Way back for the Fourth of July, I was charged with making apple pies for our “cookout” (indoors, with air conditioning). This was also when I learned that the Bronx is apparently secretly obsessed with pies?
I used a recipe recommended by these fine people, Grandma Opel’s apple pie. It’s somewhat nontraditional in that you make fill the pie just with apples and add the latice crust, then pour a syrup over the whole thing. The recipe claims it’s for 1 9″ pie, which I doubled, and then made 3 pie shells (in slightly small pans but they claimed to be 9″), but, slicing the apples very thinly and mounding them as high as I could in the pie shells, I only used 10 (out of a prescribed 14-16) apples. Granny Smiths are the best of course. Peeling, coring, and slicing them takes way longer than I thought – add some lemon juice to the sliced apples to prevent them browning before you’re done cutting up all the rest.
Bonus: a pie crust recipe. This nominally makes two 11″ (um, I think?) crusts with a little left over (which you will naturally cut into strips, butter, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, roll up, bake, and consume with great rejoicing), but remember for each apple pie you need a double crust. I doubled the recipe and it worked just about perfectly for my three 9″ pies.
2 c flour
1/2 t salt
1/2 c chilled butter cut into 1/2″ bits
3 Tbs chilled vegetable shortening
5 Tbs cold water
At this point my ancestral recipe says, “Mix as for pie crust.” The point of the operation is to mix in the butter without melting it, so that when you bake it, delicious flakes result, which is why you want to avoid handling the dough and make it using ice water. Using a pastry blender or two knives, cut in half the butter till it has the texture of cornmeal. Cut in the other half of the butter and the shortening until the size of small peas. Then make 5 small wells in the dry ingredients. Pour 1 Tbs of cold water into a well and mix it into the surrounding dry ingredients; repeat for each well/Tbs of water. Stir or squash with hands till all is just incorporated, divide according to the number of pie crusts you wish to produce, then roll out, handling as little as possible, to about 1/8″ thick (but if you can get it this thin you have my eternal admiration). Fold into quarters to transfer to the pie pan.