Add the water and bring into a soft ball of dough.Ģ. To make the pastry put the flour and butter in the bowl and run until rubbed into fine bread crumb texture. Grate in the butter, then rub it in with your fingertips until it looks like damp sand.This was absolutely delicious with a sweet vanilla icecream as it's quite tart!ġ75 g plain flour,75g butter,3 tablespoons waterġ00g soft butter,100g caster sugar,175g self raising,1 teaspoon baking powder,2 large eggs,2 tablespoons milk,1/2 teaspoon almond extractġ. Prep 30 min, plus chilling Cook 40 min Serves 6Ģ cooking apples 4 crisp, sharp eating apples Juice of 1 lemon 25g butter 3 tbsp demerara sugar, or to taste 1 tbsp brandy or rum (optional) 300g blackberries, or however many you have 1 splash milkįor the pastry 350g plain flour, plus extra for dusting 1 pinch salt 200g cold butter 2 eggsįirst make the pastry. Sprinkle the top with sugar for extra crunch and, like Slater, you may find yourself moved to wave a little flag in honour of this national treasure. In my opinion, a plate pie doesn’t offer a robust enough ratio of pastry to fruit here, but as Leigh notes, “it is a challenge to cook the bottom crust properly: it needs a lot of heat from below, and a fair bit of time”, so it’s worth heating a baking sheet in the oven first to help with this. Surprisingly, only a couple of the recipes line the dish with pastry before adding the fruit. A sweet filling, however, seems to me to demand a more savoury enclosure – Slater keeps it light and crumbly with a lard and butter mixture, but we’re sold on Leigh’s softer, yolk-enriched recipe. The pastryĮveryone uses shortcrust of some variety, and mostly plain, though seeing as Grigson is non-specific, I go for crisp paté sucrée on her pie. We find McMorland Hunter and Hughes’ dark muscovado too intensely treacley, but the caramel flavour of Day-Lewis’ demerara or light muscovado works wonderfully with the sharpness of the apple. This is a sensible approach – after all, apples, as well as tastes, vary greatly – but however much you add, I’d recommend going for a brown sugar. Slater dusts his apples with a mere sprinkling of sugar, because he likes them “fairly tart”, but he tells readers with a sweeter tooth to heap on “anything up to a tablespoon per apple”. Neither rather decadent addition is strictly necessary, but both are delicious if you happen to have them to hand. If you do have time to cook the apples, my testers and I all like Leigh’s approach of frying them in butter and sugar, which adds richness to the filling, and McMorland Hunter and Hughes’ splash of brandy. It’s delicious, but only suitable for a plate pie, rather than one encased in pastry, because it makes the filling very liquid. Grigson, interestingly, takes a very different approach, cooking down half the blackberries with the apple peels, cores and a generous helping of sugar to produce a fruity syrup that she then pours over the remaining raw fruit. This feels like the best of both worlds: the pureed apples adding moisture while filling the cavity of the pie, and the chunks of dessert apple offering a contrast in texture to the soft berries and bramleys. Perfectly pleasant, if time is of the essence, but McMorland Hunter and Hughes cook theirs first, so that the bramleys disintegrate and the dessert apples stay whole but slightly softened. While bramleys break down into a jammy paste when heated, eating apples tend to keep their shape, especially when added to the pie raw, as Day-Lewis suggests. Though flavours do indeed differ, this can easily be adjusted with sugar and lemon juice, but the texture of cooking apples is very different from that of dessert varieties. Grigson herself recommends tart eating apples such as “blenheim orange or belle de boskoop ”, Day-Lewis calls, less prescriptively, for “sharp eating apples” in her book All You Can Eat, and Jane McMorland Hunter and Sally Hughes compromise with a mixture of the two in their book Berries: Growing and Cooking. If, like me, you buy your fruit, however, the biggest decision is whether, like Grigson, you believe apple pies are likely to have tasted better before the introduction of the bramley in 1876, or if, as per Rowley Leigh’s A Long and Messy Business and the second volume of Slater’s Tender, you favour these cookers for this particular recipe. The perennially sensible Jane Grigson writes in her Fruit Book that, “when you pick blackberries in the autumn, and gather windfall apples to make this pie, quantity and variety of fruit do not much come into it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |