Apples And Dough, Two Ways
If my social media feeds are any indication, folks out there are doing a lot of stress baking right now. I’m in the nervous dessert club too. My stress has been doubled by the fact that I’ve been working from one dwindling bag of flour, unable to locate a replacement on the barren shelves of my local grocers. Thankfully, I was able to score a bag on my latest trip, so I can continue treating my gnawing anxiety with pastry.
Before that miraculous find, I was stretching my flour by making flour-light desserts like pudding and souffle. When I did make dough, I used it as a topper for large quantities of things that were not dough. One of the things I was able to score from the walk-in at Apple on the day I got laid off was a boatload of Fuji apples. I made a simple apple filling and baked two different confections with it: cobbler and coffeecake. Both filled the hole in my stomach that used to be filled with my confidence that the world around me would act basically normally and in line with my historical assumptions.
I stole some techniques from Rick Bragg’s delightful book about his mother, “The Greatest Cook in the World.” Not a traditional cookbook, this work interweaves a biography of the author’s mother with the recipes she cooked for him growing up. I found these recipes truly inspiring. Some of them are centuries-old family heirlooms that I’ve never seen before in any source on “Southern” food. The book is an incredible resource for vernacular cooking of the American South, and I can’t recommend it enough. Mama Bragg’s recipes include pages and pages of careful, homey instruction; the pinto bean recipe, for instance, has three ingredients and three pages of philosophical musings on bean cookery. I took the ideas for macerating the fruit before baking and using a lattice top on the cobbler from Mrs. Bragg.
Anyway, here’s 2 recipes:
Apple Filling
4 medium-size apples
1/4 cup brown sugar
tsp salt
tsp cinnamon
1.5 tsp grated or minced fresh ginger
2 tsp lemon juice or apple cider vinegar
tbsp flour
tsp vanilla extract
Chop the apples in your desired shape and mix with the other ingredients. The size of your pieces depends on the end texture you want. I like my apples cooked soft in desserts, so I cut mine in little baby slices. Let this hang out for at least a couple hours or up to a couple days in the fridge so the flavors can marry and the apples can release their juices.
Mmmmm, wet apple chips
Cobbler
1 cup flour
3 tbsp butter, ice cold
yogurt or buttermilk or milk mixed with a little lemon juice/vinegar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
tbsp white sugar
1/2 tsp salt
egg wash (optional)
flaky sea salt and/or turbinado sugar (optional)
Preheat your oven to 375F. Mix together flour, white sugar, baking powder, soda, and salt. Dice your butter into teeny little pieces and cut into the flour using your fingertips or two forks. Your desired end texture here is tiny chunks of butter evenly distributed and coated in flour. Add your yogurt or whatever a couple tablespoons at a time, mixing until you have a dough that’s dry enough to roll out without making a huge mess but wet enough not to break apart. Don’t overmix!
This is your desired texture, pretty dry, just a little bit wetter than pie dough. You can see visible chunks of butter still. You want that.
Roll out your dough on a floured surface to about 1/4 inch thick and cut it into little strips. This makes enough dough to cover about 3/4 of your apple mixture. Save the rest for coffee cake! Spoon your apple mixture into the greased baking vessel of your choice (I went with a muffin tin for maximum crispy edges, as per Kristen’s request). Arrange your strips of dough in a criss-cross pattern on top of the apple mixture. If you’re feeling enterprising, brush the top of your dough with beaten egg and scatter some coarse sea salt or turbinado sugar over the top.
Don’t be like me. Use a big boy knife to cut your strips.
You can tell I’m primarily a savory cook because my lattice top looks like trash.
Bake until the top is golden brown and delicious and your dough is cooked all the way through. I think I started checking after about half an hour.
I went with pretzel salt for the top
This cobbler has a lot less sugar than most recipes do. I highly suggest serving with vanilla ice cream or caramel sauce, or both.
Coffee Cake
For the batter:
3 tbsp melted butter
3 tbsp white sugar
3/4 cup flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
sour cream or yogurt
tsp salt
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extra
For the crunchy topping
1.5 tbsp butter, softened
2 tsp semolina or flour
2 tbsp oatmeal
3 tbsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
Preheat your oven to 350F. Spread your remaining apple mixture (about 1 apple’s worth) in the bottom of a very well-greased small loaf pan or baking dish (you could also do this as muffins, I won’t stop you). Mix together all the batter ingredients except the yogurt/sour cream, then add enough of that in to make a batter that’s juuuuuuust pourable. Think slightly thicker than pancake batter. Don’t overmix this either! Spread your batter over your apple mixture. Mush together the topping ingredients with a fork or your fingers and scatter this on top of your batter. Bake for around half an hour probably, but start checking after 20 minutes. Could be longer than half an hour too. Never trust any baking recipe’s exact times. You’ll know it’s done when a knife or toothpick inserted into the middle comes out mostly clean.
I didn’t take any process pics for this one, but it’s mostly a mix-and-dump kind of thing. If you’ve ever made pancakes or a cake from a boxed mix, you should be able to handle this.
