A is for Apple (Pie)

One Saturday evening a long time ago, my mom, finished with her Saturday cleaning and cooking tasks, settled into her recliner for a bit of rest. From the kitchen, she heard my nine-year old voice ask: “Mom, may I bake an apple pie?” Considering that the kitchen was clean and she was tired, she was tempted to say no, but she decided to let me give it a try. Because her recipe was not written, she gave me step-by-step instructions from where she was sitting, and I made my first apple pies. According to mom, they were delicious, but the crust was a little thicker than she would have made it…

I found out recently that January 23 is National Pie Day. Who knew? Well, now you and I both know, and today, I am going to share about making another apple pie. Except this time, it will be gluten free. And I will be the mom in the story with the “help” of two little girls, ages 2 and 5. Although it is much more stressful for me to cook with them in the kitchen, I remind myself over and over again that the only reason that I could make apple pies from scratch all by myself at the age of nine was because my mom always let me stay by her side when she was cooking. I learned so much from observing her.

Pie is one of my favorite desserts; I prefer it over cake or cookies. Apparently, this was also the case for my great-grandmother, who liked to have pie on the table at every meal. She lived to be 102 so it obviously didn’t affect her health too negatively. Because she and her husband had twelve children, they needed a lot of pie. One year the daughters decided to count how many pies they made in a year. That year, they made 1,152 pies for family consumption! They baked pies twice a week and wrote the number of pies they made on the calendar and tallied them at the end of the year. According to my Grandmother, they made quite a variety of pies, including apple, pumpkin, and mincemeat.

I rarely bake pies these days. Most of my baking efforts were halted when I found out that gluten was making me so sick, but my daughter has been asking me to bake an apple pie to use a bag of apples that my mom sent home with her for that purpose.

So last week, we made an apple pie. I started by looking through cookbooks to get an idea of ratios of ingredients for the dough. I ended up using a combination of almond flour, gluten free all-purpose flour, and a little bit of flaxmeal, butter, eggs, water, apple cider vinegar, sugar, and salt.

For Christmas this year, my mom gave me this set measuring cups in the shape of spoons, and I love using them. She purchased them from Amazon, and I have included a link here if you want to get a set for yourself (or you can click on the image.) The long handle is great, and ingredients slide so easily out of the spoon-shaped cups. The sizes are 1/8 cup, 1/4 cup, 1/3 cup, and 1/2 cup.

One thing that I learned when I first made a gluten free pie crust several years ago is that because of the lack of gluten in the crust, a mixer doesn’t make the dough tough! I don’t beat it in there, but mix it a very short period of time just to incorporate the ingredients. I also grated my butter, which I had put in the freezer to get hard enough to grate.

Here is the finished dough. Almost every cookbook gave instructions to put the dough in the refrigerator or freezer to make it easier to work with. So for the bottom crust, I rolled it out as thinly as possible and put it in the refrigerator while I peeled, sliced, and mixed my apples.

Little hands were helping me and wanted to stir the apples so I put the apples into this large mixing bowl to attempt to contain the mess.

Once the apples were coated with the other ingredients, I put them into a glass microwave-safe bowl and put them into the microwave and to cook for six minutes. I learned this tip from my mom. Doing this step helps the apples to start softening so that the pie doesn’t have to bake as long preventing the crust from burning before the apples are cooked.

While the apples were in the microwave, I got the crusts out of the refrigerator.

The bottom crust was a disaster. I could not get it to come off of the parchment paper! So I ended up scraping it off with a rubber scraper and pressing the dough into the pie plate. I think the problem was that I had rolled it too thin, trying to make sure that I didn’t repeat the error of my first pie.

I then rolled out the top crust (I had put it into the refrigerator with the other crust); however, I hadn’t rolled it out yet. And I put the apples into the bottom crust.

Fortunately, other than having lines from the parchment paper etched into the top, the top crust behaved beautifully and came off of the parchment paper without any issues.

I then fluted the edges of the crust by hand.

And marked it with an “A”…

(In case you are wondering why I marked the pie with an “A”—when I was growing up we usually baked several kinds of pies at once. The only way to know what kind of pie each one was without cutting into it was by making a mark on the crust, and my mom always put the first letter of the kind of pie: “P” for peach, “B” for blueberry, etc.)

I put some additional holes in the crust to create steam vents and called it ready to put in the oven. I had no time for further embellishments to make the pie beautiful because it was nearly dinnertime, and I still needed to make dinner! The girls were getting hungry even though they had been eating slices of apples throughout the process. The thought crossed my mind, too, that my foremothers would have made basic-looking pies also. When you make over a thousand pies a year, you probably don’t take time to make them pretty!

Out of the oven, ready to eat…

And just as it was when I was nine-years old, the crust was too thick (on purpose this time so that I could remove it from the parchment paper), but we enjoyed it anyway.

If you are interested in having a copy of my recipe, let me know, and I will send it to you.

I used the filling from this recipe, leaving out the nutmeg: http://www.nourishingmeals.com/2010/11/deep-dish-apple-pie-gluten-free-vegan.html

And I adapted this crust recipe: http://www.nourishingmeals.com/2014/10/flakey-grain-free-pie-crust-recipe.html

Happy National Pie Day!

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