Drunken Apple Pie

What better way to welcome the autumn season than to bask in the warm sun and crisp breeze in an apple orchard? Picking fruits and vegetables from the farm is one of my favorite activities, especially in the fall when a myriad of apples light up tree groves with their bright red and yellow beauty.

If you’re like me and my boyfriend, then you have the tendency to pick more apples than you could possibly eat, so a natural solution to this apple over-abundance is to make apple pie!

Apple pie can be so passe during the fall, when the dish is expected at every family gathering. It’s the age-old “supply-and-demand principle”: when a good is in high demand, mass production mitigates the desperation of the item. Store-bought dough and canned, gelatinous apple filling slopped together in what is deemed, “grandma’s apple pie,” is the quick-fix answer to the apple pie cry (no rhyme intended). Grandma would surely not approve of this fruit-filled impostor! And why cut corners when scratch-made yields you a mighty fine, lip-smacking dessert?

Freshness is key when it comes to apple pie, so that’s why I like to hand pick my apples. I want to ensure that the quality of each apple is top-notch. Empire apples were ripe for picking at the farm, so that’s what my boyfriend and I used in the pie.

We used the most ingenious contraption to prepare the apples for the pie. Rotato, roter-rooter, call it what you want; this ancient design of a crank and a blade is the most time-saving device ever invented. The apple is placed on a spike, which is moved forward with the turn of a crank. As the apple is cranked forward, it approaches the peeling blade, which peels the skin off the apples in shoe string-like ribbons. While the apple moves forward and is stripped naked, it also passes through a coring and slicing blade. So, with only a few turns of a crank, the apple is peeled, cored, and sliced like a spiral ham. Absolutely mind blowing! We prepared about 10 small apples like this for the pie, and had a blast prepping each one.

Once all the apples were prepped, we tossed them with 1/2 cup of sugar, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, 1/4 cup of flour, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 3/4 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg, and 1/8 teaspoon of allspice. Then, in a cast iron skillet, we cooked the apples down with about half a bottle of Angry Orchard Apple Ginger hard cider. The apples cooked for about 30 minutes, just enough time for the alcohol to cook off and for the sugars in the fruit to cook down with the flour and develop a rich pan sauce. Of course, you may add as much or as little as the hard cider as you so desire; however, I wouldn’t add more than one bottle per apple pie, as the effervescence and piquancy can overwhelm the delicate apples.
For the pastry crust, we used a recipe from Fine Cooking magazine for classic chicken pot pie. The pastry is a universal dough that can be adapted to just about any pie recipe, whether sweet or savory. In a food processor, we combined 2 cups of flour with 12 tablespoons of jet-cold unsalted butter, cubed into small pieces, and 3/4 teaspoon of salt. We pulsed this together until the butter formed small, pea-sized shapes. Then, we drizzled 3 tablespoons of cold water into the mixture and pulsed the ingredients together until the dough began to come together in moist clumps. We dumped the crumbly dough onto the counter and formed it into a ball, and then wrapped the dough in plastic wrap to be placed in the fridge to chill.

Technically, the dough is supposed to chill for at least two hours, but we were baking under a rather tight time constraint, so we chilled the dough for only about 20 minutes. Yes, the dough was still crumbly and difficult to knead with our hands, but creativity kicked in, and we decided to just free-form the crust into the bottom of a large ceramic pie dish. We pressed the dough all around the bottom and sides of the dish and pricked the dough all over with a fork. This step of dotting the dough with small holes is necessary for blind baking so that the dough does not rise. We then placed the pastry shell into a 350 F oven and “blind baked” the crust for about 10 minutes. – Have you ever had a slice of pie whose bottom crust was still doughy and quite raw tasting? Well, blind baking eliminates this dilemma. By pre-baking the crust, it gets a head start on the cooking process so that its wet toppings don’t saturate the dough and prevent it from baking thoroughly. – After blind baking the crust, we poured the apple filling on top.

Instead of the another layer of the same pastry dough, we decided an oat-crumble topping would be a delectable complement to the dish. We tossed about one cup of rolled oats with 1/2 cup of dark brown sugar, 5 tablespoons of cold, unsalted butter cut into small pieces, and 3 teaspoons of cinnamon. Using our hands, we mushed everything together until the butter formed small clumps with the rest of the ingredients in the mixture.

We baked the pie for one hour at 350 F, and out came this outstanding masterpiece!