Chicken Pot Pie: Keeping the Filling Thick (2024)

FAQs

How do you keep chicken pot pie from being runny? ›

Heavy whipping cream, chicken broth or stock, butter, and all-purpose flour. Simmered together creates a luxurious, rich sauce that suspends the filling ingredients. This combination prevents a runny consistency that would make a soggy bottom crust as it sits.

Adding flour to the chicken and vegetable mixture will set it up for becoming thick and creamy once you pour in the broth.

If the chicken and/or the vegetables aren't partially cooked and thoroughly drained, they'll exude moisture during baking and thin out the filling. Be sure that the assembled filling is the consistency you like before covering and baking the pie.

Experiment with different thickeners

If you usually use flour to thicken your apple pie and it's not doing the job, try something different: cornstarch, tapioca, and arrowroot are other established fruit pie thickeners. For more on specific thickeners and how to use them, see our Pie Filling Thickeners Guide.

Filling is Too Thick: Stir in additional broth or milk, one tablespoon at a time, until desired consistency. Filling is Too Thin: Stir a tablespoon of flour into a tablespoon of cold water until smooth. Stir it into the boiling filling and continue to cook and stir until the filling has thickened.

Very often flour or cornstarch is used, but in certain instances tapioca, arrowroot and potato starch can also help achieve the desired consistency.

If you don't leave the pie in the oven long enough your thickener doesn't get to the necessary temperature and time to thicken your filling. You want to see thick bubbling! The bubbling of the filling is activating the natural gelatin of your fruit as well as your thickeners.

The thickness of some fillings (namely, those thickened with flour or cornstarch) changes a lot as they cool, while others come out of the oven fairly close to what their final thickness will be.

A watery potpie may be the result of not cooking the filling for long enough or adding too much liquid to the filling. Another possible reason for the pie being watery is if you add watery vegetables like spinach or green beans to the filling rather than potatoes or carrots, which soak up liquid.

Why do you not use a bottom crust on chicken pot pie? ›

[If you don't,] the bottom gets soggy and not crisp. Simply par-bake the crust with baking weights, such as dry beans, so that it does not puff up. Once your bottom crust is 75 percent baked, remove it from the oven, take the weights out, add your filling, and then add the top crust.

Mix together cornflour and milk and pour it into the stock to thicken.

No. Cornstarch is a starch used for thickening, while cream of tartar is an acid used for leavening, stabilizing, and preventing crystallization.

If you have a custard pie like pumpkin pie or chess pie, you can indeed overbake the filling, which is why these pies often call for blind-baking the crust first, to ensure the crust has extra time to develop that golden brown color.

Bake on a Hot Baking Sheet

Place a baking sheet in the oven as it heats, then place your pie dish directly on that hot baking sheet — this little extra boost of heat will do wonders in terms of getting the crust to cook and set quickly.

Cornstarch. Cornstarch is a super-effective thickener that doesn't need much time to cook, although it does require high temperatures to activate. To avoid clumps, mix cornstarch with sugar before adding it to your filling.