Stevie Cameron mentioned her oatmeal-free apple crisp a few times when she was guest speaker at the Knox Women’s Breakfast, so we asked her to share the recipe. Here are two versions, one for the family, and one for a crowd.
Recipe from the Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook
for a regular size pan. (Serves 6.)
- 5 cups peeled and sliced apples
- 1/3 cup water
- ¼ cup flour
- 1 cup brown sugar, packed
- ¼ tsp salt
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/4 pound butter chopped into small pieces
Preheat the oven to 350 F
Butter a large baking dish (shallow-ish, not high)
Spread the apples in the dish
Sprinkle the water on top
Combine the flour, sugar, cinnamon, a little scrape or two of nutmeg & ¼ tsp salt.
Toss in the butter and stir the whole mess with a fork or a wooden spoon until the mixture is all well combined. Spread the topping over the apples. Bake at least 30 minutes; you want the apples cooked and soft and the topping melting and crumbly. Make sure you cover the apples with a nice fat layer, right to the edges. Don’t be mean with the topping – make extra if you need to. The finished crisp should have a layer of baked topping at least ½ or a whole inch thick, right to the edges.
Out of the Cold Apple Crisp
(To serve approximately 100.)
Use ceramic or sturdy metal pans with high sides – at least 3 inches high. Big metal church roasting pans are perfect.
APPLES:
- 1 ½ bushel cooking apples – Spys, Gravensteins, Macs, Ida Reds, Cortland’s, Spartan, Royal Gala.
Peeled, cored and sliced.
(Don’t slice the apples thinly or they will turn into applesauce. Unless they are huge, like large Spys, 8 slices or so per apple works. Spys are great because they are big, tart and full of flavor.)
TOPPING:
- 13 ½ cups all-purpose flour
18 cups packed brown sugar
9 cups butter (4 ½ pounds)
12 tbsp cinnamon
6 tbsp nutmeg
3 tbsp salt
Method for base:
Thickly butter 9 or 10 deep baking/casserole pans, each about 18” x 13”x 3”. Fill each buttered pan with sliced apples to about ¾ full.
Add 1 cup of water to each pan. Cover each pan of apples with 1 ½ batches of topping.
NB: Method for topping:
(Remember: you need 1 and ½ batches for each pan but a regular size food processor like a Cuisinart can only manage one batch at a time!).
For each batch of topping:
- 1 ½ cup all-purpose flour
2 cups packed brown sugar
1 cup butter, cut into pieces
4 tbsp cinnamon
1 tbsp nutmeg
Generous pinch salt
For each batch, put the above ingredients into the food processor and process until the mix has come together well into one large mass.
Remove and spread over most of the apples in one pan: make another batch and use half of it to complete the topping on the partly covered pan. Continue making batches of topping and covering the pans.
Bake the pans at 350 Fahrenheit for about an hour, until the topping has melted and started to caramelize a bit.
If it is crumbly and dry, it hasn’t cooked long enough or you might have forgotten to add water. The water turns syrupy, bubbles up and cooks with the topping to help make it candy-like on top.
Watch pans carefully; they shouldn’t scorch. The apples should be soft and thoroughly cooked – if they are still sticking out in pieces through the topping, they haven’t cooked enough. The finished desert will sink a lot – to about 2/3 its starting height – but it will be good.
Note: This recipe does not use oatmeal. Oatmeal turns it into Apple Crumble. Fine, but it’s not Apple Crisp.