Best Apple Pie

Not my recipe, but another one from the BBC Good Food 'Ultimate' Series. Like the other recipes I have tried from this series, I have little interest in using any other recipe for the same dish. And unlike other recipes from this series, I think it has not been subjected to being madeover into a healthy version- I have already vented about this in my post on their ultimate cheesecake recipe.


To me it seems too far early in the year for Bramley apples to be falling off the tree, but despite this my mum brought me a bag full of them from the garden along with several yellow and green courgettes. On Sunday night we ate pasta with slow cooked courgettes, lots of basil and garlic and a little cream,   followed by apple pie- a perfect transition from late summer to autumn in one meal.

One of the things I really like about this recipe are the unconventional methods used in making it. The pastry is the only pastry I have made where the butter needs to be soft, so you can mix it quickly with the sugar. It's much easier than fussing about with hard lumps of butter, iced water and cursing your warm hands. For the filling, the apples are cut up, and left to go brown, meaning the apples don't leak once they are cooked and make the pastry soggy. Magically, they lose their unappealing brown colour once cooked.

We ate this with proper custard, I used Delia's recipe. The recipe suggests cream, but this was perfect for me.