Apple and blackberry pie
30 mins to 1 hour
30 mins to 1 hour
This take on a traditional apple pie uses homemade pastry and foraged brambles to create a truly tasty dessert. Using a combination of cooking and eating apples adds both an apple sauce texture and sweetness!
30 mins to 1 hour
30 mins to 1 hour
Ingredients
For the pastry
- 375g/13oz plain flour, plus extra for dusting
- 200g/7oz salted butter, chilled and diced
- 50g/1¾oz icing sugar
- 1 large free-range egg, separated, plus 1 large free-range egg yolk
For the filling
- 2 Bramley apples, peeled, cored and diced
- 1 lemon, zest and juice
- 75g/2¾oz granulated sugar, plus extra for sweetening and dusting
- 4 eating apples (a sharp, crisp variety such as Braeburn), peeled, cored and cut into large chunks or slices
- 250–300g/9–10½oz blackberries (frozen is fine)
- vanilla ice cream, clotted or single cream, to serve
Method
To make the pastry, put the flour and butter in a food processor and whizz until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Pulse in the icing sugar. Whisk the two egg yolks with 1 tablespoon of cold water in a small bowl then drizzle over the flour mixture. Pulse until the dough starts clumping together in chunks – if it is too dry, add an extra teaspoon of water at a time. Tip out onto a work surface and knead briefly to bring together into a smooth dough. To make by hand, rub the butter and flour together with your fingertips until no big buttery lumps remain. Stir in the sugar, then whisk the egg and water as above and mix in with a cutlery knife until the pastry starts to clump together.
Split the pastry into two pieces, with one being a little larger than the other. Wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.
To make the filling, put the Bramley apples, lemon zest, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, sugar and 2 tablespoons of water in a saucepan. Cover with a lid and bring to a simmer over a low–medium heat. Stir occasionally, returning the lid each time, until the apples are very soft. Beat over a high heat to drive off any remaining liquid and smash the apples to a purée. Take the apple purée off the heat and stir in the eating apples and blackberries. Taste for sweetness and, if the blackberries are too sharp, add a tablespoon more sugar.
Preheat the oven to 220C/200C Fan/Gas 7 and preheat a baking tray (or pizza stone). Roll out the bigger piece of pastry on a lightly floured surface until big enough to line a 20–22cm/8–8½in pie dish with an overhang. Add the apple mixture, doming towards the centre, then roll out the second piece of pastry until big enough to cover the dish. Brush a little of the egg white around the pastry rim of the pie, then carefully lift on the top pastry to cover. Press down the edges to seal and trim any overhang with a sharp knife. Poke a few holes in the top of the pie, crimp the edge and decorate with any trimmings, if you like. Use egg white or water to stick on any pastry decorations.
Whisk the remaining egg white with a fork or mini whisk until bubbly. Lightly brush the bubbly egg white all over the top of the pie and sprinkle heavily with a layer of granulated sugar. Place the pie dish on the preheated baking tray and cook for 10 minutes, then lower the oven to 180C/160C Fan/Gas 4 and bake the pie for a further 35–40 minutes until golden. Cut into slices and serve with ice cream or cream.
Recipe Tips
Plate pies are very forgiving if you’re a homemade pastry novice. But if you really don’t fancy making your own pastry, just use 2 x 320g/11½oz ready-rolled shortcrust pastry sheets or roll your own with 600g/1lb 5oz from a 1kg/2lb 4oz pastry block. For a block of pastry, divide as in Step 2 then follow the method above. For sheets, cut a portion from the short edge and stick onto the side to turn the sheet from a rectangle to a rough square, then roll out more thinly until big enough to line and top the dish.
Foraged brambles can vary greatly in sharpness, especially when compared to the milder ‘dessert’ blackberries grown and sold commercially, so you may want to stir in more sugar if it is a little mouth-puckering.
