The phrase “dessert apple” may have become a bit obsolete. Nowadays, the combination of words conjures up images of pies, crisps, apple dumplings – sweet things that involve apples and follow a meal. An apple on its own is about the healthiest thing you could eat, right? Not dessert at all! But really the phrase really just means an apple that you would want to eat raw and fresh without first cooking, baking, or pressing it. So, really, pretty much everything that we grow at North Star is a “dessert apple.” Some are good for cooking as well, as the line between cooking and eating apples is not well defined in the U.S.

So, what’s with the name? I’m guessing that it hearkens back to an era when apples were synonymous with cider, and if you weren’t drinking your apples, you were likely drying or cooking them (or drying them and then cooking them). These apples were distinct from the ones popular today, with an unpalatable flavor or texture when raw. So, historically, for the masses, an apple that you would want to eat out of hand would be something of note. All those apple trees Johnny Appleseed planted? They were for pressing cider (which was, of course, the hard stuff), and the apples would have been too astringent and bitter to eat whole or unfermented. This is due to the prolific nature of apple genetics; plant an apple seed and you’ll get something dramatically different from its parent. So since Mr. John “Appleseed” Chapman was planting seeds, except for the one in a million, he was necessarily planting cider apples. In An Apple Harvest, Frank Browning and Sharon Silva explain: “If apples are nearly everywhere in the New World and the Old, they are not all uniformly delicious. Of the six thousand or so identified varieties, only a few hundred are good enough to be swallowed. Most are little green knots, their scant sugars drowned in bitter acid.” Furthermore, while American nurseries of a hundred years ago offered hundreds of varieties of apples for sale, today you’d be lucky to find upwards of thirty easily available. (These stable varieties are propagated by grafted cuttings rather than seed.) Some of those varieties gone by the wayside are the ones traditionally used for drying, which would have had an unpleasantly dry texture.

However, apple drying is not limited to those varieties; you can dry any number of dessert apples as well, and it’s a great way to spread out the harvest without taking up precious refrigerator space. Then you can snack on them as is all winter, or soak them in water or cider and use them in place of fresh apples for baking. There are several methods for drying (or “dehydrating”) apples. Fruits of all kinds have been dried in the sun since prehistory. Another of the oldest methods is to simply peel and core them and string them up whole in a warm drying room. Slicing them into rings speeds up the process. With the advent of modern ovens and specially-built food dehydrators, apple (or pear) rings can dry as quickly as overnight. Basically, the idea is to expose your food to warmth and air movement to lower its water content. If you live in a warm, breezy arid climate, you’re all set. But say it’s summer or fall in Pennsylvania, then you have a little less control over your drying conditions, and you’ll probably want to move your drying operation inside, and crank up your oven or dehydrator.

I currently have a top of the line ‘Excalibur’ dehydrator on long-term loan, and the Excalibur and I have been spending a lot of quality time together lately. I’ve got a routine down – about a half an hour to forty-five minutes in the evening peeling and slicing, run the dehydrator all night while I’m asleep, awake to a warm, apple-y smell rising from my kitchen, turn off the machine for the day, check on the fruit when I get home from work, and then run it a few more hours if anything needs more time. Home-scale dehydrators run the gamut – from the “Snackmaster” at around $40 to the “Excalibur Deluxe” topping out over $200. If you’re in the market, you’ll want to look for one with a thermostat and a fan.

Or, if you’re using your oven, put the fruit first onto wire cooling racks, cotton fabric, or cheesecloth, then onto your oven racks. If you use baking sheets, you’ll need to turn the fruit, since the air flow can’t travel through. Keep the oven as low as possible – no higher than 145°, or if your oven doesn’t go that low, turn it to “warm.” You might need to prop the door open a bit to encourage air circulation.

Either way, the process is pretty simple. Whether or not you peel the apples is up to you. The thickness of your apple slices also depends somewhat on you – how chewy or crispy you want your apple rings to be, and how long you want to spend drying them. In some scenarios, with some fruits, it might take up to even a few days. You do need to remove a certain amount of the water content to prevent the fruit from spoiling. Various sources say as dry as a raisin or until the fruit feels dry and leathery on the outside but slightly moist inside. If you’d like more of an “apple chip” just let them dry longer. If you’d like you can “pretreat” your apple slices – not with sulfur like commercially dried fruit – but with lemon juice and/or honey. This helps to keep your fruit from browning, but I’ve never really found this to be a problem. Dunk your fruit in lemon juice, a honey-lemon dip (1 cup honey: 1 cup water: the juice of one lemon), or a honey syrup of ¼ cup honey in 2 cups of hot water.

