I'll have a piece of that apple pie please

There are few desserts that are easy to make and taste amazing and nearly impossible to mess up. Apple pie happens to be one of those desserts.  In my life I have eaten many apple pies and baked quite a few I might as well add. As a child I was sure the one we had in our home was the best, but I can say with certainty that even pies coming from the market in prepacked wrap always tasted great to me.

In the bakery I started making apple pies for customers and I found quickly that they loved how they tasted along with how they never felt overwhelmed after eating them. I use simple ingredients in my pies as I believe that simplicity is what keeps its it consistent. When selling a pie, it is important that the second one tastes just as good as the first.

I learned to make apple pie when I was a kid. I do not recall how old I was, but I would guess around eight years old. My mother made them all the time and the routine always the same, prepare the dough, prepare the apples, create the pie, and bake. With that said, there is a bit of nuance that goes into them in order to make sure you have those nice chunky bits of apple, a sauce that is thick enough to drip slowly off the edge of your fork, and a crust that isn’t too dry, nor too moist, but instead, just right so that it is a bit flaky and yet doesn’t fall apart. Now that I put it that way, it sure sounds like the pie is much more difficult.  Nope!

When I was a kid and baking the apple pies my mother would help, mostly with paring the apples. I guess it was a bit of a dangerous job. If truth be told, the hand held paring tools, the ones that are wide at the top with two cutting blades and a handle you use to pull along an apple, still cut me from time to time. That is more about impatience than anything else though as I generally move very fast. As I think about it, that is kind of sad that I am not enjoying those moments and taking them in, but at the same time, in a bakery it is about quality, volume, and variety. I remember a couple of times taking off the corner of my nail and having to throw everything away to ensure there was no contamination. I am sure this is why she would peel the apples for me. Yes, I have used a paring knife, but I find them a bit too slow and if not done correctly, can waste some of the apple. 

Make the crust was always fun for me too. I would use our big rolling pin and push out the dough to a really big round circle, even though it wasn’t so round. All the outer edges would be broken in to jagged shapes, which was also good news because I would cut them off and eat the raw. I usually was kneeling on a dining table chair while mixing up the apples with the spices because I wasn’t tall enough. After I got the dough and apples in, I would not so carefully make a lattice pattern with strips of dough across the top. They never looked as good as my mothers, or Dee’s, the mother of our friends from down the street who was an amazing baker. 

I would never call her Dee, instead always Mrs. Fredrickson. But every time I went over, she would have some baked treat I could have a piece of.  Her kitchen wasn’t very big, but it certainly was covered with lots of machinery. At the window was her sink and to the right was the oven and her refrigerator. Then just across from the refrigerator was the dining table, which is where me, Joey, and Jr. would play rummy all day long during the summers, while enjoying her cookies or something else fresh out of the oven. 

By the time my pies were done baking I would have had maybe one half of a cup of raw dough, and certainly a half of a cup of the apple pie filling. Strangely I never felt sick afterwards, but thinking about those times now my stomach is telling me to not even think about it. 

Before we go any further, I want to make a confession, or would it be an assertion? I am particular, about everything! I like clothing put away a certain way though I don’t always follow the rules. I like to keep the house clean even though I am not a fan of cleaning. I like to do all of the hard work first during a day so that the easier work flows when I get tired. I like to work always before playing. And, I like my food to be neat and organized. Under no circumstances, do I believe ice cream belongs with apple pie, that is to say, Pie à la Mode. It is a strange name given it means pie in the current fashion, that is, what is fashionable. Does this imply that the pie is still a current fashion trend even to this day? 

Doing my research, I learn that it started with John Gieriet of the Hotel La Perl in Duluth, Minnesota, USA, and a native of Switzerland.  There was some speculation as to if a man named Charles Watson Townsend came up with the idea of ice cream on the pie, but in a New York Times article in 1936, it was cleared up that Townsend wasn’t the originator, but Gieriet.  All of that speculation aside, please, keep your ice cream off the pie, even if your pie is still warm from the oven and you have the perfect vanilla ice cream.

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I know, I know, let’s get to the recipe and see how it comes out. Before we do, I want to talk about ingredients for a minute. Times are tough and spending money on non-necessary things can make one think twice about what they buy and the quality of those decisions. When baking, I believe the quality of ingredients really makes a difference. For instance, cinnamon. If you have had the opportunity to try fresh cinnamon from Morocco you will experience the rich deep flavor that you can never find in the plastic bottle in your supermarket. With that said, if there are ingredients that are not the highlights of what you are baking, then please feel free to cut corners where possible Not everything needs to be perfect to get to perfect results. 

My apple pie, is not dissimilar to many you will find. That is my disclaimer, but also brings up a good point. There are many, many variations of recipes throughout the world and we do not source any one person for all of them. I believe if we take the time to adjust the defaults and turn them into our dishes, then we can call them our own. Maybe I have said that before, but I will continue to remind you as I often see a lot of conversations around who really made what recipe. In this case, I took what I learned as a kid and turned it into what I bake today.