Источник
How to cook the perfect apple and blackberry pie
Apples bulk up the berries in this quintessentially British pie that sings of autumn
Felicity Cloake’s perfect apple and blackberry pie. Photograph: Dan Matthews/The Guardian. Food styling: Liam Baker
Felicity Cloake’s perfect apple and blackberry pie. Photograph: Dan Matthews/The Guardian. Food styling: Liam Baker
Last modified on Wed 2 Oct 2019 15.11 BST
I f there’s anything more seasonal than an apple pie, it’s an apple and blackberry pie, described by Tamasin Day-Lewis as the autumn pie, while Nigel Slater reckons it’s “almost impossible to think of a dish that so accurately expresses the glories of the British countryside in autumn”. Few can fail to have bittersweet memories of past tangles with thorny brambles – one for the mouth, one for the bag – and though it takes a dedicated picker to amass enough to feed a family, they make a happy pair with their seasonal bedfellow, the apple, helping even the most meagre of harvests to stretch a little further. If you’re lucky enough to have a glut, freeze them to enjoy this recipe throughout the winter.
The fruit
The perennially sensible Jane Grigson writes in her Fruit Book that, “when you pick blackberries in the autumn, and gather windfall apples to make this pie, quantity and variety of fruit do not much come into it. You make the best of what you have. This is the way it should be.”
If, like me, you buy your fruit, however, the biggest decision is whether, like Grigson, you believe apple pies are likely to have tasted better before the introduction of the bramley in 1876, or if, as per Rowley Leigh’s A Long and Messy Business and the second volume of Slater’s Tender, you favour these cookers for this particular recipe. Grigson herself recommends tart eating apples such as “blenheim orange or belle de boskoop [the latter of which she asked friends to bring from France each January]”, Day-Lewis calls, less prescriptively, for “sharp eating apples” in her book All You Can Eat, and Jane McMorland Hunter and Sally Hughes compromise with a mixture of the two in their book Berries: Growing and Cooking.
Though flavours do indeed differ, this can easily be adjusted with sugar and lemon juice, but the texture of cooking apples is very different from that of dessert varieties. While bramleys break down into a jammy paste when heated, eating apples tend to keep their shape, especially when added to the pie raw, as Day-Lewis suggests. Perfectly pleasant, if time is of the essence, but McMorland Hunter and Hughes cook theirs first, so that the bramleys disintegrate and the dessert apples stay whole but slightly softened. This feels like the best of both worlds: the pureed apples adding moisture while filling the cavity of the pie, and the chunks of dessert apple offering a contrast in texture to the soft berries and bramleys.
Grigson, interestingly, takes a very different approach, cooking down half the blackberries with the apple peels, cores and a generous helping of sugar to produce a fruity syrup that she then pours over the remaining raw fruit. It’s delicious, but only suitable for a plate pie, rather than one encased in pastry, because it makes the filling very liquid.
Flavourings
If you do have time to cook the apples, my testers and I all like Leigh’s approach of frying them in butter and sugar, which adds richness to the filling, and McMorland Hunter and Hughes’ splash of brandy. Neither rather decadent addition is strictly necessary, but both are delicious if you happen to have them to hand.
Slater dusts his apples with a mere sprinkling of sugar, because he likes them “fairly tart”, but he tells readers with a sweeter tooth to heap on “anything up to a tablespoon per apple”. This is a sensible approach – after all, apples, as well as tastes, vary greatly – but however much you add, I’d recommend going for a brown sugar. We find McMorland Hunter and Hughes’ dark muscovado too intensely treacley, but the caramel flavour of Day-Lewis’ demerara or light muscovado works wonderfully with the sharpness of the apple.
The pastry
Everyone uses shortcrust of some variety, and mostly plain, though seeing as Grigson is non-specific, I go for crisp paté sucrée on her pie. A sweet filling, however, seems to me to demand a more savoury enclosure – Slater keeps it light and crumbly with a lard and butter mixture, but we’re sold on Leigh’s softer, yolk-enriched recipe. This is a pudding, after all.
Surprisingly, only a couple of the recipes line the dish with pastry before adding the fruit. In my opinion, a plate pie doesn’t offer a robust enough ratio of pastry to fruit here, but as Leigh notes, “it is a challenge to cook the bottom crust properly: it needs a lot of heat from below, and a fair bit of time”, so it’s worth heating a baking sheet in the oven first to help with this. Sprinkle the top with sugar for extra crunch and, like Slater, you may find yourself moved to wave a little flag in honour of this national treasure.
