1 large cooking apple

American apple pie

Difficulty

Ingredients

400 g	butter (cold, divided)
520 g	all-purpose flour (divided)
1	egg yolk
½ tsp	salt
170 g	sugar
60 ml	water
8	apples
½	lemon
½ tsp	cinnamon
¼ tsp	nutmeg
100 g	brown sugar
1	egg white

Utensils

• stand mixer
• plastic wrap
• oven
• rolling pin
• pie dish
• pie weights
• parchment paper
• cutting board
• knife
• large bowl
• cooking spoon
• pastry brush

How-To Videos

How to core and slice an apple

How to fit dough into a pie dish

Nutrition per serving

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Step 1/6

• 360 g butter
• 500 g flour
• 1 egg yolk
• ½ tsp salt
• 120 g sugar
• 60 ml water

• stand mixer
• plastic wrap

Cut some of butter into large pieces and add to a stand mixer with most of flour, egg yolk, salt, and sugar. Beat for approx. 2 – 3 min. until crumbly. Then, slowly add water, reserving a small amount for the final step, and continue to beat for another 1 – 2 min. until dough is smooth and uniform in consistency. Wrap dough in plastic wrap and transfer to refrigerator. Allow to set for approx. 1 h.

Step 2/6

• flour for surface work

• oven
• rolling pin

Preheat oven to 180°C/350°F. Cut dough into two even rounds. Then, flour work surface, place dough on top, and roll out, one at a time, using a rolling pin until rounds are larger than your pie dish.

Step 3/6

• pie dish
• pie weights
• parchment paper

Flour both sides of dough and transfer to pie dish. Press evenly into all edges of dish and then remove excess dough. Place a piece of parchment paper on top of dish and fill with pie weights. Place in preheated oven at 180°C/350°F and blind bake for approx. 10 min.

Step 4/6

• 8 apples

• cutting board
• knife

Peel, core, and quarter apples. Then, cut crosswise into medallion-sized pieces.

Step 5/6

• ½ lemon
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp nutmeg
• 2 tbsp flour
• 50 g sugar
• 100 g brown sugar

• large bowl
• cooking spoon

In a large bowl, thoroughly mix together apple, lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg, flour, sugar, and brown sugar.

Step 6/6

• 40 g butter
• 1 egg white
• 1 tsp water

• pastry brush

Transfer apple slices to pie dish and spread out evenly. Cut remainder of butter into pieces and place on top of apples. Cover pie with rest of dough. Make a small hole in the middle, so air can escape. Mix together egg white and water and brush on top. Return to oven and bake at 180°C/350°F for approx. 50 – 55 min. until golden brown. Enjoy!

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Applesauce

Delicious homemade applesauce recipe! There is nothing better than homemade applesauce with hand-picked apples, and it is so easy to make!

Elise founded Simply Recipes in 2003 and led the site until 2019. She has an MA in Food Research from Stanford University.

Nothing beats the taste of homemade applesauce, and it’s so easy to make! Every year, starting in mid summer with the Gravensteins, and through late fall with Granny Smiths and Fuji apples, my father processes dozens of batches of applesauce from apples picked from his trees. He freezes them in large quart-sized mason jars for us to enjoy all year long.

The secret to my dad’s applesauce is that he adds a couple strips of lemon peel to the apples while they are cooking, as well as some lemon juice or apple cider vinegar.

The tartness of the lemon or vinegar serves to intensify the taste of the apples, and helps balance out the sweetness of the sauce. The result is a refreshing, utterly delicious applesauce.

He also likes to mix other fruit in with the sauce. He’ll mix fresh cranberries in with the apples for cranberry applesauce, or stalks of rhubarb for rhubarb applesauce. Plums and pluots sometimes find their way into his applesauce too.

For more information on which apple varieties are best for baking, check out our Guide to Apples.

Love Apples? Try These Recipes:

Applesauce

Apples vary in their sweetness level, depending on the variety and how late in the season they are picked. The amount of sugar you will want to add will depend on how sweet your apples are, and how sweet you would like your applesauce to be. This recipe is just a guideline, please adjust the sugar amounts to your taste. You can even leave the sugar out all together if you are using sweet apples.

If you use less sugar than this recipe suggest, you will likely want to reduce the amount of lemon juice or vinegar as well. The acid in the lemon juice or vinegar brightens the flavor of the apples and balances the sweetness.

In place of the ground cinnamon you can cook the apples with a stick of cinnamon, just remove it before puréeing.

To prep the apples, use a sharp vegetable peeler or paring knife and cut away the outer peel. Then quarter the apple and use a paring knife to cut out the tough core parts from the quarters. Or use an apple peeler corer.

