We are now reaching the peak of the apple pie season. Belle de Boskoop, the earliest of a trio of the best European culinary apples, has been available in some markets and co-ops for some three weeks now.
I saw the second, Calville Blanc d’Hiver, the pride of France, in Montpelier’s Hunger Mountain Co-op for the first time last Friday. The third, Bramley’s Seedling, the best English baking apple, should be along soon. Any pie made between now and Thanksgiving would benefit from using any of these three as a base — meaning up to half the pie.
All three tend to be big, hard, long-lasting and filled with enough acid and tannin to not just stand up to cooking, but to revel in it. The major question for the pie maker now is to determine what to mix with them. The pie panel has found over the years that the optimum combination has been three parts base apple, two parts very tart apples, and one part very sweet and flavorful ones. The trickiest one to find is the tart one.
An early contender is Holstein, which we mentioned in the last post. A new one is Ananas Reinette, a small brightly colored red and green apple with feisty, snapping acids, a tart gem. Another is karmijn de Sonneville. The best in my view is yet to come — Rhode Island Greening. We’ll have a report on that one shortly.
For now, here are some choices. Cox’s Orange Pippin has always worked well as the sweet apple in the melody. Reine de Reinette is also worth a try as the sweet one. Franc Rambour is a terrific eating apple and deserves a shot; the panel hasn’t tried it yet. But give it a try.
In fact, the advancement of the art of apple pie really depends on the consumer broadening his or her horizons on apple varieties. The panel has tried many combinations of apples, but only a tiny fraction of the possibilities. Some will fail, others will astonish you. The key is to try them. Who knows, you might begin to match the pies made by your great grandmother.
Some notes on crust and spices
One of the consequences of the huge loss of varieties in the apple market since the end of World War II has been an over-emphasis on crust in the art and practice of apple pie making. The demands of the mass market reduced the normal supermarket offerings in the east to McIntosh and a few of its cousins and the Red and Golden Delicious, dominant in the west, but ubiquitous in all regions.
In the biz, they are known as dessert apples, bred to be eaten out of hand. Some of them are OK for pies, but many are indifferent to poor because they lack the levels of acids and tannins necessary to stand up to cooking. With relatively little to work with on the apple side, the dedicated pie maker has tended to focus his or her genius on the crust to distinguish their pies from the competition. A secondary response has been to over-spice the pies. If you can’t detect much flavor and tone in the apples, pour on the cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar and dazzle the family with a crust light and flaky as air.
Well, even if you can now get superb pie apples in at least some places in the Northeast — much of the country remains in thrall to the dreadful Delicious tribe — it’s worth considering the roles of crust and spices in the whole enterprise. The pie panel is united on the approach to spices — use less of ‘em. A lot less. Cut the normal recipe amounts of sugar to one-third — even less. Some use none. Forget nutmeg. Cut the cinnamon to half or less. I use just a trace. The engine for the pie is the apples, not stuff that comes out of a jar. You could grind up cardboard, marinate it in lemon juice and drench it with sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg and get a coated and sugared crust on it and you’d be fully competitive with many restaurant pies. The spice hasn’t been invented that can improve on the world’s great pie apples.
Larry has devised an inventive way to deal with the spice issue. He puts traces of the spice cohort in the crust, rather than the pie itself. Larry’s family likes it that way; they tell him he is so close to the platonic ideal of the apple pie that he just needs to try again—soon. Pete swears by a clove in the pies.
As for the crust itself, some suggestions. My wife has developed a 50-50 mix of leaf lard and unsalted butter for the necessary fat. Lots of people continue to use Crisco—I can’t cope with it—it reminds me of Brylcream, a 1950s hair gel for zoot suiters (look it up). If you don’t recoil in horror from lard, make sure you get leaf lard, not the ordinary supermarket stuff. Larry used store-bought lard in some of his pies, and his brother-in-law George thought that he was making the crusts with bacon drippings. That was fine with George, a formidable consumer of pies in whatever format, but I think you really don’t need to evoke bacon grease with your crusts.
You can buy leaf lard online. My wife and I get it in half-pint containers from an old German-Dutch firm in Pennsylvania. Leaf lard is the light, lacy fat that encases the organs of the pig. Dead white when rendered, it delivers flaky crust without adding any off flavors.
In service to the flaky crust, my wife uses a technique propounded by the magazine “Cooks Illustrated.” They use vodka for half the liquid in the crust; the vodka does the necessary work of the liquid as the crust comes together, but the alcohol vapors off quickly and the result is a flakier crust.
An interesting idea from Clem Nilan, the major domo at City Market in Burlington: Instead of sticking to all-purpose white flour for the crust, he uses whole wheat pastry flour for half the recipe. He says it gives the crust a warm, nutty flavor without making it heavy. I haven’t tried it; I’m going to, but not until I get better at it.
My wife makes terrific crusts, but mine have a sort of armor plating quality to them. Until I can get by the military dimension, I’m sticking to the lightest flour I can find. If you’re good, try Clem’s strategy.
Finally, if you can’t manage making your own crusts at all, try the Betty Crocker pie mix in a box. Something called Jiffy isn’t anywhere near as good. You can get the Betty Crocker in your big supermarkets, although they are often hard to find.
The pie panel has nothing to say about those crusts that you buy already rolled out that you just flop on the pie. Larry once lost an apple pie contest on his street to a neighbor who used those crusts in the winning entry. I was visiting and tried all the pies and the outcome reinforced all of my feelings about the vast amount of injustice abroad in the world.
We will report soon on a number of three-apple combinations from the late September, early to mid-October offerings.
