mstefanis: You indicate that you used a ceramic dish. That’s quite acceptable. Better than a shiny metal pie pan as it’s more likely to cause a soggy crust. Instead, use either a blackened steel or glass pie plate to bake your pie crust. The glass plate has the advantage of transparency so that you might judge the doneness of the bottom crust. I have always advocated the use of a dark steel pan for pie baking because it gives the best assurance of an evenly coloured crust. It absorbs and distributes heat with far more alacrity that do either glistening stainless or aluminum ones and is certainly superior to anything made of glass. As you’ve sadly discovered, failure to achieve a well-cooked crust results in a shell which has the taste of raw butter and the texture of moist clay.
It might seem that an antidote to the undercooked crust would be more cooking, but there is a peril in that approach. I recall a time when an acquaintance of mine baked an apple tart in a light-coloured, tinned-steel pan. After baking the tart, which was topped with a neat array of painstakingly arranged apple slices, for the prescribed time & at the appropriate heat, he noticed that the crust was still undercooked. So he kept baking, and the dough did crispen somewhat – but the apples blackened beyond redemption!
There are a number of factors we must consider en route to offering a solution to your undercooked, soggy bottom crust. First, I must say that brushing egg white onto an unbaked crust will not prevent it from absorbing liquid from the filling. You need to modify the filling itself. What variety of apples did you use? Northern Spies traditionally make the best uncooked pie filling (i.e., where crust & filling are baked together). These apples hold their shape admirably during baking, and they exude the right amt of liquid to provide a juicy filling, but not at all watery. Rhode Island Greenings & Pippins are good alternative varieties for an uncooked filling. On the other hand, Golden Delicious or Granny Smith apples really need to be partially cooked before they're combined into the filling because some of the moisture has to be rendered out of them -- otherwise the filling will be somewhat liquid and the bottom crust will tend to absorb that excess moisture.
You can add 2 or 3 tablespoons of cornstarch to your apple pie filling to help it to gel. Also, wait at least 30-40 minutes before slicing the pie; the juices in the filling continue to set because of the residual heat retained from the oven.
"A house is beautiful, not because of its walls, but because of its cakes." ~ Old Russian proverb