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How to make the perfect apple charlotte – recipe

Autumn’s answer to summer pudding, made with sweet spiced apple puree and butter-soaked bread

Felicity Cloake’s autumnal summer pudding – AKA the classic apple charlotte. Photograph: Dan Matthews/The Guardian. Food styling: Loïc Parisot.

Felicity Cloake’s autumnal summer pudding – AKA the classic apple charlotte. Photograph: Dan Matthews/The Guardian. Food styling: Loïc Parisot.

O ften described by those who don’t know any better as a “classical French dessert”, apple charlotte is actually more likely to be one of our own – the similarities to summer pudding are unmistakable. Stewed fruit and stale bread is just a very British vibe somehow, especially when it’s served up smothered in custard.

The ever diligent Regula Ysewijn explains in her book Pride and Pudding that, despite attempts to credit it to the superstar 19th-century chef Marie-Antoine Carême, the first print recipe for apple charlotte appears in John Mollard’s 1802 The Art of Cookery Made Easy and Refined, probably named after the wife of King George III, at a time when Carême was still a mere apprentice.

As this pedigree suggests, this is an elegant dish perhaps more suited to dinner parties than crumbles or pies are; the kind of thing at home on the tables of royalty, back when British royalty was known for more than its thrifty ways with cornflakes. Happily, it’s also both pretty cheap and very simple to make, even without the palace kitchens at your disposal.

Cox’s give the ‘scrummiest, mostly wickedly rich apple pudding’, says Darina Allen. Photograph: All thumbnail pictures by Felicity Cloake

The apples

In common with many seasonal fruit recipes, my instinct is to suggest you use whatever you have to hand; once sweetened to taste, all apples will work here. That said, those apples should certainly be cooked before use – I try one recipe, from Mary Norwak’s The Farmhouse Kitchen, that puts the apples into the oven raw, but this makes for results so dry, if delicious, that we have practically to drown them in cream to make them palatable (which, of course, only makes them more delicious, but that’s hardly the point). As Anne Willan notes in French Regional Cooking, “the key to making a successful apple charlotte is to reduce the apple puree thoroughly so that the charlotte does not collapse when unmoulded”. If your mixture is too liquid, it will seep through the bread walls and undermine the structural integrity of the entire edifice.

Anne Willan: reduce the apple puree thoroughly or it will sag when unmoulded.

Cooking apples such as bramleys have the distinct benefit of breaking down easily when heated, giving a smoother fluffier puree. They can lack the complexity of flavour of some eating varieties, but initially I decide this is worth the sacrifice for their beautifully silky texture, but actually, as I learn the hard way, it takes a very long time to reduce them sufficiently to guarantee that your charlotte will stand up.

Eating apples it is, then – I’d recommend choosing larger examples, if possible, to minimise the time you have to spend extracting the core. (If you only have cooking apples, reduce them as much as possible, and consider adding the cores and skins to the pan during cooking, to increase levels of pectin and give the puree a firmer set.)

The flavourings

As we’ll be using plain bread, rather than sweet pastry, you’ll need to add sugar to the apples, unless they’re already very sweet or you have Spartan tastes – though you could do this in the form of jam, if you prefer, in obedience to Ysewijn’s recipe, which is based on Mollard’s original. I rather like this, but my testers complain that it makes the whole thing taste of apricots rather than apples, so I abandon the idea in favour of Norwak’s demerara sugar, which is always a flavour that works well with apples. I am, like Mollard and Ysewijn, going to add a slug of booze – he likes brandy, she suggests brandy or dark rum, while Willan cooks her apples in white wine, “preferably Jura ‘vin jaune’”. Apple brandy is, I think, the best call if you happen to have some knocking around, but otherwise most brown spirits or white wines will work – if you’d prefer to keep it alcohol free, just add a little more water, or apple juice, if need be.

Anthony Demetre’s charlotte is more ‘a palisade of homemade sponge fingers’.

Willan and Norwak both add a pinch of cinnamon to the dish, which is a classic pairing with apple, though you could use any sweet spice that takes your fancy (cloves, ginger, nutmeg or mixed spice all strike me as good combinations), as would a hint of lemon zest, which is my own addition. Allen beats egg yolks into the fruit to give it a lovely, rich roundness, but we think the same result can be achieved with more butter with no need for an extra ingredient.

It may well be too late for this season, but Demetre and Norwak both add blackberries to their charlottes, with the former also making a blackberry sauce, cooked with lemon juice and icing sugar and then passed through a sieve. My testers are big fans of these but, for me, they outshine the apples; if you have them, by all means stick them in (or, even better, make Demetre’s sauce, so you can add it to taste), but I prefer the dish without. If you’re keen on the idea of extra fruit, you might also like to consider Mollard’s dried cherries, which are less likely to bleed into the apples in the oven.