• • •

Question. Are you listening to music? I suggest that if you want to try this recipe, then you read it through thoroughly so you understand it, then you put on some good music.  Yes, I have a suggestion. I absolutely love La Donna è Mobile, by Verdi, but only if sung by Pavarotti, of course. In fact, while I write I listen to classical music all the time and this is amongst my favorites. 

The Crust

The crust to me is essential to get right, which includes ingredients, process, and temperature.  If you build your crust properly, you will have that amazing flaky crust, if not, you will just have an oily crust. Not a crime I suppose, but I say we shoot for the stars. 

First, we look at what we need:

300g of all purpose flour.
227g of butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon white sugar
6-8 tablespoons of cold water

Preparation

I like to use a food processor because it gives me the best results, but if you want to do this by hand you are welcome. First, I will explain the method with the machine and then I will explain it using your hands, which can be a meditation if you think about things in that manner. 

1. It is essential to make sure your butter is cold. What I like to do is measure it out and then return it to the refrigerator until I am ready to use it. If it is really soft, I will put it in to the freezer for a bit of time. I do not want it to be a rock, but if I were to chop it into cubes, they would stay solid and not be sticky.
   
   
2. Once you measure out the water, also return this to the refrigerator to keep it cold. Measuring this isn’t essential as we may not use it all or we may, we will know this as we mix our ingredients together. 
   
   
3. Now we can mix the dry ingredients together by putting them into the machine and pulsing it a few times.
   
   
4. Take the butter and water out of the refrigerator and start to add the butter to the food processor, about half. Turn the machine on and let it start mixing in, then slowly add the rest. Then start adding the water, do not add too much, maybe four tablespoons and let it blend. You want the flour to turn into a gritty sand like texture. No big lumps, but also, you do not want anything melted together. If at this point the butter is softening up, it probably means you had it mixing too long. Stop the machine and put the container in the refrigerator to let the butter cool down.  After mixing it when everything gets together it will start to shape into a ball, yes, even with the metal blades. This is when the dough is done so let’s get it out of that machine.
   
   
5. Take that beautiful ball of dough and form it into a round ball. Then cover it with plastic wrap as we are going to let it rest. But first, once it is covered, roll it on the table a bit to make it cylinder shaped. Not long, just no longer round. The reason is we are going to cut it and if we make it this shape, we are already on our way to the rolling out the round bottom. Once done, put it in the refrigerator.

Without a food processor. Using a bowl repeat steps one through three above just make sure your butter is in cubes. You can even use your fingers to mix up the dry ingredients

1. Add the butter to the flour. What you are going to do is start marrying the two together with your hands and fingers. Start working the butter with your fingers into the flour, rubbing your fingers together while they go through the butter and the flour. You do not want to let the butter soften so if you are rubbing it too much you will need to stop and chill the butter.
   
   
2. As you are breaking up the flour you will see the pieces, or chunks, of butter getting smaller and smaller. If the chunks are about the size of peas this is perfectly fine
   
   
3. Add some of the water to the dough mixture. Now take a fork and start mixing it together, you can mush it some and stir it some and just continue repeating this until everything is well mixed together. But note, if you are making this by hand, we already have determined we are going with rustic, so do not worry if this mixture is perfect, it will still turn out amazing as long as everything is nice and cold.
   
   
4. Take the dough in your hands again and start forming into a ball. Once you have it all together you are now done with making the dough crust and you can continue with step five above.

The Filling

Here comes another Dave rule, Daveism. No, I think this is more of a rule. In my opinion, the best apple for an apple pie is a granny smith apple. I have seen recipes where multiple apple types have been used and I have tried it myself. The results are never the same, especially with red delicious apples. They are too soft and not the right taste for an apple pie. In short, use granny smith apples unless there are no other options and your neighbor threatens to run around your house naked until she gets a piece of your pie. While the thought of that amuses you some, you remind yourself how it looked the last time she circled your house in her birthday suit because you held back on the watermelon ice cream.

Ingredients

6 granny smith apples
200g white sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons soya or almond milk
2 tablespoons corn flour
1 lemon

Preparation

It cannot get easier than this, I promise!!

1. Turn on your oven. It is always essential to make sure your oven is at the correct temperature when you put your pie, or anything else into it, so preheating is important. Maybe your oven heats up fast, but this process will go relatively quick and once we have formed the pie, we do not want to leave the pie sitting and waiting, we will go crazy because the smell of that cinnamon will tell our brains to eat it all now.  I set my oven to 225C or roughly 425F
   
   
2. I like my pie to be full. When I start to bake it, I want it to be a small mountain. This will ensure that I have a nice dense pie once it is baked. That means plenty of apples, even seven if they are not big, no one will call the police I promise. Peel and dice the apples into small chunks (how you want to see them inside the pie)
   
   
3. Squeeze the juice of one lemon over the apples and mix together with your hands. This will keep the apples from browning while you work through the rest of the process.
   
