as easy as apple pie
Intro
Hi! Welcome to the first edition of the No Talent Club. I’m starting off with one of the first things I learned to cook, an apple pie.
“It’s as easy as pie” is a phrase used in English to mean that something is easy, which is weird because most people think that cooking is hard. It isn’t it’s super easy, and pies are pretty much the easiest thing to cook.
Apple pies are delicious and don’t take much work. I don’t know why I started cooking apple pies, but in my first years of cooking I remember baking a lot of them. Perhaps it was the terrible tiny kitchen I was using, or the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing.
For me, the hard thing about pies is pastry. It might surprise you to learn that I’m absolutely terrible at pastry, but I truly suck at all pastry-related things. There are two ways around this: you can either buy a pre-made roll of pastry at the shop, or you can make the pastry by hand, and just allow yourself to fuck it up. I have been fucking it up for over a decade and nobody has ever complained about being given a slice of freshly-made apple pie.
Things you need:
- baking tin (9”/22cm round tin)
- a big bowl for peeled apples
- cling-film (Frischhaltefolie auf Deutsch), bee-wax wrap, or a tupperware box
- vegetable peeler and sharp knife
- a cup for keeping egg white in
Ingredients:
Pastry:
- 225g butter, room temperature
- 50g golden caster sugar, plus extra
- 2 eggs
- 350g white flour
- softly whipped cream, to serve
Apple filling:
- 1kg apples
- 140g golden caster sugar
- ½ tsp cinnamon
- 3 tbsp flour
- optional: blueberries, or other berries
Pastry instructions:
This kind of sweet buttery pastry is for making cakes and pies. It’s really sticky because it’s full of butter and sugar, which means it’s hard to roll out with a rolling pin. After several disasters, I stopped bothering trying to roll it out. You can do this pastry the day before.
- Beat the butter and sugar in a large bowl. Add one egg, and one egg yolk - put the left-over egg-white in a cup in the fridge. Don’t forget about it or you’ll have to use it in a boring omelette.
- Beat the butter, eggs and sugar for a little bit. It will look very wet. Add the 350 grams of flour and mix until it forms a wet mixture. Scoop it into a ball with your hands, wrap it in the cling-film, and put it in the fridge to harden.
Apple filling instructions
- Peel all the apples and cut them up into smaller chunks. It doesn’t have to be perfect, so don’t take ages.
- Toss the apples, sugar, cinnamon, and flour together in a bowl. If you want to throw something else in there, now’s the time - blueberries will make your apple pie look amazing, you can also add ginger, marzipan, other berries, or even a bit of brandy. Go wild!
Apple Pie, Assemble!
- Turn the oven on to 180 degrees Celsius
- Grease the baking tin with some butter.
- Take the pastry out of the fridge and start lining the baking tin. Rip small chunks of the pastry off and press it into the base and walls of the tin. Aim to have about a third of the pastry left over for the top
- Pour the apple filling into the pie.
- Working from the sides, use the last third of the pastry and make the top of the apple pie.
- Brush the egg white over the top of the pastry. This will stop the pastry from burning so quickly and will also give the top of the pie a better colour. However, it’s also a pain in the ass and you can skip it if you want to.
- Bake the assembled apple pie in the middle of the oven for 40-50 minutes.
Congratulations, you’ve made a pie! Apple pies smell amazing when cooking, and you’ll probably have attracted some friends to the kitchen. Also I’m pretty sure this pie is too big to eat by yourself, but feel free to prove me wrong.
A Quick Note on Apples
This recipe works with any kind of apple, but the common supermarket apples - Red/Golden Delicious, Pink Lady - are a bit too sweet when baked. Try using a bit less sugar in the filling if that’s all you can find, but I would encourage you to find a different type of apple. The reason that those apples fill up the supermarket is that they are the easiest type of apple to transport without bruising, not because they taste nice.
SUPPORT:
Rather than give me money, if you have enjoyed this email please give some money to a charitable cause. This week, I’m suggesting you support Ana Orenz, an endurance cyclist who crashed during a race and sustained what is called “life-changing injuries”, meaning that she’ll be feeling the effects of this for a long time: Fundraiser for Ana Orenz
Subscribe
You can subscribe to this email at https://buttondown.email/petehindle, which also has a link to the archives. But this is the first newsletter, so the archives are empty.
Next week: chocolate cake! Everybody’s favourite, apart from mine because it gives me migraines. Please stop asking me to make chocolate cake.