I love baking. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I love the way the house smells when something is in the oven. I love cleaning the brownie batter out of the bowl with a squeegee. I love the smile on someone's face who's enjoying one of my concoctions. I love the simpleness of it. I love the indulgence of it. It's a form of therapy I suppose.
When I was younger and living with my parents, my mom would always do the baking. I have several fond memories of those years. One in a particular that always sticks in my mind is a particularly procrastinated Christmas. If my memory serves me (and I was quite young, so it might not), it was Christmas Eve and none of the baking had been done. My mom called my sister and me into the kitchen, where there were ingredients everywhere, \told us she's on fudge duty and to pick a cookie, double the recipe and get to work. I don't remember what cookie I picked, I don't remember how long we were in that kitchen. I just remember enjoying myself and being happy.
When my parents divorced, I took it upon myself to become the family baker. I would bake a batch of cookies every Thursday night so that we could all have cookies in our lunches the next day. If you ask my siblings, they'll probably tell you about my "cement cookies". These were a simple chocolate chip cookie recipe that I somehow ruined. The resulting cookies could be used in a house's foundation. But bless them...they ate them anyways.
Luckily, I've progressed over the years. I've branched out into cooking but my true love in the kitchen is still baking. I have a couple favorite recipes and one that brings me the most joy is apple pie. From start to finish, an apple pie will take me nearly two hours because I make the crust then I make the filling and then there's the baking time of nearly an hour. This is the baking experience that I'll share with you today. My first apple pie of the 2012 holiday season!
As with most things, I suggest you have a beer or a glass of wine handy. For my apple pies, I prefer to use a blend of apples. 3 Granny Smiths for their tartness and their stability and 3-4 Honeycrisps for their super sweet flavor.
This is the old, old recipe I still use from the copy of Better Home and Gardens I pilfered from my Mom. In this book, I made notes and what not. Notice the note above...the first pie I ever made was this apple pie in 1999.
Crust:
I usually double the recipe for pie crust so I have plenty of crust and don't have to get the dough super thin.
This is my method of "sifting". I hate sifters, with a passion, so I whisk my dry ingredients together.
Cutting in the "lard" with a pastry knife. This recipe calls for Crisco. I've been tempted to use a different recipe that uses butter but I haven't bothered to look for a good recipe yet.
"Lard" is incorporated and dough resembles peas. Or so the book says. You don't want to work the lard in too much or the crust won't be as crispy. So sayeth Alton Brown...who is my favorite food network guy.
Time to bring it all together with water. The book calls for cold water, so I usually throw a couple ice cubes in the water to keep it cold.
With a coupe tablespoons at a time, moisten the dough until it comes together. Working your way through the entire bowl, section by section. I used a fork for this because the book tells me to and that's how my Grandma always made hers.
The dough is all moistened and coming together. Time to make the big balls of dough. I usually make two balls out of this. One for the top crust and one for the bottom.
I used parchment paper to roll out my dough this time to try and cut down on the mess. It worked almost perfectly. The parchment paper did get a little moist and would move around a lot but it did cut down tremendously on the mess. If it hadn't been for this parchment paper, you have to coat your counter with flour. They do make awesome little pastry mats, I just don't have one. What I do have is an epic marble rolling pin. I covet that thing.
You still need to add flour to the top of the dough so the pin doesn't stick to it. And you'll need to do this repeatedly as the flour works into the dough. If you don't, this could happen.
This is your worst nightmare. The dough stuck to my pin and I kept rolling, tearing this section. Luckily (?!) this isn't the first time this has happened to me and I learned how to fix this. Little bit of water and a flat metal frosting spatula, and voila, good as new(ish).
To transfer to the pie plate, I fold my dough on itself a couple times (the parchment paper made this easy). If your dough is to brittle, you shouldn't do this or you'll have 4 cute sections of dough instead of 1 big flat sheet. Instead use a couple spatulas, your hand and a prayer to transfer it. I unfolded my crust and left it to rest there while I move along.
At this point, I rolled out the other crust the same way I did the first but left it on the parchment paper while I worked on the filling. I did it this way so that I could throw the pie in the oven as soon as possible after introducing the sugar to the apples. If you wait too long, the sugar breaks the apples down and it becomes a soupy mess. Sounds delicious but it makes for one hell of a runny pie.
Filling:
I have one of those fancy apple corer, peeler things that attached to the counter but I haven't had much luck with it lately. I never seem to get the whole core out. So I went back to the basics and bought a corer...which is nice to have anyways if you'd just like to core a single apple and don't want to go looking for your coring, peeling, thingymabob. It takes a little practice but if you're patient you'll learn to peel an entire apple without breaking the string of peel and never removing the peeler from the fruit. Then you'll have this awesome spiral of apple peel goodness that dogs and husbands gobble up (side note, do not feed your dogs apple cores, they're poisonous).
This is the best part. When you mix the combination of sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cornstarch with the apples. I tend to use WAY more cinnamon than the recipe recommends and more sugar too. To properly mix the cinnamon mixture with the apples I suggest using freshly washed hands. Best tool ever.
Next, pile those apples high in that pie plate. Making sure to fill all the gaps so the apples don't settled too much.
Dot the apple mixture with a couple tablespoons of butter and top with the second pie crust. I like to trim my pie crusts to match each other then I fold the top under the bottom and flute the edge.
Lastly, cut a design into the top crust to let the steam escape. I think I tried to make a star but it turned out more like that starfish from Spongbob. Oh well.
I would make an apple pie a weekend if I had enough people to eat them all. This pie turned out particularly yummy and even converted a non-pie-believer. If you want to really dazzle them, make this recipe as I have but for the top crust, make a lattice, or a spiral lattice. Or if you just want it to be devoured, make a crumb topping with flour, butter, cinnamon and brown sugar and forgo the top pastry crust. I did that for Thanksgiving with my in-laws and it turned out to be a big hit.
I hope you enjoyed my rant on baking. I enjoyed writing it. Next on the baking to-do: fudge!!!!
Liz DiNatale
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