Sourdough apple pie

Yesterday some folks from the playgroup came over and we all picked apples from our tree. They’re green, roundish, crisp and tart — not sure if they’re actually Granny Smith (as the description might suggest) or Golden Delicious (as the previous owners, who planted it, thought) or something else, but they are nice for eating and make fabulous pie.

I decided to try making a sourdough pie crust. I found three recipes online, and adapted a little bit — I saw one had baking soda, and I know that can cut down on the sour taste (I like sourdough for its health more than its taste), so I adapted that part to the recipe that used the most sourdough.

It was a weird recipe. I added maybe two or three times as much flour as it called for, and it still needed to have more kneaded in. It made a soft pliable dough that was very nice to roll out at first, but as it approached a good crust thickness it got very stretchy and fell apart rather easily.

I made two pies in the morning and froze them — lined the pie pan with plastic wrap so when they were solidly frozen I could remove them and bag them and use the pans again.

I ran out of butter so I had to wait until evening to make the other two. The third one I baked, and the fourth went into the freezer.

I am now tasting pie #3, and it is delicious. I tasted the filling first — thin slices, nice and mushy, with juices thickened nicely with flour and flavored with cinnamon and a little honey — not too sweet. The crust is actually more like apple dumpling dough than anything else — chewy, a little soft, almost crisp in places. The first bite of crust I tried, without any filling, was noticeably sour, but I didn’t notice it much after that.

I wasn’t able to get the crusts large enough to seal them together, so my “slice” is really a scoop, with a hunk of the bottom crust lying on top.