February 19, 2020 Deep Dish Apple Pie with Lavender.
The recipe we use is, of course, Cook’s Illustrated’s Deep Dish Apple Pie (subscription required). We add some lavender to give it a touch of Normandy, France. We seem to only make this on special occasions, in this case, the Blue Mountain Ranch Road Association annual meeting.
This dish takes a lot of apples! Five pounds of them to be exact. This is one of the Fujis. The Granny Smiths have been done.
The final apple prep is to clean up the cores. The machine’s design is quite old and it doesn’t cope with modern very large apples perfectly.
If there’s apples, there will be parrot! Livingstone is an apple addict.
Well, this counts as an oops! Even our biggest bowl isn’t big enough to mix up the filling.
So, we moved to the dutch oven that we’ll be pre-cooking the filling in. This is before any cooking and reduction has been done
The pre-cook is now done and the apples have been reduced enough to actually fit!
The filling gets cooled on a half sheet pan.
Cook’s Illustrated always has some neat ideas. In this case, using parchment paper instead of plastic wrap. Wow! It’s a bit stiffer and the crust absolutely doesn’t stick.
Even after chilling in the fridge for an hour, the parchment still doesn’t stick!
The filling does fit, at least in our biggest pie dish.
Top crust on, sealed to the bottom crust, slit and ready to bake!
Ta Da! The finished pie...