As you’re drying you’ll want to check in on your fruit from time to time, to turn it, or to remove any fruit that’s dry (it won’t all be done at exactly the same time). The amount of time needed varies widely with temperature, thickness, variety, etc., but I’ve found that overnight at about 135° is generally sufficient for most of the fruit I’ve dried. For more detailed instructions, check out http://www.pickyourown.org/apples_dried.htm which includes instructions on how to use your car as a dehydrator!

(For some great old fruit drying pictures: http://www.fruitfromwashington.com/History/fruit_prep.htm)

Resources:
An Apple Harvest by Frank Browning and Sharon Silva
Preserving Summer’s Bounty by the Staff of the Rodale Food Center

Could someone please tell me where the expression “easy as pie” came from? Pies are not easy. Like all skilled tasks, pie baking takes practice and repetition, usually a mentor of some sort, and a magic touch doesn’t hurt either. We’re talking about a very temperamental process that can be thwarted by humidity.

A life goal of mine is to make a good pie. Consistently. I’m getting there, but usually people of my generation are impressed with a pie of any caliber, so long as it’s made from scratch. Bumbling along on this assumption, I made a peach pie last season to take to a Backyard Fruit Growers’ meeting and potluck. Upon arriving, I discovered that there was some stiff competition in the pie department. I also learned a thing or two about the demographics of your average Backyard Fruit Growers attendee. Let’s just say there were some ladies present who had many long decades of pie-baking experience on me. They’d presumably had a lifetime of access to fruit fresh from their very own back yard, and they knew what to do with it. Humbled, I returned to my cookbooks and began my study of pie crust anew.

Now that fall is in the air, it’s time to bake. If you’ve got a solid pie crust up your sleeve, now’s the time to flaunt it. If not, don’t despair. There’s a whole world of baked goods out there waiting to be explored, and anything that involves fruit, a bit of sugar and butter, and arrives warm out of the oven will be more than appreciated. In fact, all those other baked fruit creations in the cobbler family are just as authentic to the heritage of our mid-Atlantic region. Pie, whether of the fruit, vegetable, or meat variety, is a solidly European creation, predating the cobbler by a few hundred years. It was when pie reached the far side of the Atlantic Ocean that it underwent transformation. According to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, “without the resources of brick ovens… colonial cooks often made cobblers – also called slumps or grunts – and their cousins, pandowdies, in pots over an open fire. In these types of pies, a filling made of fruit, meat or vegetable goes into a pot first; then a skin of dough is placed over the filling, followed by the pot’s lid. As cobblers cook, the filling stews and creates its own sauce and gravy, while the pastry puffs up and dries.”

It also seems that pies and their kinfolk, before the late 19th century, were served with all meals and at all times of day. I point proudly to tales of pie breakfasts in my own family history and take this as an invitation to shed any last shred of guilt about eating peach cobbler for breakfast. I invite you to do the same.

So, here’s an incomplete inventory of all the things you might do with fruit, flour, sugar and butter. (I’ll leave the gluten-free, vegan, or any other finagling up to you.) I’ve included a sample recipe for each, some of which, for fun, are quite old. Luckily, while recipes and techniques may fade from style, the ingredients remain the same, so revive away…

Brown Betty
From The Joy of Cooking: “Nobody remembers who Betty was, but a brown betty is both layered and topped with sweet buttered crumbs. The crumbs should be dry, so that they will absorb the juices in the middle and bottom layers and remain crunchy on the top. (For homemade breadcrumbs, dry sliced bread in a 225°F oven until firm to the touch and crisp, about 1 hour. Let cool, then break up the dried bread with your hands or chop with a knife into about 1-inch square pieces. Crush with a rolling pin to produce a fine meal or process in a food processor.)”
Apple Brown Betty

Buckle
From The Joy of Cooking: “A buckle is another type of cake with fruit folded into the batter before baking and a generous crumbly streusel topping. The cake buckles, or crumples, in spots from the weight of the topping before the batter sets, creating pockets of caramelized sugar and butter.”
Almond-Plum Buckle

Clafouti
From In The Sweet Kitchen: “Easy, fresh, light, very country, but also very elegant, clafouti is a traditional rustic Provençal dessert somewhere between a baked custard, a light pancake and a cakey soufflé. Traditionally made with cherries, clafouti is also wonderful made with apricots, berries, fresh figs, pears or even peaches or apricots…”
Black Plum Clafoutis

