Apple crumb pie

As a pie, apple does not rank particularly high for me. But a friend who loves apple pie was having a birthday, so I made one anyway. I was thankful that she chose a streusel topping over the standard top crust. (I love pie crust, but streusel is even better, especially on apples.) This pie turned out decently, but holes in the crust caused a bit of burning on the bottom.

Mixing and rolling the crust went smoothly. Between keeping all the ingredients super cold (gotta prevent gluten formation!) and using my pastry cloth and rolling pin sleeve, I didn’t have any trouble with the dough sticking.

I blind-baked (partially baked without the filling) the crust and then brushed it with egg white to moisture-proof it. I used parchment paper and dry chickpeas as weights to prevent the crust from bubbling while it baked. (I don’t particularly care for chickpeas, so what better ingredient to “waste” as pie weights!)

Unfortunately my crust wound up with some good-sized holes, especially around the edges. I think that I stretched the crust a bit when putting it in the pie pan; it’s hard not to stretch the sides once the middle is resting on the bottom of the pan and the edges are resting on the top. It’s possible that I rolled it too thin, but I was using rolling pin spacers, so that seems unlikely.

The filling was fairly straightforward. First I peeled and sliced a bunch of apples, coated them with sugar and spices, and let them sit to bring out the juices. I tried to cut the apples nice and thin – probably between ¹/8 and ¹/4 of an inch – based on a coworker’s recommendation. Then I cooked the juices over the stove until they made a thick-ish syrup and drizzled that back over the apples.

I tried drizzling the syrup over the apples after it had boiled for a few minutes, but it didn’t seem quite thick enough. I dumped it back in the sauce pan, boiled it a bit longer, and was much happier with the resulting thickness. I’m not sure how much of a difference it made in the final result, though. My thinking was that if the syrup was too thin, it would be more likely to make the crust soggy.

With the filling and crust both complete, I baked the thing. It cooked for a while with foil on top, and then I removed the foil, added the streusel, and baked it a bit more. The resulting pie smelled wonderful.

As I feared they would, the holes in the crust allowed the filling to seep through, and then it burned a bit around the bottom edges. I was sad, but at least the side crust was still good.

The finished pie tasted good. I hadn’t eaten an apple pie in quite a while, and eating this one made me realize that while I’m not entirely against it, apple pie doesn’t really seem worth eating without some vanilla ice cream. (I tried to eat my second slice without ice cream and quickly went back for a couple scoops.)