Okay, so everyone’s been seeing those fancy caramel rose apple pies online, right? And I thought, hey, how hard can it actually be? Famous last words, let me tell you.
Getting Started: The Dough and The Dream
First off, the crust. People always go on about the crust. I read somewhere that a bad crust with the best apples makes a fair pie, and a good crust with fair apples makes a good pie, but a good crust with great apples makes an excellent and memorable pie. No pressure, then! So, I really tried with this crust. Made my own, chilled it, rolled it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was mine. You know, you want those apples to shine, the ones that have that perfect mix of acid, tannin, sweetness, all that good stuff you get from properly ripened fruit. But if the base is like cardboard, what’s the point?
The Apple Saga: Slicing and Dicing (and Hoping)
Then came the apples. The “rose” part. This means slicing them super thin. Like, see-through thin. My mandoline slicer and I had a real heart-to-heart. Took ages. My plan was to make these beautiful, delicate apple roses. The reality was a lot of broken apple slices and me muttering to myself. I also remembered reading something about making sure the filling is nice and thick. They said to add a touch of tapioca starch to the apples after they’ve sat a bit and released some juice. Apparently, this stuff absorbs the extra liquid and thickens it up without making it all gloopy. So, I tossed my apple slices with sugar and spices, let them sit, then threw in some tapioca starch and gave the whole bag a good shake. Fingers crossed it wouldn’t be a soupy mess.
The Caramel Conundrum
Caramel. Oh boy. I decided to make my own. Sugar, butter, a bit of cream. It’s a high-stakes game, that. One minute it’s beautiful amber, the next it’s a smoking, bitter disaster. I was watching that pot like a hawk. Managed to get it to a nice deep color without, you know, setting off the smoke alarm. Poured that molten gold into the bottom of my pie dish. Felt pretty good about that part, actually.
Assembling the Beast and Baking Thoughts
Arranging the apple slices into “roses” on top of the caramel was… an experience. It’s fiddly work. You gotta roll them up tight, then try to place them so they look like a flower and not a sad, collapsed apple pile. It took way longer than I thought. My back was aching. But eventually, it sort of resembled a rose pattern. Ish.
Into the oven it went. Now, here’s another thing I picked up. Apparently, apples have this stuff called pectin, and if you heat them too hot, too fast, like over 185°F (that’s about 85°C), they just turn to complete mush. Which is not what you want for defined apple slices. But, get this, if you can hold the apples at a lower temperature, somewhere around 160°F, but not much over, for a good while, their own natural enzymes actually make that pectin more stable against the heat later. Science, eh? I just tried to bake it at a moderate temperature, hoping for the best, not really sure if I was hitting those magic numbers. I just didn’t want apple sauce pie.
The Grand Reveal (Sort Of)
So, after what felt like an eternity, I pulled it out. It smelled amazing, I’ll give it that. The caramel had bubbled up around the edges. The apple “roses” weren’t exactly botanical illustration quality, but they hadn’t totally disintegrated either! We let it cool, which is pure torture when your house smells that good.
Was it the prize-winning, life-changing apple pie? Well, the crust was decent. The apples were cooked through but still had some bite, so my makeshift temperature management might have done something right. The tapioca starch trick worked; no soggy bottom, and the filling was nicely thickened. The caramel was definitely the star. It was a LOT of effort for a pie, though. My kitchen looked like a bomb site.
Would I make it again? Ask me next week. Right now, I’m just glad I tried it and it was, you know, edible. Pretty tasty, even, if I do say so myself. But those picture-perfect ones online? They’re either made by wizards or people with way more patience than me.