   
4. Now add the cinnamon, corn flour, and the milk to your mixture and stir together very well with a spoon and set to the side. 

Pulling it all together

Now that we have everything ready to go it is time to form our pie. I like to use a glass pie dish when I am baking my pies at home, but if you are baking in a commercial area, please use metal ones, never have glass in the kitchen. If you break something glass in the kitchen you have to toss everything out in the neighborhood.  If using a metal pan, maybe you want to butter and dust the outsides with flour to ensure the pie doesn’t stick to it, or use a vegetable oil spray and spray the outside. Either works fine as well as doing nothing. If the pie doesn’t stick of course we can cut nicer pieces later. 

1. Take the dough out of the refrigerator and cut a bit more than half of the log off and wrap up the rest and return to the box to keep cool.
   
   
2. Generously dust your work surface and put the dough flat side down on top and start to work it in your hands to flatten it out and make a round disk. If it is sticking at any time during this process or rolling it with the pin, just dust some more underneath.
   
   
3. Take your rolling pin and start to flatten out your dough. It is important to constantly move the dough in a circular manner so that your dough maintains some sort of circle shape. Continue to do this until the dough is somewhere between one eighth and one quarter of an inch. One eighth is too thin and one quarter is too thick.
   
   
4. Now that you have it nice and flattened out gently place it over the baking dish you chose. A simple trick is to fold the dough in half and place it half way into the dish, then unfold it the rest of the way to cover the other side. Make sure the bottom inside edges are touching the dough. If you have space between the two your dough will tear when we put the filling inside. Snuggly is the thought of the day during this step.
   
   
5. The outside of the baking dish needs to be one-half an inch of extra dough. Anything more than that we do not want so now you want to trim all of that excess off. Take that excess and put into a ball, we are going to use it in a minute.
   
   
6. Take the apple mixture and gently start pouring it into baking dish. Using the spoon, spread around the apples so they fill the nooks nicely and then let the rest start to pile up in the center. 
   
   
7. Take the butter that we have for the filling ingredients and cut into three or four pieces and put on the top of the apples. That will give this pie that extra specialness.
   
   
8. After you move the pie to the side, get the remainder of the dough out of the refrigerator and repeat the same process of flattening out the dough. This time, the dough needs to be able to fit over the top of the pie with one inch extra. We will pinch it in the next step. Put the rest of the dough with the scraps that you had from the other half of the crust.
   
   
9. Now we will overlap the dough. The top half of the dough will be longer than the bottom, so fold it over the top of the dough, this will make like an envelop of dough and then lay it flat on the rim of the baking dish.
   
   
10. Here you have many options on how to pinch your dough. We will go with the classic technique, but do not worry if it doesn’t look perfect, it will be beautiful.  The classic method is when you crimp the dough with the middle and pointer fingers of one hand, then take your index finger from the other hand and push it between the two fingers, creating a u-shape. You then move your fingers over to one half of the hump and repeat and then continue until you work your way all around the dough.
    
    
11. It is really important that you allow your pie to breath while baking or it can explode. What I like to do is cut slits that point toward the middle of the pie all the way around. Usually I will cut four, since no more is necessary.
    
    
12. Now is the creative part. What I like to do is roll out that extra dough and cut little shapes to put on top of the dough. My go to shape is a heart. I will place eight of them on the pie so each person eating a piece will have a heart with the widest part at the crust and the point facing the center. After you cut your shapes, brush the bottoms with your soya or almond milk and place them on the dough. This will seal them during the baking so they do not separate. Be creative. Tell me what designs you have put on your pies and show me photos too, I love to see how differently we have fun when baking and I always learn something new.
    
    
13. Paint the entire top of the pie with that same milk. You want a nice coat. If you see a little bit in a spot, do not worry about it too much, it will evaporate. This will give the pie a really nice shiny finish on the top.
    
    
14. Since we are baking this pie for a long time, we want to cover the crust for at least half of it so that it doesn’t burn. The crust can burn easily. What I like to do is take aluminum foil and make a strip that is about two inches wide, and long enough to go all the way around the pie. I wrap it around the pie snugly and fold the ends together. Then I crimp the foil over the crust and under the outside of the baking dish.
    
    
15. Put your pie in the center of the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes. At the end of this time, carefully remove the foil and bake for another 20-25 minutes. Every oven is different so the time and temperatures can be different too. If your oven runs hot or is accurate you can always lower the temperature some. The idea is that we want the pie to bake long enough that the apples properly bake, and that we get a beautiful light golden crust on the outside.

Now that your pie is done take it out and let it cool for at least one hour on a cooling rack before you cut your first slice. Smile, you survived your first Dave, plant-based apple pie and you did an amazing job.  Enjoy, just without ice cream.