Mountain of Apple Pie

It seems like just the other day I was writing about baskets of beautiful August tomatoes, and now suddenly it's fall. The boxes of berries, piles of tomatoes and crates of peaches at the greenmarket have been replaced by mountains of apples, bunches of dark greens and stacks of squash. And although I don't particularly like squash, it's every bit as inspiring and happy-making to ogle on my lunch break as summer fruits.

Fall is my absolute favorite season, not least because my birthday is in September (for which Nick gave me a new digital camera, which should significantly improve the quality of the photography here.) And one of the real joys of the season is apple pie - which is Nick's favorite, and definitely one of my top five, if not two. So, despite the fact that I have no food processor (my usual pie crust tool) I was determined to make an apple pie before the season escaped me, as peach pie season did. I figured that would entail investing in a $100 food processor, and was just about ready to pony up the cash. Then last week I decided to make empanadas (I need more practice before they become blog-worthy) mostly because I wanted to eat them. Well, the first step in empanada-making is dough-making and, as it turns out, empanada dough is a whole lot like pie dough. Except the empanada dough recipe I was using said to simply pinch the butter into the flour with your fingers. Which I did. And it was while my floury fingers were pinching butter (and begining to get tired) that I realized the technique was equally applicable to pie dough. Now, it wasn't the first time I'd considered making pie dough by hand, but it was the confirmation I needed that it would probably, most likely, work.

So with that knowledge in mind, I went to the greenmarket last Friday and bought as many apples as I could carry. I usually use Granny Smith for pie - the tartness and texture are both perfect and they don't turn mealy or into sauce in the oven - but apprently Granny Smith are not one of the several dozen apple varietes grown in the greater (much greater) New York City area. So I went for a mix of giant Mutsus and some red-and-green ones I forget the name of, unfortunately. The Mutsus tasted a little too much like Golden Delicious for my taste, but it didn't seem to negatively affect the taste of the pie. The red-and-green ones tasted a lot like Macintosh, which have a great flavor but tend to get a little too mushy in pie. I figured combining the perfect-texture apples and the perfect-taste apples would yield a happy-medium delicious pie, and I think I lucked out.

But of course, before apples even enter the apple-pie picture, you must make the dough. I've made strawberry-rhubarb pie here before, and the recipe is the same. The only thing I did differently this time was mixing everything by hand. So, if you don't have a food processor, here's what you do:

Whisk the dry ingredients together to blend. Cut the butter into small pieces, about 1/4 inch on each side, by standing it on its end and slicing twice, at right angles, lengthwise (so you have 4 long, skinny sticks of butter). Hold the sticks together and cut into 1/4 inch slices. The smaller you make them, the less tired your fingers will be later. I would also advise using a very sharp knife - cutting cold butter with a butter knife makes it break and takes more work, which warms up the butter. You want to keep you butter as cold as possible.

Dump all the little butter pieces into the bowl of dry ingredients and start pinching and squeezing it into the flour. It's an imprecise process, but you'll figure it out. Just keep breaking up the butter until the dough resembles coarse meal. The only piece of advice I have is to keep your hands in the bowl at all times, so the butter gets coated in flour as you squeeze it. When you've got your coarse meal, slowly pour in the ice water while mixing with a fork. When the dough is uniformly moistened, turn it out onto a clean counter and proceed as usual.

I use my mother's recipe for the apple filling, which is very simple and mostly apples. Peel the apples and cut them up into large chunks. I like to keep the pieces nice and big so they stay together in the pie. Toss the apple chunks in a VERY LARGE bowl with:

1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup flour
the juice of 1/2 a lemon
and 2 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon.

Then back to the dough, which has been chilling in the fridge (or freezer if you only have an hour or so.) Roll it out like in the strawberry rhubarb pie recipe, then fill with apples. I like to mound the apples up as high as humanly possible (see photo). My pie was at least 6 inches tall before cooking. I had to take the top rack out of the oven. Don't worry, they cook down a lot.

On top of your mountain of apples, slice 1 tablespoon of butter. Then cover with the second crust. I usually just do a regular solid crust for apple pie. Trim and crimp the edges. And don't forget to poke some holes in it! My mom likes five slits with a small knife, in a circle around the top (so of course I do too.) Then coat lightly with a mix of one egg white and a little bit of cream, beaten together (this was where my lack of kitchen tools became a real problem, I'm lacking a pastry brush and had to use my fingers, awkwardly.) Sprinkle with coarse non-melting sugar, and pop it in the oven! Bake for 15 minutes at 400º, then turn the heat down to 350º and bake for another hour, or until brown.

Enjoy warm, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream if you like. Then go jump in a pile of leaves for me! (I miss real trees.)

Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

My mom used to grow rhubarb in our front yard when I was little. Sometime in May, the stalks would begin to turn bright red, and I could traipse out front as I pleased and yank out a stalk to much on. I remember pulling so hard at times that I would fall over backward when the stalk finally came free. (Only recently did my grandmother - the gardener, not the baker - inform me that this can easily be avoided by pulling the stalk at an angle to the ground. But where's the fun in that?)

Every year (or on two separate occasions at the very least) this gangly plant became the star of the Rhubarb Olympics – a series of pint-sized sporting events featuring rhubarb in some way. I can't actually remember what they were, but one definitely entailed running with rhubarb and another somehow involved wearing its giant leaf as a hat.