The bread

Mary Norwak’s charlotte: more like a bread-based crumble.

I’m very tempted to try the black bread apple charlotte from Elena Molokhovets’ 19th-century A Gift to Young Housewives, but on reading the recipe, it doesn’t quite fit the bill – all the British and French versions I find call instead for soft white bread, often stale, though actually I find it much easier to work with if it’s fresh. That said, I’m sure most plain or indeed fruit breads would be delicious.

One of the key differences between a charlotte and a summer pudding is that the charlotte is baked, which means the bread needs to be buttered to prevent it burning. To no one’s great surprise, the more butter, the more crisp and delicious the results. Allen and Willan clarify their butter first, skimming off the milk solids to leave the pure fat, which makes it less prone to burning at high temperatures. It’s not a must, but it will make your charlotte look more attractive on the plate – and, if you’re really keen to impress, consider using beaten egg white to stick the bread together, as Allen suggests. I’m going to add spices to the butter, so the bread doesn’t feel like the plain relation, but stick them in the apple instead, if you prefer.

Rather than using bread, Demetre goes down a more charlotte russe route, encasing his apples in instead. They’re very nice, but don’t soak up the butter in the same way as the bread, making the whole thing less rich and crunchy. Norwak, meanwhile, goes for the kind of charlotte my parents both recall from childhood, namely, layers of fruit and crunchy, buttery spiced breadcrumbs, making hers more like a bread-based crumble. We’re all very into this, but it cannot be denied that it’s an entirely different dish.

The mould

Regula Ysewijn’s charlotte: a shot of brandy or dark rum hides within.

To make this a truly elegant dinner party dessert, you might like to consider making these in individual dariole moulds, as Demetre suggests, though I like the drama of turning out a large golden pudding at the table – in the absence of a charlotte mould, a pudding basin will do, as would a loaf tin, as Allen recommends, if you don’t have one of those – just adjust the amount of bread and apple accordingly. Finish with a further sprinkle of crunchy demerara sugar, and serve with liberal amounts of custard, cream, ice-cream or, as chef Jeremy Lee does at London’s Quo Vadis restaurant, all three at once. It’s that kind of autumn, after all.

Perfect apple charlotte

Prep 35 min
Cook 1 hr 35 min
Serves 6

1.5kg apples, preferably firm eating apples such as cox’s or similar
175g butter
75g sugar, preferably demerara, plus 2 tbsp extra to finish
30ml brandy, or golden rum or whisky (optional)
Grated zest of ½ lemon (optional)
1 pinch ground nutmeg, or cinnamon, ginger or mixed spice (optional)
8 slices medium-thick soft white bread

Peel and core the apples, then cut them into thin slices or cubes (it doesn’t really matter which, because they’re going to be cooked down into a puree). Melt 75g butter in a large pan over a medium-low heat, add the apples, sugar, alcohol (if using) and a tablespoon of water (you may need to add more later if you don’t use the alcohol, so keep an eye on it), then cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and beginning to break down.

Uncover and leave to cook until you have a very thick and pulpy puree; stir regularly, so it doesn’t catch and burn (this process took me almost an hour from start to finish).

Grate in the lemon zest, taste to check the sweetness and adjust as necessary, thenleave to cool while you prepare the bread.

Heat the oven to 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6. Melt the remaining butter over a low heat and skim off the foam.

Once you see pale solids in the bottom of the pan, carefully pour off the clear liquid above into a clean, heatproof container, preferably through a fine sieve, and discard the solids. Add a pinch of spice, if using, to the liquid butter.

Cut the crusts from the bread. Find an ovenproof mould (a pudding basin or a bread tin) with a capacity of about one litre, then cut the bread into rounds or strips to line it (or six individual ramekins); if your mould is round, bear in mind that you’ll probably need some little triangles to fill in the gaps, and factor in that you’ll need more bread for the lid, too.

Remove the bread from the mould(s), dip each piece in turn into the melted butter, then use to line the dish(es).

Spoon in the apple puree, then top with the final piece(s) of bread, also dipped in butter. Bake for 15 minutes, then turn down the heat to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4 and bake for about another 40 minutes, or until the bread on top is golden.

Leave to cool in the mould for 10 minutes, then turn out, scatter with sugar and serve with cream, custard and/or ice-cream.

Apple charlotte: French or English? Bread, sponge or crumbs? How do you like yours, and what do you flavour it with? And which other apple-based treats are on the menu in your kitchen at this time of year?

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