If this is your first time visiting Spice & Tart, I recommend checking out my first post found here to lend a deeper context on this recipe. I reference specifics about why this particular pie is so important to me, and why I chose to make it.
Here I am with my first post about to commit the cardinal sin of recipe blogs by unloading a heap of text about baking with my grandma before getting to the reason you’re here: the recipe. But don’t worry. If you keep reading, you’ll see that I plan to commit plenty of other narrative sins along the way. First, let’s start with this one.
When I was a child, my grandmother assembled a book of her recipes. She typed up over one hundred pages of her most precious work in the kitchen, which she had handwritten in various hues of ink throughout her decades of family cooking onto a rainbow of brightly colored little notecards, kept in a humble wooden box that lived on a shelf beneath the Magic Mill she acquired in the 60’s. She wrote an introduction and a table of contents, went to a printing shop, and had them printed onto heavy paper that would withstand time and spills from her grandchildren. She had covers printed on a thick cardstock, had them carefully bound together with a plastic spiral ring, and included all kinds of conversions and substitutions and tips in the index. I remember when she passed out copies to each family cluster that year after an abundant Christmas breakfast once the grandkids had opened most of the presents. It felt like she was gifting us a book of her personal secrets, and I treasured it.
Somehow through the sorcery of time, more than twenty years have passed since that Christmas day and I have ended up in possession of my family’s copy of her recipe book. Parts of her introduction read, “This book is dedicated to my children. If they hadn’t asked for recipes, I probably wouldn’t have tackled this book. Over the years, you kids have asked how to fix a certain dish or asked for a specific recipe. So with that in mind, I put this book together.” Perhaps the most notable difference between my grandmother’s recipe book and my blog is that no one has asked for recipes from me, much less has anyone asked for an entire blog. Nonetheless, I have resolved to burden pages of binary code with these things all the same.
When I think of pie and what makes it so indulgent, this is the pie that I think of. There is something about the process of the sweet crumble caramelizing perfectly across the surface of the apples, harmonizing with their tang in a medley of sugar, spice, and tart that is nothing short of magical. Traditional top crust is not something I would ever turn away, but for my taste, piling on mountains of sugar to an already good thing is a tough bet to beat, which is why crumble pies are so wonderful in their own right.
This pie lives on page 87 of my grandma’s recipe book. The instructions are sparse and its directions state to bake for 40 minutes, but each time I have made this pie, it needed to bake for much longer. When making this pie with my mother, every ten minutes that passed after the initial specified 40 minutes sent me panicking, as I had already annihilated one attempt at apple pie beforehand and could not emotionally afford to decimate another. My mom kept checking it with me, telling me to put it back in because it wasn’t brown enough on top. Nearly two hours passed before she said it was okay to take out, commenting that it could still do with even more browning. When I made this pie again recently, it was in the oven for at least an hour and a half. This is all to say that I have taken some slight liberties with the original draft to provide a more structured recipe for the best outcome.
The introduction to my grandmother’s recipe book closes with, “Not all recipes will be liked by everyone, but hopefully your favorites will be in here. Here’s hoping you will enjoy using this book as much as I enjoyed putting it together.” This is the first recipe I have chosen to make for this blog, and I’m honored to dedicate it to my mother, who helped me make this pie when I most needed her, and to my grandmother, who guided us in making it like just like she did in her life.
I’d like to gently echo my grandmother’s sentiment and tell you that I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you’ll enjoy my version of her apple crumble pie.
Bon appétit!
xo,
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Apple Crumble Pie
Equipment
- food processor (can substitute for a pastry cutter)
Ingredients
Pie Crust
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2/3 cup shortening
- 5-7 T cold water
- 1 tsp salt
Crumble Topping
- 1/2 cup white granulated sugar
- 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/3 cup unsalted butter cold
Pie Filling
- 6-7 large green apples (Granny Smith apples)
- 1 cup white granulated sugar
- 2 T all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp salt
Instructions
Pie Crust
- In a large bowl, combine flour and salt.
- Using a food processor (or pastry cutter), cut shortening into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs.
- Gradually add cold water, one tablespoon at a time, mixing until the dough just comes together. Avoid overworking the dough to prevent it from becoming tough.
- On a pie mat or lightly floured surface, roll out the dough until it forms a rough 4×4 inch (10×10 cm) square.
- Fold up the pie mat around the dough or cover it in plastic wrap. Chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
- After chilling, take the dough out of the refrigerator. Roll it out on a lightly floured surface until it is about 1/8 inch thick. If the edges break, pinch them together to repair.
- Carefully fit the rolled-out dough into your pie pan. Trim the edges as necessary to fit the pan.
Crumble Topping
- In a large bowl, combine sugar and flour.
- Using a food processor (or pastry cutter), cut in butter to the sugar and flour mixture until crumbly.
- Chill in refrigerator.
Pie Filling
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
- Using the apple peeler + corer, pare apples and slice thin.
- In a large bowl, combine and mix sugar, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Toss this mixture with the sliced apples.
- Pour the apple mixture into an unbaked pie shell, packing the apples into a dome shape about three inches high.
- Firmly pack the crumble topping over the apples.
- Cover outer crust with pie shield or aluminum foil.
- Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes, or until crumble topping darkens to deep golden brown. Rotate pie halfway through the baking time.
Notes
- A mechanical peeler and a food processor will make your life much easier when making this pie.
- Green apples are best for pies because their tartness is perfectly balanced by the sweetness of the sugar.
- Use sea salt. Trust me.
- This pie may get messy and boil over due to the moisture from the apples, so I would heartily recommend putting a large foil-lined cookie sheet or pan on an oven rack underneath the rack the pie is on in order to trap any liquid that may boil out, otherwise you could end up with a nasty sugar mess on the floor of your oven. Please don’t ask me how I discovered such a thing.
- Your pie should be a nice golden color when it’s ready to come out of the oven. Sometimes, if it seems sufficiently baked but the top isn’t quite as gold as I want, I will turn the broiler on for just a couple of minutes to get it a little darker. Be careful, though; it can burn in seconds!
