Anniversary apple pie

We wanted to have a special dessert for our anniversary.  I didn't want to get a cake from a bakery, and I have never had much success making a cake at home, so we decided to make a fruit pie.  After spending some minutes scouring all of our cookbooks and Google Drive recipes, we finally decided on a recipe from a cookbook we don't even own: the Betty Crocker French apple pie recipe, the one my dad always used and for which I have carried a scanned copy through numerous apartments in three states.

As you can imagine, apples aren't really in season right now, and we are at least 2000 miles from the nearest commercial orchard.  We had a mix of Fuji, Gala, and Braeburn varieties, and we had to really go through the bins at the grocery store to find the good ones.

I had found a new (for us, at least) pie crust recipe that substitutes sour cream for the ice water and some of the butter: for a 9" pie, it's 1 cup flour, 1 stick of butter, ¼ cup sour cream, ½ tsp. salt, and 1 tsp. sugar.  It looked pretty foolproof, and while I wasn't the one who made the crust this time, I can attest that the dough ended up in the refrigerator in near-record time, and the end result was tasty...so, I'd say it was a success.

While the crust didn't take long to put together, I had a very short time window to roll out the dough and get it into the pan; it got soft fast, and it isn't even very hot in our kitchen anymore.*  So this may have to be a wintertime pie crust recipe unless I can get quicker about rolling it out.  However, I stuck the crust into the freezer while I got the filling ready, and it was just fine by the time I was ready to fill and bake.

Betty Crocker's recipe is pretty simple.  For a 9" pie:

6 cups of apples
¾ cup sugar (white sugar, but I used brown)
½ tsp. cinnamon (I used our Trader Joe's stuff; maybe I should try the Ceylon cinnamon next time!)
½ tsp. nutmeg
¾ cup flour
Dash of salt (I used 1/8 tsp. of kosher salt)

To this, I added the juice of one lemon, partly to keep the apples from browning while I peeled and sliced all of them, and partly to punch up the flavour.  This could have been reduced to a half lemon as the pie had a pretty strong lemon taste (obvs).

I made half of the crumb topping recipe, as I've noticed in the past that a full recipe makes WAY too much.

½ cup flour
¼ cup butter
¼ cup brown sugar

This seemed to work just fine for the pie.  I also added some cardamom (because why not?); while good, for me it was not entirely necessary.  Take it or leave it.

I used the pi dish, of course.

Obviously, for me, this will always be a recipe to keep.  We made just a couple of small modifications to tailor it to us specifically, but the crust, the filling, and the topping all turned out great.

Similar to my experiences with peach pie, I cut the apples into chunks rather than thin slices.

*This is a relative statement, as the chocolate on our chocolate-covered shortbread cookies (a Christmas gift) became soft enough to stick to the plastic wrapper and peel away from the actual cookie as we'd unwrap them.  We now store the box in the fridge.

Betty Crocker's Cookbook (year unknown, c. 1960s-1970s), p. 321
Writeup background noise: an interesting assortment of music, including Kylie (1988-2007 selections), Tom Petty, Rihanna, Santana, the Jackson 5, KT Tunstall, Yael Naim, and Gavin DeGraw.  Not to mention the Australian Open on mute in the super-background (Serena's match is about to start).  Wow.

Kitchen experiment: cinnamon

On a recent trip to California, we took the opportunity to visit a Penzeys Spices store.  One of the items on my list was Ceylon cinnamon, supposedly 'true cinnamon' as opposed to the cassia that is usually packaged as cinnamon; they're both part of the genus Cinnamomum, so it's more a matter of labeling and semantics, I suppose.  We were curious, so we picked up a jar along with several other herbs and spices, some of which were on the original list...and multiple that had not been.

I wanted to test the Ceylon cinnamon against "regular" cinnamon, so I decided on rice pudding: a nice neutral background for a flavoring.*  I used the Joy of Cooking recipe, and made two batches of 1/3-recipe so that we wouldn't be inundated with rice pudding.  To each batch, I added 1 egg yolk (I had used some egg whites earlier in the afternoon and didn't have any other immediate use for the yolks) and 3/4 tsp. cinnamon, both mixed in with the milk and sugar.  When I opened up the Ceylon cinnamon, I decided to first compare the fragrance of the two: the ol' swipe-a-finger-across-the-inside-of-the-lid-to-pick-up-just-a-bit trick.  Of course, at that point, I couldn't stop making Dune references.

Puddings in process.  Yes, the regular cinnamon is from Trader Joe's, and we haven't lived in a state with a Trader Joe's in over 6 months.  Might the age of the cinnamon have affected our conclusions?  Our past experience with 'older' spices indicates that this is negligible for us, but perhaps not so negligible for a professional.

At the first tasting, we both decided that the pudding with Ceylon cinnamon was our preference: it seemed to have a stronger and punchier flavour, though both puddings were tasty.  Even after a day in the fridge, we still both liked the pudding made with the Ceylon cinnamon.  Neither cinnamon was 'better', as it were, and since neither of us is any kind of a connoisseur (wine, beer, coffee, cheese, etc.), we can't even really quantify the taste differences between the two.  Most likely we won't go too far out of our way to get the 'real' stuff (though we'd never turn it down if given the opportunity), but this was an interesting experiment that gave us a good excuse to try something new.  And a good reason to buy a bunch of stuff at Penzeys.

Our finished puddings: that's 1/3 of a recipe of rice pudding in each 25-oz. bowl.  Two servings each!

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820: the "stovetop rice pudding", not the "baked rice pudding".

*With one actual scientist and one aspiring scientist in the household, I needed to create as close to a double-blind study as is possible when only two people are involved, so I devised this method: I would make the puddings and assign a random number to each bowl of pudding while Dom was at work.  Then, when it would be time for tasting, he would select the number of pudding that we'd test first, without telling me which number it was.  Unfortunately, time ran out on my day off and we ended up making the puddings together, but I'd say we have a solid design for our next experiment: Madagascar vanilla vs. Mexican vanilla.