No-Fuss Apple Pie from Stella Parks’ Bravetart
What went well:
The macerated apples are heavenly. They make your entire apartment (1 bedroom or smaller) smell like cinnamon and spices.
The top crust was delicious and flakey.
We made brown sugar whipped cream for a topping and that stuff is absurdly good
What went poorly:
We did not use nearly enough flour when rolling out the crust. Our countertop will now forever be partially made of pie crust.
The bottom crust was tough and chewy, that one’s almost definitely on us ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It took us the entire day to make this thing - granted, we did let things sit in the fridge for a bit longer than we needed to. But since we thought we would start at 1 pm and have it with guests before they left at 5, this was a bit of a bummer.
We recently went apple picking and came home with about 15 pounds of apples. I can’t really explain why we thought it was a good idea to pick so many apples, but needless to say we’re now desperate to get rid of them. Naturally, we decided to bake an apple pie because it’s a charming fall activity and because it’s like a blackhole for apples.
To start, we peeled, sliced, and spiced the apples in a gallon size plastic bag. We’d done this part before when we made the Bravetart apple crisp, which is a riff on the apple pie recipe, and it’s pretty easy. If you can cut an apple, you can make the filling. The process is pretty much alchemy though. You do essentially nothing and the apples release this huge volume of cinnamon spice apple syrup stuff. Just turning the bag around and watching the syrup swirl around the apples is it’s own special kind of food porn.
The apples have to hang out for several hours before they’ve produced enough liquid gold to create a pie, so you’re definitely going to want to do those first. While you’re waiting for the apples to do their thing, it’s the perfect time to make your pie crust which will also need to hang out for several hours.
We went all in on the Bravetart recipe and made our own pie crust following the “No-stress All-butter Pastry Crust” from earlier in the book. True to its “no-stress” name, the recipe doesn’t call for anything fancy like pulsing the ingredients in a food processor. Unfortunately, I apparently don’t know what a “generously floured work surface” means. As a result, our crust stuck to the countertop multiple times while we were rolling it out. When future archeologists unearth our kitchen, they’ll be perplexed by why someone would have built a countertop out of a mixture of stone and pie crust.
By the time we had rolled out the pie crust and were actually putting it in the dish, there were a couple spots where you could almost see through the pie crust. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of making the pie crust because I didn’t decide I would start writing these things up until I took a photo of the assembled pie.
Once the filling has sat for a few hours and your rolled out pie crust has sat for a few hours, everything is ready to assemble. Putting the bottom crust in the pie plate: easy. Putting the apples in the dish: easy. Putting the top pie crust on: easy. Trimming and pinching the top and bottom crusts together: full blown wtf.
The first struggle was just trimming the pie crust so that it sticks out ¾ of an inch around the edges. Since we couldn’t actually see the edge of the pie plate we were just kinda lopping off strips of crust here and there hoping it was fine. Because we had no idea what we were doing we left a bit more crust on thinking “No problem we can just trim that off later”. Only later did we realize that you’re supposed to actually roll the top crust down under the bottom crust inside the pie plate. The instructions said “then tuck the dough under itself, so the pie looks something like a bonnet” …… wut? It was only because the next step said “don’t worry about crimping the edges; pressure from the massive volume of apple filling will distort the design” that we realized the inner weight should somehow be pushing on things.
Once we realized that we had to put the crust inside the dish we realized we had left on waaaaay too much extra pie crust. We just kinda trimmed it willy-nilly and 🤞that it’s fine. After everything was sealed up, which took us much longer than it should have, we brushed the pie down with an egg wash. At this point, despite our crust related setbacks, we were actually starting to feel pretty good about the whole thing.
I mean, is it kind of a lumpy behemoth? Oh most definitely. But it still looked pretty good nonetheless.
The recipe calls for a 75 minute bake time, or until the apples in the middle of the pie register 195 degrees. Ours ended up being closer to 90 minutes, but that’s probably just our crappy oven that always takes an extra 10 minutes. Maybe someday we’ll buy an oven thermometer and get to the bottom of it. Most likely, we’ll just move to a new apartment.
When the pie was finally finished it actually looked pretty damn good! I mean look at this thing!
One thing that absolutely cannot be understated is the importance of the baking sheet underneath. This thing juiced all over the place. This is after we took the parchment paper off.
Before we could even move the pie off of the baking sheet we had to clean the bottom of the pie plate which was its own adventure. Holding a freshly baked (meaning lava-hot) pie while trying to wash the molten sugar off of the bottom is not an easy task. But in the end our desire to take a good photo prevailed over our fear of horribly, horribly burning our hands. This one is stylized courtesy of Google Photos, thanks Google.
After we waited for the whole thing to cool down a bit we were finally able to slice it up and try it. The inside looks pretty great.
Not too shabby as a slice either.
The whipped cream on top is brown sugar whipped cream also from Bravetart and holy crap is that stuff good. So good that it will make you question why there’s a whipped cream in a can business at all. It actually takes 5 minutes unlike a lot of other “5 minute” recipes. Make it, you won’t regret it.
My only gripe on the filling is that it’s a bit sweet, but that’s probably also on us for not using all Granny Smith apples. We used a blend of Shizuka and Granny Smith and the Shizuka might be a tad too sweet. The only other problem we had with this pie is that the bottom crust was a bit tough. But I’m pretty sure that one is entirely on us given the setbacks that we had when making the crust. I guess our one other problem with the pie is that one of us doesn’t actually like apple pie, so she thought it was “fine”.
What’s my overall thoughts on the pie? It’s pretty solid. Definitely beats the pants off of that 3 day old apple pie that you were thinking about buying at the grocery store. The top crust is fantastic and the filling is awesome. I’d recommend giving this a shot, just make sure you budget plenty of time and don’t skimp on flouring your countertop.