Apple Crisp

In Bottled Pears I said “Of course this applies to most fruits like pears. But not apples; they go to mushy. I can’t think of any other examples, good or bad.”

Here’s what I do with apples:

I ignore all that rubbish about “5 medium-sized apples”, because my medium turns out to be their large, or their small. After all, how can you have an average, or medium, without also having a large and a small. If I’ve got the average, someone else must have the ....

I use as many apples as will fit comfortably in my flat glass dish.

Mathematically I’m thinking something along the lines of the sum of the dimensions of the apples across the dish, and the sum of the dimensions of the apples along the dish, and the volume of a sphere being four-thirds PI times the cube of the radius, which is half the diameter, and so on.

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader while I get on with ....

Dunking the apples in a bowl of water. This helps bring them up to room temperature and gives them an added rinse.

Here’s my flat glass bowl, empty again, but not for long.

Same deal with the “half a cup of this, two-thirds a cup of that, and three-quarters a cup of the other”. It’s never enough, or it is too much.

I measure out a cup of oatmeal, ½ cup of all-purpose flour, and a half cup of sugar.

It makes a pyramid.

I flatten out the pyramid and think that, even ‘though it will fluff up (we hope) with cooking, it needs more if it is to cover the apples with a one or two centimeter thickness of Crisp.

Here we are after adding a second dose of dry goods and flattening it out. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just pretty close.

I put the teaspoon of salt atop the dry mixture, then gently tip it into a mixing bowl. I mix the dry ingredients thoroughly.

In goes half a cup of vegetable oil. I can always add a dash more if the mixture is too dry. But it is not too dry this time – just right, “crumbly” they call it. I call it “moist”, although I’ve added no water.

The apples are retrieved and quartered. See the bowl lurking there in the background?

Yup! The cores and stalks go into a bowl, as we did for Bottled Pears . The quartered apples go back in the bowl of water.

Once all apples are quartered, they are sliced and dropped holus-bolus into a bowl. Not whole-less bowl-less.

I will microwave the bowl of slices for 120 seconds on high, so that partially-cooked apples are going into the oven.

The recipe calls for a dribble of lemon-juice. I juice my lemons and freeze the juice in an ice-cube tray; makes it easier to measure amounts of lemon juice. Here I am using four cubes.

The bowl sits in the bowl, so that the cubes will thaw.

The dinner plate is used as a cover, and the lot goes into the microwave.

The micro waved apples are spread and packed back into the glass dish. I drop a pyramid of oatmeal mix on top.

Then I spread the pyramid level, brushing the mixture to the edges of the dish.

Any excess apples and mixture go into a smaller dish. You can never have too much apple crumble.

And into the pre-heated 375C oven they go. I need a larger drip-tray to catch any fluid that boils out of the dishes!

(later) You're probably wondering what happened to the smaller dish of Apple Crumble .....

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