Pie time!
Autumn is here! Well, although the season might not officially begin until September 22nd, the collection of windfall apples and their transformation into a pie is a much more valid checkpoint if you ask me!
When our neighbours brought over a huge bag of collected cooking apples yesterday (thank you Alice & Henry if you're reading) I dropped everything and started searching for pie recipes! I'm sure there must be some great ones out there but in my excited haste I couldn't bear to scroll slowly through BBC goodfood or flick through our mountainous pile of books. This recipe is therefore an amalgamation of a Jamie Oliver pastry recipe, a rogue American pie article I found online and my own adaptations according to available ingredients :)
I'm happy to say that the pie was absolutely deeeeelish and lasted no longer than one evening - quite right!
Ingredients
For the pastry:
275 g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
2 tablespoons icing sugar
130 g butter
2 medium egg yolks (save the whites!)
caster sugar, for sprinkling
For the filling:
6-8 cooking apples, peeled, cored and sliced fairly thinly
juice of 1 lemon
1tbsp cornflour
1tbsp plain flour
6tbsp demerara sugar
3tbsp cinnamon
Method
1. First, make the pastry:
2. Sift the flour and icing sugar into a food processor. Cube and add the butter, then blitz until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.
3. Tip in the 2 egg yolks along with 60ml of ice-cold water and gradually pulse the mixture until you have a rough dough.
4. Shape into a ball, flatten and place in the fridge for 30 mins.
5. Remove the pastry from the fridge and cut off 1/3 to save for the lattice top.
6. Now roll out the remaining pastry (to the thickness of a £1 coin) and ease into a 23cm pie tin.
7. Don't trim too much off the sides, because the pastry case will shrink when cooking but do take off any large excess pieces and add these to the pastry saved for the top.
8. Place the lined tin in the fridge while you prepare the filling.
9. For the filling, peel, core and slice the apples - relatively thinly, about the thickness of a £1 coin. 10. Place these in a mixing bowl and squeeze over the lemon juice.
11. Mix in the cornflour and plain flour.
12. Now, in a smaller bowl, mix the demerara sugar with the cinnamon.
13. Remove the pastry case from the fridge and fill it with the sliced apples, layered with sprinkles of the cinnamon sugar.
14. Finally, roll out the remaining pastry and cut into long strips to form the lattice top.
15. Arrange the lattice on the pie then brush it with egg white and sprinkle over caster sugar.
16. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for 30-40 minutes until golden.