Perfect blackberry and apple pie
Prep 30 min, plus chilling
Cook 40 min
Serves 6
2 cooking apples
4 crisp, sharp eating apples
Juice of 1 lemon
25g butter
3 tbsp demerara sugar, or to taste
1 tbsp brandy or rum (optional)
300g blackberries, or however many you have
1 splash milk
For the pastry
350g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
1 pinch salt
200g cold butter
2 eggs
First make the pastry. Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. Grate in the butter, then rub it in with your fingertips until it looks like damp sand.
Mix the flour and salt, then grate in the butter and rub it in, before adding the egg yolks and a splash of cold water.
Separate the eggs, and set aside one white for later (give the other one to the dog, make a tiny meringue, or freeze it for bigger meringues another day), stir in the yolks, followed by just enough cold water to bring the mixture together into a smooth dough; four tablespoons should do it, but add it gradually.
Pinch off about a third and form both lots of pastry into a disc or rectangle, depending on the shape of your dish. Wrap well and chill for 30 minutes.
Peel, core and thickly slice the apples, then sprinkle with lemon juice to stop the fruit from discolouring.
Meanwhile, peel, core and thickly slice the apples and sprinkle with lemon juice.
Heat the butter in a frying pan over a medium heat and add the apples, two tablespoons of the sugar and the alcohol, if using, then fry for about five minutes, until they’ve started to soften. Add the blackberries, turn off the heat and leave to cool completely.
Fry the apple in butter with sugar and a splash of brandy, until soft, then stir in the berries off the heat.
Heat the oven and a baking sheet to 200C (fan 180C)/390F/390F/gas 6 and on a lightly floured surface roll, out the larger piece of pastry to about 5mm thick. Use this to line the base and side of a greased pie dish about 24cm wide, leaving an overhang around the edge, then spoon in the cooled filling.
Line a pie dish with rolled pastry, fill, top with a pastry lid and seal the edges with egg wash.
Roll out the second piece of pastry. Beat the reserved egg white with the splash of milk, brush this all around the rim of the pastry lining the dish, then lay the lid on top, pressing together the two pieces of pastry all around the rim to seal; trim off any excess (if you like, you can roll this again and cut into shapes to stick on top).
Pierce the lid so the steam can escape, bake for about 45 minutes, until golden, then slice and serve.
Brush the top with more of the egg white and milk mixture, sprinkle with the remaining sugar and cut two holes in the top to allow the steam to escape. Bake on the heated baking sheet for 25 minutes, then turn down the heat to 180C (fan 160C)/350F/350F/gas 4 and bake for another 20-25 minutes, until golden. Leave to cool slightly before serving with thick cream or hot custard.
Is apple and blackberry pie the king of autumnal desserts, or do you have another contender for the crown? Which variety of apple do you like to use, and what else do you like to do with blackberries once you’ve had your fill straight from the bush? And, most important of all, cream, custard… or ice-cream?
Источник
Blackberry and apple pies
less than 30 mins
This easy little blackberry and apple slice is the perfect way to use the blackberries from an afternoon’s picking. Serve hot with ice cream.
less than 30 mins
Ingredients
- 300g/10½oz apples, peeled, cores removed, sliced
- 125g/4½oz caster sugar, plus extra for dusting
- 1 tbsp blackberry liqueur
- 200g/7oz blackberries
- 1 packet ready-rolled puff pastry, cut into eight to twelve 6in x 4in/15cm x 9in rectangles
- 2 free-range eggs, beaten
- vanilla ice cream, to serve
Method
Place the sliced apples in a pan with the sugar and blackberry liqueur and cook gently over a medium heat for 5-6 minutes, or until the apples are softened. Set aside to cool, then mix in the blackberries.
Preheat the oven to 180C/355F/Gas 4.
Divide the apple and blackberry mixture, leaving aside any juices, among four of the puff pastry rectangles, leaving a 2cm/1in border around the edges of the pastry.
Using a lattice cutter, roll over the remaining pieces of pastry, or alternatively use a sharp knife to cut 2cm/1in slits in staggered rows 1cm/½in apart. Gently pull the pastry so that the slits open up and a lattice shape is shown.
Brush the edges of the filled pastry layer with the beaten egg, then carefully lay the lattice-cut layer of pastry on top. Seal the edges by pressing down, then brush the pastry all over with the beaten egg. Sprinkle over some caster sugar and bake the pastries for 20 minutes, or until the pastry is golden-brown and puffy.
Источник
