- Once the dough is chilled and the pie filling is prepared, work with 1 pie dough disc at a time so the dough doesn’t warm up. Keep the other disc in the fridge. On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough so it is slightly larger than the size of your pie plate.
- With your hands, or by wrapping the pie crust around a rolling pin, place the pie crust into the pie plate. Gently push the pie crust into place in the pie plate. Place the pie plate with the crust back into the fridge while you roll out the top crust.
- Roll out the top piece of a pie crust like you did the bottom piece on a lightly floured surface. Allow the crust to be slightly bigger than the pie plate itself just like the bottom crust.
- Once you have the top crust rolled out, pull the pie plate out of the fridge. Fill the crust with the pie filling and carefully place the remaining pie crust on top of the pie filling.
- Cut off any excess dough that’s hanging off the edges and seal the pie by pressing the edges closed with a fork. You can roll out the cut off dough to create a design to put on top of the pie, or just discard it. Cut 4 air vents in the center of the pie. This will allow the filling to not burst through the crust while baking and allows excess steam to escape.
- Place the pie on a cookie sheet and place in the oven to bake for 50 minutes in the preheated oven.
- Once the pie is done cooking you want to allow it to cool for 3-4 hours before serving.
Vegan Cherry Pie Notes:
- I attempted to use a vegan egg wash, but I wasn’t satisfied with how it turned out. I plan on doing a dedicated pie crust recipe in the future with one or more egg wash options, so be on the lookout for that if it’s something that interests you.
Removing the pits from the cherries can be messy and time-consuming. While I currently own no fancy tools, a family I use to nanny for owned this cherry pitter and it worked great! Find it here on Amazon.*
If you make this recipe we’d love to hear from you down below in the comment sections. You can also tag us on one of our social media or use our hashtag #vegantheway. You can also stay up to date with our new recipes and post by subscribing to our email notifications.
If you liked our Vegan Cherry Pie recipe, check out some of our others like these Vegan Strawberry Lemon Bars, or maybe a something savory like our popular Vegan KFC Fried Chicken recipe.
Vegan Cherry Pie
Equipment
- Oven
- Pie Dish
- Food processor
Ingredients
Pie Crust
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 tbsp pure cane sugar
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup cold vegan butter, cut into 1 inch cubes
- 4-5 tbsp ice cold water
Cherry Pie Filling
- 4-5 cups Fresh or frozen cherries, pitted.
- 3/4 - 1 cup pure cane sugar (If you like pies sweeter add 1 cup. 1 cup is not overbearingly sweet either.)
- 1/4 cup cornstarch
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 tsp almond extract, optional
Instructions
Pie Crust:
- In a food processor add your flour, sugar, and salt to the blender and pulse a few times until combined.
- Next, add cold and cubed butter to the food processor. Process for around 10 seconds or until you’re left with a crumbly consistency.
- Next, turn the food processor on and slowly add 3 tablespoons of ice water to the dough and process just until it begins to form/clump together. You may next to use 1-2 tbsp more of ice-cold water. Careful not to add too much water. The dough shouldn’t be wet, it should be able to hold together without any remaining large bits of flour.
- Divide the dough into 2 discs, wrap tightly with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes or overnight.
Cherry Pie Filling:
- In a saucepan over medium heat add your cherries, sugar, lemon juice, and cornstarch. Stir your mixture as it heats to ensure the sugar and cornstarch are evenly distributed throughout the sauce and so you don’t have any balls of cornstarch in the pie.
- Continue to heat and stir the filling until it comes to a boil, then allow the filling to simmer for 10 minutes while it thickens, stir occasionally.
- Once the mixture has thickened, remove from the heat, stir in the vanilla and optional almond extract. Place to the side until the pie crust is ready to be filled.
Assemble the Cherry Pie:
- Preheat your oven to 375° F.
- Once the dough is chilled and the pie filling is prepared, work with 1 pie dough disc at a time so the dough doesn’t warm up. Keep the other disc in the fridge. On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough so it is slightly larger than the size of your pie plate.
- With your hands, or by wrapping the pie crust around a rolling pin, place the pie crust into the pie plate. Gently push the pie crust into place in the pie plate. Place the pie plate with the crust back into the fridge while you roll out the top crust.
- Roll out the top piece of a pie crust like you did the bottom piece on a lightly floured surface. Allow the crust to be slightly bigger than the pie plate itself just like the bottom crust.
- Once you have the top crust rolled out, pull the pie plate out of the fridge. Fill the crust with the pie filling and carefully place the remaining pie crust on top of the pie filling.
- Cut off any excess dough that’s hanging off the edges and seal the pie by pressing the edges closed with a fork. You can roll out the cut off dough to create a design to put on top of the pie, or just discard it. Cut 4 air vents in the center of the pie. This will allow the filling to not burst through the crust while baking and allows excess steam to escape.
- Place the pie on a cookie sheet and place in the oven to bake for 50 minutes in the preheated oven.
- Once the pie is done cooking you want to allow it to cool for 3-4 hours before serving.
- Serve warm or cold. Serve with vegan whip cream, ice cream or alone. Store the pie covered in the fridge for up to 5 days.
would it be possible to turn this into little bites? like put the button crust in a cupcake liner, add filing, top it off like mini pies in a muffin tin?
Yes! You’ll bake them for 45-50 minutes versus the 50 minutes or more that a large one would take. 🙂
Hey there!
Should I wait for the filling to cool before placing it on the cooled dough?