For those too old to enjoy running around with poisonous leaves on their heads, rhubarb season meant strawberry-rhubarb pie – and lots of it.

But despite my long history of pie-eating, this May marked the first rhubarb season of my pie-making life. Remembering the taste of my mother's pies, I made several pilgrimages to the grocery store in search of that flavor. The first few trips turned up nothing but the same root vegetables of Winter and asparagus of early Spring. But as the price of strawberries began to fall toward affordable levels, I knew it couldn't be long. And then, one day, lo and behold! Rhubarb! It had been denuded of its poisonous leaves and sat unassumingly in a small basket, dwarfed by the towers of more popular vegetables. But among the floppy ruby-colored pieces and the thin green ones were a handful of the firm candy-apple colored stalks of my childhood. I gathered them up, brought them home and attempted to cajole my roommates into eating some. Vicky was the only taker, and was pleasantly surprised to find it did not taste like celery. I knew what it tasted like, but I wasn't expecting to feel eight years old after the first bite. It was such a throwback to my childhood I half expected to shrink until my eyes were level with the counters (although I'm probably underestimating my eight-year-old height.)

Luckily, I stayed tall enough to roll out dough, because the pie that resulted was a much bigger hit with the roomies than the raw rhubarb had been. To make your own slice of childhood, you'll need enough rhubarb and strawberries to fill your pie dish. You want the fruit to make a nice big mound, because it will cook down a lot. I like to do half rhubarb and half strawberries, but if you're not sure how you feel about rhubarb, feel free to tilt the balance toward strawberries. Just compensate by cutting down on the sugar. Alternatively, put in twice as much rhubarb as strawberries, and add a half-cup of sugar. For my 9" pie, I probably used about 9 firm pink rhubarb stalks and a pound and a half of strawberries.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

For Pie Crust:
2 1/2 cups Flour
1 tsp. Salt
1 1/2 tsp. Sugar
2 sticks cold Unsalted Butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup ice water

For Filling:
Strawberries, washed, hulled and sliced in half (or smaller pieces if very large)
Rhubarb, washed and cut into 1/2-inch slices
3/4 cup Sugar (if doing half-and-half)
1/3 cup Flour

For Finishing:
1 Egg White
Light Cream (or some other kind of cream, it doesn't seem to matter)
Sparkling Sugar

Making pie is a two-step process best spread over two days (in my opinion.) The first day is for making the dough, the second is for making it into a pie. In between, the dough sits in the fridge and gets nice and cold, which makes it much easier to roll without it breaking into a million pieces.

Day One:

Blend flour, salt, sugar and butter in a food processor just until butter forms pea-sized balls. Do not overmix. Pour water (no ice!) into running food processor in a steady stream (pour slowly, but it should take no more than three seconds or so.)

Turn crumbly dough out onto a clean surface and divide into two piles, one slightly smaller than the other. With your hands, forcefully but quickly knead each pile into a cohesive cake of dough, shoring up the sides as necessary to prevent cracking. This took me many pies to master, but never fear, even if your dough is a disaster, the pie usually still tastes great.

Slide each cake into the corner of a separate plastic bag and, if necessary, press down until it is about 1/2 inch thick. The thinner your dough cake is, the easier it will be to roll out. That being said, if it gets too thin, it will fall apart. Use your judgment.

Place both doughs in the fridge, on a flat surface, with nothing on top of them.

Day Two:

Preheat the oven to 400º. Place a piece of tinfoil on the top rack, to catch dripping juices from the pie.

First, make the filling. You might want to sprinkle the rhubarb with a little water first so the flour sticks better, or you can just toss it with the strawberries if they're damp. Then mix in the flour and sugar.

Now it's time to roll the dough. When I do this at home, I start by covering one of my mother's lovely marble counter tops with ice packs first to let it get nice and cold. But my counters here are some sort of laminate that is a pretty much constant temperature, besides which they're too small to accommodate dough rolling. So instead I use a cheapo fake wood desk that was in the hallway when we moved in (it's in the kitchen now and I've cleaned it thoroughly.) Not only is the desk a good height for putting your whole weight behind the rolling (my arms are skinny weak little things) but the fake wood laminate seems to have magical non-stick properties. All in all, I'm surprised to say I'm going to miss it.

In any case, you can use whatever you like to roll out your dough, just sprinkle it with a little flour first. Also sprinkle your rolling pin. (Mine is OXO from Target and I love it!) Then take the larger dough cake out of the fridge and sprinkle it with a little flour too. Roll the dough out to about 1/8 inch thick, flouring the top and bottom as needed to prevent sticking. Cut out a circle about an inch larger than your pie dish, then gently lift the dough into the dish.

Fill the dish with your strawberry and rhubarb filling, and slice a tablespoon of butter over the top.

To make a lattice crust, roll out the second dough then slice it into strips. A lattice is actually easier to make than you might think – check out this video on bonappetit.com if you've never done it before. (Oh, how I wish I had a pastry wheel!)

Finally, to finish off the pie, curl the bottom crust up over the edges of the lattice strips, or tuck them under if you'd rather. Use a pastry brush to lightly brush the top crust with a mixture of egg white and a little cream, then sprinkle with sparkling sugar.

Slide the pie into the oven, on top of the tinfoil. Bake for 15 minutes at 400º, then turn the oven down to 350º and bake for another hour, or until the crust is golden brown.