Yesterday we were invited to a party here in Malmö.
It´s always the question “what should we bring?”
It´s even more complicated with international friends. What´s bon ton here?
But…I haven´t been questioning too much, so I decided to go for a pie.
In the morning I went to the green market, a nice routine that we have with my husband on Saturday morning. For necessity and for pleasure, with the sun and with the rain.
We have two favorite spot and we gave them labels to distinguish them, “The-Nice-Old-Lady” that sell vegetables and some local fruit, and “Our Friend” where we can always have a taste of the fruit before.
From “The-Nice-Old-Lady” I have got these red-snow-white-kind of apple, really sour and not really crispy …perfect for my pie.
So I went home and I have started to look for a recipes. I had in my mind a picture that I saw on a American Thanksgiving recipe book and I wanted to recreated.
A perfect crunchy pastry with sliced apple in the middle covered from small leaves of pastry. Beautiful.
I have started to read the recipe. And problems have arrived from the beginning, the ingredients: no eggs, using sour cream and water for the dough and vegetable lard…
Vegetable lard…Ok, lets google the last one…for images.
“Crisco”, this is the result. How, what and why should I have this “crisco” in my home. So there were too many lacking ingredients no sour cream and no crisco.
So I opened my scratch book of home-recipes, where all the pages are covered of stain of pastry and little bit sticky for the sugar…
Here it is my recipe, my recipe, my safe recipe an Italian version of apple pie:
Torta di mele
ingredients:
for the dough:
– 450g all purpose flour
-150g sugar
-50g moscovado sugar
– 3 eggs (medium size)
– a pinch of salt
– 150g no salty butter (room temperature) + 10g
for the filling:
– 10 small-medium sour apples
– half lemon juice
– 3 tsp cane sugar
– 1 tsp moscovado sugar
– 1 cup of raisins
for the decoration:
– 2 tsp cane sugar
– 1 egg (just the yellow)
tools:
-30 cm pie pan
– stand mixer (optional)
– cookies leaf shaper
Procedure:
Mix all the ingredients for the shortcrust together, making the butter in quite fin slices.
Use a stand mixer but if you don´t have it you can just do it by hands.
(Put the flour on a table and make a hole in the center where you will add all the other ingredients, you need to process the dough really fast to don´t ruin it. If your hands become to warm than it will be a disaster so you should start to mix it with a metal spatula or a side of a large knife).
The dough is ready when it becomes yellow and smooth.
Divide the dough in 3/4 part for the base of the pie and 1/4 part for the decorations. Let in the fridge for at least half an hour.
Preheat the oven to 180°C.
In the mean time, wash and peel the apples, slice and mix them in a bowl with the sugars and the lemon juice.
Roll out the bigger dough and make it in a disk shape, 1 cm thick. Overspread the butter over the pan. Put the dough into the pan an roll the edges to make a nice frame for your pie.
Roll out the other dough in 0.7cm thick layer. Use the leaf shape to make the decoration.
Put the filling inside the pie and decorate it with the leaves of shortcrust.
Brush with the yellow of the egg and besprinkle its top with the cane sugar.
In the end, It went really well. I have copied the aspect of the American pie and I used my old secure Italian recipe.
Fortunately, we found out that we decide to bring the right thing because the hosts didn´t prepare any dessert. But they have prepared an amazing stewwww.
By the way, thanks again guys for your hospitality!
