500g Sainsburys puff pastry.
Halve the pastry, roll out into two circles, one slightly – say 2cm – wider than the other.
Put the slightly bigger circle into a pie dish and blind bake it for 20 mins (in total) at 180C. You’ll need to have some clay baking beans to put onto baking paper to weigh down the pastry circle while it gets partly cooked. Whip the beans and paper off after 10 mins and bake it naked* for another 10 mins. If you ain’t got beans, sacrifice a couple of hundred grammes of dried pulses like chick-peas or kidney beans instead. After 10 mins at 180 they will be like full metal jacket bullets, so just bin them afterwards. After the 20 minute blind bake (i.e. sans contents) it should look like this:
https://imgur.com/82eo03y
(Sorry folks, but I’ve been trying to get the images to actually appear in this post for about 12 minutes now, and a) I’ve lost the will to live, and b) my 15 minutes are nearly up, so hey, just select ’em and open ’em in another tab OK?)
OK, that’s built the basic container. Now for the scrummy filling. You can use any apples, but ideally you want a couple of utter bruisers from a decent cooker tree. Here are the two victims I chose from one of our trees:
https://imgur.com/HdPuxoH
Peel ’em and slice ’em up, bung them into a nice big frying pan with a good dollop of unsalted butter – by a good dollop I mean about 4cm lopped off the end of a standard butter brick. Melt the butter on the pan, set out the apples slices to fill the pan brim to brim, and heat on a medium heat. Give the apples a really generous sprinkling of suger, preferable demerara for the extra colour, but really any sugar will do. Let them bubble and cook for a wehile, move them about a bit with a spatula to make sure all of the apple gets the hot butter tratment. Turn them all over so the sugary sides are downwards, and then liberally sugar them once more. At this point you can bung in a splash of some alcoholic stuff – I use a splash of brandy, but choose your own poison. Let them cook like that for another few minutes until they look something like this:
https://imgur.com/fajEjYW
Now you can pour the sugary appley gorgeousness into the pie base so it starts to look like something you might serve up at the table:
https://imgur.com/vcab5Nu
All that remains is toroll out the other half of the pastry into a circle the same size as the filled pie, paint the rim of the pie base with some milk and stick the pastry lid on for the final bake. Squidge the edge down lightly all around the pie, and brush the rest of the top surface with milk to make sure it browns nicely. Into the oven at about 180, and set the alarm for 40 minutes. Here is the pie plus payload and lid, all assembled and about to undergo the final bake:
https://imgur.com/BOL4OlW
Et voila, he-hon-he-hon, zut alors; around 40 minutes’ later (keep an eye on it for the last 10 mins in case your oven is feeling excitable on the day) out comes the finished thing. Put it aside to cool down or tuck straight in if you have heatproof mouth parts.
https://imgur.com/5aexJzG
Best with creme fraiche or double cream or good yoghurt or even custard, depending upon your dietary preferences and/or the contents of your fridge.
*that’s the pie base naked, not you, ya dummy.
Whilst we cook at home most days, we very rarely cook (or even eat) dessert. Coincidentally though one of those rare occasions we do was last week when I made an Apple crumble (I prefer crumble to pie).
Basically caramelise 6 tbsp sugar in an oven proof dish, add 6 apples – half cut in chunks, half grated, a pinch of cinnamon, juice and zest of half a lemon and about 100g of dried cranberries. For the topping mix 100g flour with 50g butter and 2 tbsp demerara sugar and rub together to resemble breadcrumbs. Add another pinch of cinnamon and 4 tbsp of granola. Add on top of apple filling and bake for about 15mins at around 200degC.
I think the basis of this recipe came from Gordon Ramsey.
*drools*
Found it…….
Not entirely the same but I have started making my own apple sauce. When the only Apple Sauce was out of a jar I wouldnt touch it. Now Pork dinner with home made apple sauce is the bees knees.
I made the BBC Good Food Rhubarb and Custard cake a couple of times and have since substituted apple for the rhubarb which was even better! The quantity of custard in the recipe is a bit odd so I improvised with a couple of table spoons in the mix then drizzling it around as per the recipe. It uses about half a tin rather than a small pot.
That rhubard custard cake is amazing. I’ve made it a few times. Stays moist for ages too. I’ll try it with apples.
Re: Puff pastry at Sainsbury’s.
Good luck on even getting into a Sainsbury’s, Lawrence Fox is telling everyone to boycott the place, so if you haven’t already got it in your pantry, no apple pie for you.
To be honest, if I know there’s no chance of bumping into Lozza there I am much more likely to go to Sainsbury’s
I have mine delivered.
And incidentally, the self obsessed asshole to whom you refer doesn’t even merit a thought round here anyway.
might as well put this here…have you seen this, VV? A nice Korean lad explaining how to talk Janner
Oh yes, I’ve seen some of the other videos by Korean Billy. The “Speak Geordie” one is a hoot.
I tried to learn a bit of Korean back in 1998. I could’ve used Billy’s help there, actually. I didn’t get very far…. An-njong-hi. ka-seyo.
I bet down in Pleemuth they hoot at this bloke! Does he make money from doing this? Ansome.
Looks lush Vulpes. Ice cream and custard please.
Help yourself from the fridge, take as much as you like, enjoy!