Prep time 15 minutes Cook time 20 min
With lots of good quality ready-made pastry crust around, you can quickly have your kitchen filled with the lovely aroma of baking apples and cinnamon and enjoy an easy, delicious dessert.
I can’t bake but I love a good apple pie.
Unlike cooking, there is no margin for error in baking. If the temperature, time and ingredients are slightly off you have a disaster. On the other hand you can usually wing it at cooking. If the oven temperature or baking time is slightly off, no big drama.
So when the pie urge overwhelms me I turn to a foolproof Crostata (or Galette in French if you want to be fancy), a rustic, free-form pie with the crust folded around the filling. I love the lack of formality about how it is made and looks – as if someone plopped a mound of dough on the dinning table and filled with fruit. You don’t even need a special pie dish.
All you need to do is coat some apple slices with lemon, sugar, flour and spices, roll out a round of dough, and arrange the apple slices in the center of the dough. Fold the sides of the dough a little over the apples and bake. It is that easy.
Apple Crostata
by
Derek Farwagi
Ingredients
- Ready made pie pastry To avoid thawing time, choose the refrigerated brands not the frozen ones.
- 1-2 Apples, peeled and sliced ( Fuji,honey crisp, golden delicious will do) Depends on the size of apple
- ½ cup Granulated brown sugar (divided)
- 2 tbs All purpose flour
- ¼ tsp Ground cinnamon
- ¼ tsp Ground allspice
- ½ Lemon juice
- Pinch Salt
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
- Flour a surface and with a rolling pin (if you do not own one a wine bottle will do), roll the pastry into an 11-12-inch circle about 1/4 inch thick. Transfer it to a baking tray covered with floured parchment paper. (To easily transfer rolled out dough to baking pan, gently fold the dough circle in half then a quarter and lift that onto the floured baking pan. Then open up the circle.)
- For the filling, peel, core, and cut apple in half then slice each half into a quarter inch thick slices.
- In a large bowl, toss and coat apples with half the sugar, salt, flour and spices. Then add lemon juice.
- Add apple slices in a pile in the center of the dough leaving a two inch border of dough.
- Gently fold the border over the apples, pleating it to make a circle.
- Sprinkle remain half of sugar over the apples and crust.
- Bake the crostata for about 25 minutes, until the crust is golden and the apples are tender. Allow to cool. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Notes
For other recipes that use the “crostata” technique of folding pastry and leaving the center bare, visit Spanakopita “Crostata Style” and Tomato And Herb Crostata.
Derek Farwagi
Glad you enjoyed it.
Kate Dourian
I love this recipe because it’s so easy, quick and delicious.. My son has asked me to make it a few times now. Perfect lockdown dessert because you don’t need any fancy ingredients.