I can already see your faces when you look at the title of this post So is it a pie or a crumble? Both and let me explain why. A few years ago in the office where I worked at that time, one of the senior managers made an announcement. They wanted to have a pie competition! And they wanted to take some pictures of the most beautiful pies and publish them in a calendar for the next year. Since I’m a cooking/baking animal, of course I decided to participate in the contest. I called my mom just to be sure that I remembered the recipe and I made a raspberry pie…well at least I thought it was a pie. When I brought it into the office, the HIGH Committee looked at my pie and decided it was not a pie. It was a crumble. In countries such as UK or Ireland they know their story. If you call something a pie, it means there is nothing on a top of the dough- in my case no crumbles…I made a serious mistake by putting a topping on my pie. They told me that if I had not done that I would have won the whole competition…argh! I guess that’s how you learn about all the cultural differences and the tradition. However the committee really appreciated my effort, so I got my own calendar with the picture of my raspberry pie in it. Here you have an apple pie/crumble recipe, but the raspberry one will follow soon.
Ingredients
Preparation time- it depends- if you use a kitchen robot all together about 10 min, you need to cool the dough in the fridge for about 30 min, baking time-45 min, oven temperature 180 C
- 3 glasses of flour- 1 glass means 250 ml
- 3 eggs
- 3/4 glass of sugar- I use brown as per usual
- 125 gr of butter
- 3 kitchen spoons of sour cream- it has to be 30% one, so very thick
- 3 tea spoons of baking powder
- vanilla sugar
- 1 kg of apples- sweet apples would be the best choice
- cinnamon
- some olive oil just to grease the pie plate and some bread crumbs
Crumble/topping
- around 50-60 gr of butter
- half of glass of flour
- sugar
Preparation
If you’re lucky to own a kitchen robot of any kind just throw in to the bowl eggs, flour, sugar, vanilla sugar, baking powder and butter. Since you need to make the dough as fast as you can use the highest speed you can. It should not take more than 30-40 seconds anyway. If you have to do it yourself it will take about 10 min.
As you can see on the picture above the dough is not tacky yet, so when you remove it from the bowl you need to knead it for a few minutes on a floured board. You can add even more flour if you think it’s needed. To make it easier divide the dough into two parts, and knead each separately.
When the dough is ready place it in the fridge for about 30 minutes. In the meantime prepare the apples.
Once the dough is cool enough you have to spread each part using the rolling pin ( you can already switch on the oven). Then you need to place it on your pie plate ( grease it with olive oil and spread some bread crumbs)- I use a ceramic one by Le Creuset/ 30 cm. What you can do, my mom does that too, you can pierce the dough with the fork like on the picture. When you do this, place the apples and sparkle some sugar and cinnamon over. Here you will not see the cinnamon, because my boyfriend doesn’t like it! Please use it though by all means! As the last thing you cover the apples with the second part of the dough and place the pie in the oven.
Now what you have to do is the crumble or topping as some call it. In order to prepare it you need to combine together some butter, sugar and flour, until they become crumbly.
After 30 minutes take out the pie out from the oven and sparkle the crumbles all over and then place the not pie anymore but crumble back to the oven for another 15-20 minutes. My mom does that, because she says if you sparkle the crumble right at the beginning it will get burned and I think she is so right about it.
As a serving suggestion I can only say that it would taste great with some vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. Enjoy!
