On Tuesday I took a break from my daily practice of waking up without an alarm clock so I could get an early start on my plans for the day – baking apple pies. The previous Saturday the GF and I invested almost sixty Canadian dollars and two hours of our morning acquiring eighteen kilograms of fresh apples from a local fruit farm. My favourite autumn food is apple pie and I was *not* going to let this year pass with only token handouts of leftovers from Christmas / Thanksgiving / Easter supper.
So with the apples all purchased I ventured out to Orleans to learn from my mom the secrets of building delicious apple pies.
Now most people would keep secret something as important as the instructions for the perfect apple pie. Information is power and power is money and money is happiness and all that. But me, I get happy from eating pies (apple and rhubarb, not meat pies – these make me the opposite of happy – whatever that is) – so if more people are building apples pies *properly* it increases opportunities for me personally as I am more likely to benefit from the increased supply.
“What of the existing supply?” Well, right now Big Apple is focussed on quantity not quality. All the commercial suppliers construct their pies using robots and to save money they use every part of the apple (cores and all).
Everyone knows the best pies are made by highly-trained humans in a kitchen – not by some minimum-wage-earning robot in a factory somewhere. But the media has distracted all the voters (like they do every fall) with made-up scandals involving the end of the world. Last year it was the Mayans and this year the Republicans. I wonder what they’ve got planned for 2014? I bet you ten dollars it involves Toronto mayor and real-life walking-Onion-news-article Rob Ford getting his hands on some sort of bio weapon. “I think he just has gas.” That only proves my point – no one is going to click through to read a news story about a boring trip to the doctor. And all these print media outlets have to pay their bankruptcy lawyers somehow. So yeah.
Anyway. Here’s the step-by-step for making world-class apple pies. Call me if you need any help with quality control.
1. Sort your apples in a 6×10 grid on your kitchen table.
Remember to put your laundry out before you start baking.
2. Make sure you have all your ingredients – bleached white flour, bleached white cane sugar, sixty Courtland apples,
and a cocaine-sized baggie of cinnamon.
3. Peal and cut the apples into cubes about the size of my thumb. Take a pie tin and pour the cut apples into the tin to measure out the correct volume.
4. Take one half cup of white sugar and add three lines of cinnamon.
like this.
5. Then take two tables spoons of white flour and add it to the cinnamon sugar mixture.
Like this.
6. The final product should look something like
this.
7. Next mix the sugar-flour-cinnamon in with the measured-apples.
Like this.
8. Once the apples are mixed, you need to make the crust. Get your mom to prepare the pastry and roll it out into a circle.
Like this.
9. Take the circle and fold it in half.
Like this.
10. Cut some air vents in the lid to prevent the pie from exploding when it’s baking.
like this.
11. Pour the apples into the crusted pie tin.
Like this
12. Next add as much butter as you can. The more butter, the more delicious the pie.
Like yummy!
13. Add the lid and bond the top and bottom crusts by pinching them with your fingers all they way around. Remove the excess dough with a table knife.
Remember to laugh at your foreign roommates when they try to pronounce the word “dough”.
14. You now have a finished pie. It just has to be cooked.
or launched at someone.
15. Put it in the oven.
like this.
16. Set the oven for 15 minutes at 430 degrees F (to cook the crust)
like this.
17. Then 35 minutes at 350 (to cook the filling).
Like this.
18. At the end you should have about nine pies.
Thats’s six short of the stated objective for the day.
“What are you going to do with all these pies?” Well, that’s obvious. I’m going to bribe my brother to get him to watch Avatar with me. He’s got a sweet tooth and I know he’s powerless against delicious apple pies. Most people are.
Die Hard Three 
note: we have the remaining 9 pies as hostages in our freezer. they will be released one at a time minus one dad size piece from each or surrender 2 pies to us and the rest go free
Jason – what??? Love you and hi to your folks!!
I wrote butter but it’s actually margarine. The whole pie is vegan!
Ok, I understand wanting to have a freezer full of apple pies but you said “. . . to learn from my mom the secrets of building delicious apple pies”. You had your Mom make the pastry! It’s no secret that Mom’s make the best pastry. You wussed out!
Lotta reminds me of this every single day.