Minnesota-Grown Gluten-Free Apple Pie: The Taste of October

Make and prepare bottom pie crust, as well as a second crust if making a latticed or two-crust pie.   Preheat oven to 425 for latticed or two-crust pie; preheat to 350 for streusel-topped pie. Spoon lemon juice over sliced apples, and gently mix.  In a small bowl, mix flour, sugar, spices, and salt.  Pour dry mixture over fruit, and gently mix to coat apples well.  Pour filling into bottom crust, mounding at the center.  Ideally, filling should sit a little higher than the crust (it will seem overly full), as it will sink during baking.  Place small chunks of butter around the apples.  Top with either (1) Streusel Topping, or (2) make a latticed top with the second half of your pie crust dough.   (1) Streusel Topping:

½ c. Cooqi Cake+Pastry Flour

¼ c. brown sugar

½ tsp cinnamon

4T cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces  

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, and cinnamon.  Add the pieces of butter, and using your fingers, work the ingredients together until they form a crumbly mixture.  Crumble the mixture over the top of the pie (break up any larger pieces so the topping is very crumbly), and bake as below.   (2) Lattice Top Crust You can make a lattice top with GF pie dough, but it’s a slightly different game than with traditional dough, mainly because the dough is fragile, and difficult to pick up.  I recommend using fewer, slightly wider, chilled pieces, as well as not fully weaving, but rather laying each successive piece over the previous ones, in alternating directions.  No one will really notice the difference, and you’ll save yourself crumbly heartache.  AND you’ll have a beautiful pie!   Roll your dough (using the plastic-wrap process described in the pie crust recipe) into an oblong shape a couple inches longer than the width of your pie.  Remove the top sheet of plastic wrap and slice the rolled dough into 1” – 1 ½ ” strips.  Chill dough again to harden it before lifting the slices--even chilled, this is GF dough and it will want to break, especially if you have succeeded in rolling your dough very thin.  Using a metal spatula or scraper, gently lift a slice of chilled dough and lay it across the pie about 1” from the edge.  Repeat with a second strip, placing it perpendicular to the first, also 1” from the edge, so the two strips form an ‘L’.  Continue to place strips, alternating directions until you have covered the surface of the pie, leaving square holes between the strips of crust. (Is this cheating?  Well, maybe, but most people will never notice--especially as they are eating your delicious, flaky crust!)  Crimp the edge of your pie, sealing the top and bottom crusts together.  Brush top of pie with a wash of 1 part egg white, 1 part water/milk, and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar (this step will make your finished pie shiny and pretty).   Place pie on a cookie sheet and bake at 425 for 15 minutes, then reduce oven to 350 and bake for additional 45-75 minutes.  (This first step is to set the top crust of the pie; if you’re making a streusel-topped pie, you can bake it at 350 for approximately 50-60 minutes, until the apples are soft.)  To prevent crust edges from getting too brown, use a pie topper or aluminum foil strips to cover outside of crust after first 15 minutes. NOTE:  I find that it helps to cover the entire pie with foil after the top crust has set, for the next 30-45 minutes of baking (or, for streusel pie, for the first 30-45 minutes of baking time), then remove foil for final 15 minutes or so, in order to cook the apples without overbaking the crust, particularly when using crisp apples, like Haralson or Honeycrisp.  Pie is done when apples are softened (not mushy—they will continue to soften as the pie cools).

 

The length of baking time will depend on the size and depth of your pie, the thickness of your apple slices, whether you cover it while baking, and the type of apples you use, so stated times are approximate.  Patience and flexibility are pie-baking virtues.   Allow to cool for an hour (I know, you’ve been hovering around the oven being tortured by the smell for an hour now, but you have to wait just a little longer).  Slice and enjoy straight, or with a scoop of vanilla ice cream—yum!  The taste of fall…