Searching for The Perfect Recipe for Apple Pie
Author: admin // Category: Food and Drink, Fruit Desserts
The words, “recipe apple pie“, brought back 1,430,000 search results.
Just in Google! Yahoo! found 17,800,000 results, and msn found 10,200,000. And 6 of the first 10 results from each search engine were different. At this point, I’m already thinking that an internet search may not be the best way to find the best recipe for apple pie.
If you love apple pie as much as I do, you’ve spent some time looking for the best recipe. And how do you know it’s the best? You try it, of course.
As in: you use the recipe to bake an apple pie, then eat some and see what you think. So, if you’re searching using the phrase above, you’d need to bake 22 apple pies (which would take over 3 weeks, if you baked only one a day) just to get through the first page of search results on the top 3 search engines.
I thought there had to be a better way.
So I started over and, to maximize my chances for success, I only counted recipes from recipe sites that made it into the first 2 pages of results (I realize this is an arbitrary cut off point, but there are several million results, and only so many days when apples are in season). That meant I’d only need to test 14 different recipes.
That’s still too many.
So I narrowed it down further: the first decision was the crust – store-bought or handmade? I wanted a handmade crust, so I looked to see if it called for lard, shortening or butter. I avoid hydrogenated fats and had no lard, so I opted for butter it was. That helped eliminate some results.
Now it was down to 9 recipes (which would still require more than a week, if I only baked a pie a day), and I still wasn’t sure which kind of apples to use, which kind of extracts, which spices, how much sugar, etc… Who ever would have thought there were so many decisions to make when picking a recipe for apple pie? (But then who ever would have thought that a search for “recipe apple pie” would return so many results?)
At that point, I started thinking, “I’d gladly pay somebody to do this for me.”
I baked for a week (and I think I used nearlya bushel of apples), and I still wasn’t convinced\sure that I had the sells a downloadable cookbook called “Cooking with Apples“. The author said she’d been looking for the perfect apple pie recipe for years, and had collected a bunch of them (along with some 90 other apple recipes) and put them together into this cookbook. I decided to give it a try.
Boy, was I glad I did; there are 7 different apple pie recipes in the book, and every one I’ve tried is really good! (I’m not a big fan of sugarless recipes, so I haven’t tried that one yet, and probably won’t.) Just in case you’re curious: my favorite used Honey Crisp and Granny Smith apples, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice, lemon juice and lemon zest, almond and vanilla extract at about a 3 to 1 ratio, and had no flour or tapioca added to the filling at all.
For more delicious recipes, visit our pie recipes collection.
The Apple Crisp dessert recipe is definitely one you want to commit to memory. Of course, you’ll be making it so often that that won’t be a problem.