When the two neighbor boys came to the door with a sack full of fresh-picked fruit from their apple tree, I was thrilled to do some fall cooking to store away for the winter. Right now I have half of the apples stewing in the crockpot for applesauce, but Sunday I made apple pie filling. I had never made filling like this ahead of time - I usually just slice fresh apples, toss them with sugar and cinnamon, and pop them into a crust-lined pie dish, but I was pleased with the moist results of this stove-top recipe.
18 cups thinly sliced apples
lemon juice
8 cups water
4 1/2 cups white sugar
1 cup cornstarch
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
Right off the bat, I refused to peel the apples. I grew up using an apple-peeler-corer-slicer contraption, which worked well on apples just the right size. Left to my own devices (aka a knife), I opted to leave the skin on, especially since the apples I was working with were very small and would take a long time to peel. And, as my Dad would say about potatoes (and I'm sure must be true of apples as well), most of the nutrients are found right in and beneath the skin, so why bother? For those of you who are wondering, the filling turned out great despite my lack of peeling. I urge you to do the same and save yourself the work!
As you slice the apples, toss them in a bowl with lemon juice to keep them from turning brown (although the cinnamon tints the filling brown later, so I'm not sure if it really matters except perhaps the lemon draws out the apple flavor).
Fill a large pot with 8 cups water and heat on the stove. Combine the sugar, cornstarch, and spices and whisk into the water as it heats. Bring to a boil and stir constantly while boiling for two minutes. Add the apples and return to a boil.
Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until the apples are tender, about 10-15 minutes. Cool for 30 minutes.
You can use some of the filling immediately, like I did, and ladle it directly into a pie shell. I was having difficulty with my pie dough this time, so instead of struggling with the top crust, I packed the dough into a ball, refrigerated it for an hour while I was gone, and used my large-hole grater to shred the dough on top of the pie in German apple pie fashion before dusting with cinnamon sugar and baking as normal.
The recipe said it would make around five pies, but I used nearly a third of the filling to make one. It could be that I didn't pack the apples tightly enough when I was measuring, or that I just like to pack my pie shells full of more filling than is normal. I froze the rest of the filling in two plastic containers. Once they had frozen solid, I popped the blocks of filling out of the containers and into gallon freezer bags so that I could use the containers for other uses in the meantime.
As a side note, the apple pie recipe I have used in the past makes pies that taste best hot, fresh out of the oven. This one, however, was even better cold the next day because the filling was so moist. I'm not sure I'll make them the old way again. Enjoy!
Yummy!
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