When I was 16 and got my driver's license, I often took my friends around in my silver Volkswagen for Sunday road trips. Our destination: Julian, sit in a pine-clad restaurant and eat apple pie.
Julian, a historic gold mining town known for its apples and apple pie, is about 60 miles northeast of San Diego, where I grew up. Travel was an expression of our freedom and cake was a trophy of our independence. But how they came to be apple pie remained a mystery to me until a decade later, when I got a job baking seasonal fruit pies at a grocery store in the Hamptons.
For years, I proudly carried fruit pies I had baked countless times and taught many friends, neighbors, and family how to make their own pies.
My passion for cake runs deep. So it's not easy for me to tell you that for homemade baked apple desserts, I now skip the pie. Rustic, no-fail chips, crumbles, and cobblers are not only easier than apple pie, they're better. They are America's dessert apple of the future.
Choose your own apple adventure: apple crisp, apple crumble, and cobbler apple.
(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)
An apple crisp is defined by rolled oats with their rustic, crunchy topping. A cobbler is covered with dough, usually cookie dough, sometimes cookie dough. And a crumble is topped with buttery streusel.
None of them require you to roll out the cake batter.
Chips, cobblers, and crumbles can be made in any baking dish you have on hand, even a cast iron skillet; Put it in the oven and leave it there for an hour without caring. The toppings, which are easily made days in advance, also tolerate longer baking times than pie crust, which often burns before the apples are fully cooked and juicy. That's why many apple pie recipes call for the apples to be pre-baked, which is a lot more than I'm willing to do for any pie, no matter how iconic.
Much of the appeal of apple pie is its symbolism, the feeling it evokes of a time and place when an idealized American family sat upright around a table (a real dining table, with chairs!), without cell phones in sight, enjoying a healthy meal. food, meaningful conversation and of course a piece of cake. Much of the effort we do, or at least that I have done, especially around Thanksgiving, has been an attempt to replicate those images. But many of us are at least two generations away from knowing how to fold the edges of a pie crust. Or we come from other traditions. We are mixed and mixed, broken, cut and reintegrated on our own terms. Sometimes that means buying cake at the last minute at the supermarket.
However, apple crisp and the like are much more aligned with who we are and how we cook, bake, and eat today. They are comforting and communal. Friendly and welcoming. They don't ask to be sliced, perfectly portioned and spread out on elegant plates. These down-to-earth alternatives beg you to relax in the true American spirit and explore whatever you desire.
I've made a lot of chips, crumbles and cobblers in my life, but in classic frontier style, I wanted to push myself to see what else I could do with the shape. I made over a dozen of them and recruited friends to make some too.
First, I played with the fruit, using pears instead of apples, only to discover that any flavor they may have had when I took the juicy pears in my palm to peel them had evaporated when I pulled the crispy crust out of the oven, leaving me with mush. sweet, flavorless and very spicy. (There's a reason we're not talking about pear pie here.)
Then I tried a fall fruit medley, adding cranberries to the apple and quince base, a hairy, lumpy, apple-sized thing that some believe was the original fallen fruit, although you'd never want to take a bite out of one. raw. The quince gave a pretty pink hue and subtle citrus flavor to my crisp (or was it a crumble?), but those nuances didn't justify the hunt for this sometimes elusive fruit. And while I appreciated the pops of color the blueberries added, I didn't love the hints of bitter fruit in my mouth.
In the end, I decided that no matter how flexible and forgiving the chips, crumbles, and cobblers are (improvise with spices, get creative with toppings), all you have to do is use apples. And only apples.
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1. Carolynn Carreño pours browned butter over diced apples for crunch. 2. The apples and butter are then combined by hand. (Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)
I swapped my stash, Granny Smiths, for Honeycrisps, a sweet, tangy, crunchy hybrid, and Opal, a golden-colored apple, a recent immigrant from the Czech Republic, related to one of the great baking apples, Golden Delicious. Both Honeycrisps and Opals, readily available on the West Coast, had more flavor and held their shape better than Grannies. Along with the juices that the apples release when they bake, the brown butter, brown sugar, and vanilla create a rich, caramelly, cinnamon-scented filling.
Yellow Opal and Honeycrisps apples dyed red ready to dice for apple crisp.
(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)
As for the toppings, I chose four options: a classic oatmeal crispy topping; an earthy and spicy whole wheat crumble; a snickerdoodle cookie cobbler; and a gluten-free dip enriched with finely chopped walnuts or pecans, so good you can proudly serve it even to a gluten-consuming crowd.
Choose your own adventure. What could be more American than that?
