Lake Simcoe Apple Pie
The best apple pies I've ever had were made with apples from the trees planted by my great-grandparents near Lake Simcoe. These trees weren't sprayed or pruned for easy picking.
One of us would climb a tree and gently shake a limb to make the apples fall. The rest of us would gather them from the ground. The wormier windfall apples were raked into a pile and composted, which would attract a lot of bees and wasps.
Nobody wanted to gather the wormy apples, and my grandmother Mary had to remind everyone to come pick them up each year.
We'd cut out the parts with worm holes and peck marks made by the birds, before peeling and slicing the apples. My sister Sandra and I once spent an entire day in the small kitchen, making pies to freeze.
The old apple trees started being less productive, so Sandra's husband Karl decided to prune them, but that didn't help. Eventually he cut most of them down.
My mom planted a new apple tree where the weeping willow used to be, near the house her grandfather built. Update 2022: The apple new apple tree didn't survive and is gone now. This year, I bought some Gravenstein pie apples from Old Homestead Orchard farm but they were small so we ate them. The best pie apples are large, for easy peeling, and have dense-textured pulp. Braeburn and Northern Spys are good pie apples.
Update 2024: This year I picked some large Cortland apples from an orchard near Stouffville, and everybody wanted to just eat them. It was hard keep some apples for Thanksgiving pie.
- Pastry for a double-crust pie
- 1/2 - 3/4 cup sugar (more sugar if apples are tart)
- squeeze of lemon juice (if apples aren't tart)
- 2 Tbsp. flour
- 1 tsp. cinnamon
- dash of grated nutmeg
- 6 cups peeled, sliced apple
- 2 Tbsp. very cold butter, cut in pieces
Line a 9-inch pie plate with pastry. Roll a 12-inch round for a 9-inch pie.
Dough made from lard can be rolled very thin. If you roll on a floured, flowered cloth the dough should be thin enough that you can see the flower pattern through the pastry dough. I roll pastry on floured parchment paper now and just imagine the flower pattern.
Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees F.
In a bowl, mix flour, sugar and cinnamon.
Toss the apples in the sugar mixture, then place apple slices in the pastry-lined pie plate.
Dot with butter.
Top with a round of pastry and flute edges.
For a sweet crust, sprinkle the pastry top with sugar before baking. (My mother never did this.)
Cut vents into the top of the pastry so that steam can escape. Vent an apple pie by pricking an "A" in the top crust with a fork. When she was little Lauren said the "A" on an apple pie was really for Arthur, because her grandpa liked apple pie the best.
Bake 10 minutes in preheated 425 degree F oven.
Reduce heat to 350 degrees F and bake 30 minutes or so, until pie crust is golden.
Baking perfect pastry comes with experience because you have to know your oven.
When my mom's oven was getting old, she started baking pies at 425 degrees for 10-15 minutes and turned it down to 375 to finish baking. She says if you don't have a very hot oven you might have to bake a pie at 400 degrees for 40-50 minutes. And if you don't get good results baking pastry, maybe you need a new oven, "You used to get an oven when you got married and you'd use it for life, now you might need a new one every 5-8 years." For some people that now seems to apply to husbands, too.
Put a cookie sheet on the rack below the rack the pie is on, in case hot juice spits out and spills over, to avoid having to scrape burnt pie filling off the oven bottom.
