Apple Pie

"It's called the South Beach Fat Flush and all you drink is cranberry juice for 72 hours... I really want to lose three pounds."

                        -- Regina

Absolute Yums.

I promise I'm actually good at baking. For reals. I can throw together cookies, brownies and cakes without trying, but those are boring. So I keep attempting things I'm not good at or haven't done before, which most recently produced a saccharine eldritch horror.

I know an apple pie seems straightforward enough, but I've failed miserably before (something Miss Marple loves to reference). I have as much experience cooking/consuming fruit as I do with cooking/consuming crystal meth, Breaking Bad not withstanding. My previous attempt at apple pie was both watery, gummy, crunchy (in all the wrong ways) and bland. I think I'm going to start taking pride in not just failing but failing spectacularly. Anyway, this attempt was supposed to be different because I: one, followed the recipe; and two, had the assistance of my aunt, MFK Fisher. She's an experienced home baker and in the past we've formed a symbiotic partnership cemented with butter and chocolate. It seems that even her skilled hands cannot salvage the utter meh that this pie became.

I combined two recipes from the America's Test Kitchen Cookbook to get an apple pie with a simple filling and a crumble topping. To those who insist an apple pie needs a second crust, I simply state that two-crust pies make baby Jesus cry.

The crust was thrown together with a food processor. I have no qualms about buying premade pie dough, but with a food processor, assembly is delightfully quick if a bit messy. I ended up making the crust a touch dry and it was thus crumbly. MFK Fisher ended up rolling it out twice before it held together. This was unavoidable, but reworking pie dough is a bad idea. Every second you're working with the dough the butter is melting. Melted butter means the crust is fated to be less flaky and less flake produces an overall tougher pastry. Remember to prick the crust with a fork so trapped air doesn't cause it to bubble.

For those not in the know, that's a dough scraper in the top left. They're awesome.

You shouldn't start on the apples until everything else is ready to go into the oven. Apples covered in sugar turn brown quickly no matter how much lemon juice you use (and we didn't have any). I wish I'd remembered Alton Brown's advice and grabbed two types of apple. With two different types of apple you end up with noticeable texture variation - usually a firm apple mixed into nice, soft apple sludge. Granny Smith apples keep the pie from being too sweet but needed a softer companion so this pie wouldn't feel underdone.

A few seconds with the food processor (didn't even need to rinse it) and you have a crumble. Here's a hard-learned lesson for pie amateurs: use lots of flour and sugar and don't melt the butter. Think of it less as a paste and more as a powder. Once baked you've essentially made a crunchy cookie-like top for the pie. If you use too much butter you end up with... apple soup? (Fun fact: that tastes much worse than you're imagining.) At least, that's what I got. So this time I stuck firmly to the recipe.

Tossed with sugar and a generous splash of cinnamon, the slices were unceremoniously dumped into the unbaked crust.

Applying the crumble, I had flashbacks to the White-Out cake. You have to pile the crumble on top of uneven apple slices and press it all together into a compact mass. There's no way to do this cleanly. Abandon hope all ye obsessive compulsives who enter here.

Out of the oven everything looks great. You lose plenty of height as the apples collapse, and by following the recipe's instructions I produced a beautiful looking crumble without burning the crust. Unfortunately, a fatal error was made during assembly: I forgot the flour. It's such a small thing, a tablespoon of flour tossed with the apples. Yet without it, all that juice exuded by the apples just sits. It doesn't thicken. It doesn't boil away. Hell it isn't even absorbed by the crust. So when you cut/gouge out that first "slice of pie"...

That's after I ladled out as much liquid as possible.

Your Fearless Leader:

Alright, so it's more cobbler than pie. How does it taste? I'll go with underwhelming. The pie wasn't too sweet, something I like in an apple pie. Unfortunately the excess liquid made the crust soggy and thick, a huge faux pas. The apples weren't soft enough for me, and obviously everything was wet instead of slightly syrupy. If the apple pie is synonymous with America, this pie represents Vietnam: wet, confusing and ultimately a senseless waste of (apple) life.

The Gaggle:

Though Your Fearful Leader was really disappointed with this pie, I thought it was okay. Not great, exactly, but not terrible. I've had worse (RE: The Great Apple Pie Butter Disaster of 2010). It's surprising how much of a difference forgetting just a little bit of flour can make to the success of the dessert. However, the apples themselves were perfectly baked -- not too soft, still a little crisp, and the cinnamon-sugar topping was delicious. The pie made a great breakfast. Overall, a B-.

    -- Miss Marple

[Editor's note: Dorian couldn't be bothered to meet even my lax schedule, so I'll be paraphrasing what he'd probably have said.]

Beauty, beauty, beauty, glitter, beauty, beauty, pro-biotic yogurt. Beauty! This did not sparkle with the committee.

    -- Dorian