Of all the pies in all the world, none is as grand as an apple pie. It’s partly the scent that is so enticing — what could beat butter, caramelising fruit and cooked pastry? But it remains, for the most part, a special occasion kind of dish, because of the work involved. There’s a good argument for preserving the mystique and keeping it this way, but if you’re prepared to cheat on the pastry you could eat it every day. I keep a stock of Dorset Organic all-butter shortcrust pastry in the freezer, and find that I do quite a lot of instant rustling nowadays.
Another helping hand is to get hold of one of those simple gadgets that looks like the cross section of an orange. You press it down on an apple and it removes the core and divides the fruit into wedges at the same time. All you have left to do then is peel and halve the sections.
For the classic pie, line your dish with pastry. Toss the apple pieces with a little caster sugar and a pinch of cinnamon, and pile into the dish, doming them up in the centre as they will collapse during cooking. Cover with pastry, sealing with the tines of a fork and brush with an egg and milk glaze. Bake at 220C/gas mark 7 for 25 minutes, reducing to 180C/gas mark 4 for a further 40-45 minutes. If it looks as if your pastry is cooking too quickly, loosely tuck around a sheet of foil. Best left to cool, so it can set, and then reheated.
A couple of alternatives; for blackberry and apple pie, toss the fruit together first with a couple of tablespoons of light muscovado and a teaspoon of cornflour. Don’t bother to line the dish, simply pile the fruit up into it and cover with a pastry hat — either shortcrust or puff. Dampen the pastry with water and sprinkle over demerara sugar, making a hole for steam to escape. Bake at 200C/gas mark 6 for 40 minutes and eat straight away.
To make a rustic strudel, you want sultanas and puff pastry. Toss together a mixture of peeled and grated apple, with sultanas, demerara, orange juice and a whiff of grated nutmeg. Roll out your pastry into a rectangle, and make a neat line of the mixture lengthways down the middle. Fold the two sides over to form a roll, sealing and painting the top with an egg and milk wash. Dust with more sugar and bake at 200C/gas mark 6 for 30-40 minutes.
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Cream or custard in all cases, you choose.
Joanna Weinberg