Cobbler
From The Joy of Cooking: “Cobblers are simply deep-dish single-crusted fruit pies; the crust is usually on the top, though occasionally it is on the bottom. Cobblers used to be made with pie dough, but a sweet, rich biscuit dough is more common today. For a tender crust, do not overmix the dough; stir in the liquid quickly and knead gently a few times to form the dough.”
Apple Cobbler

Crisps, Crunches, & Crumbles
From The Joy of Cooking: “These simple and popular desserts consist of sweetened fruit – usually lightly thickened to produce syrupy juices – baked with crumbly toppings of flour, butter, and sugar and sometimes oats, cookie or cake crumbs, nuts, and spices. For a crisp, the flour, butter, and sugar are mixed together like pie dough before the liquid is added, and the mixture scattered over the top like a streusel or crumb topping. An approximate ratio of three parts fruit to one part topping makes a perfect crisp. A crunch is fruit sandwiched between two layers of sweetened, buttered crumbs; it is served cut into squares, like bar cookies, but is a bit more fragile. Keep the butter cold for crisps and crunches and handle lightly to assure that the toppings will be both crisp and tender… Crumble is the British name for a crisp or crunch with oatmeal in the topping.”
Harvest Pear Crisp with Candied Ginger
Plum Crumble

Dumplings
From The Joy of Cooking: “Any pie dough, puff pastry, or biscuit dough can be used to make fruit dumplings or turnovers. Dumplings are formed by gathering the edges of the dough up around the filling like a purse or pouch; the resulting packets may be baked or boiled. (The texture of baked pastry contrasts particularly nicely with the filling.) Turnovers are made by folding the dough over the filling and can be formed in any size from miniature to large. The dough can be made well ahead and kept chilled until ready to use. These little ‘pies’ are best eaten the day they are baked.”
Apple Dumplings

Galette
From The Penguin Companion to Food: “… a flat, round cake; the word being derived from galet, a pebble weatherworn to the shape that is perfect for skipping…”
From The Joy of Cooking: “A galette – or in Italian, a crostata – consists of a flat crust of pastry or bread dough covered with sugar, pastry cream, or a thin layer of fruit… They are, in effect, dessert pizzas. Since galettes are baked on a flat sheet rather than in a pie or tart mold, they may be made in any shape that appeals to you. If the filling is juicy, bring the edge of the crust over the filling to catch drips; otherwise, simply double up the crust edge, then crimp or flute if you wish.”
Apple Galette

Grunts & Slumps
From The Joy of Cooking: “Grunts and slumps, both descended from puddings cooked in pots over the fire, are steamed fruit topped with dumplings. Grunts are steamed in a mold inside a kettle full of water and inverted when served; the result is something like a warm fruit shortcake. Slumps are cooked in a covered pan and served dumpling side up in bowls – more like a hot, sweet soup or stew under a dumpling… Grunts are best steamed in a soufflé dish, but pudding molds or heatproof bowls work as well; metal molds are not recommended, as they may overcook the fruit and impart a metallic taste. Cook slumps in stainless-steel, enamel cast-iron, or glass saucepans, but make sure the vessel has a tight-fitting lid to contain the steam. If the pan is uncovered before the dumplings are done, they will collapse into toughness.”
Apple Slump

Pandowdy
From The Penguin Companion to Food: “An old-fashioned deep-dish New England fruit dessert related to cobbler, grunt, and slump. Sliced or cut apples or other fruits are tossed with spices and butter, sweetened with molasses, maple syrup, or brown sugar, topped with a biscuit-like dough, and baked. Partway through the baking time, the crust is broken up and pressed down into the fruit so it can absorb the juices. This technique is called ‘dowdying’. After the crust is baked, it becomes crispy. Pandowdies are served warm with heavy cream, hard sauce, or a cream sauce flavoured with nutmeg.”
Apple Pandowdy

And if that isn’t enough to inspire you, take heed:

“It is utterly insufficient (to eat pie only twice a week), as anyone who knows the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy must admit. Pie is the American synonym of prosperity, and its varying contents the calendar of the changing seasons. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished.”

from The New York Times, 1902

(In response to an Englishman’s suggestion that Americans should reduce their daily pie eating to two days per week.)

Sources:

Regan Daley, In the Sweet Kitchen
Alan Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food
Kim O’Donnel, “American as Cobbler,” (A Mighty Appetite: August 11, 2006), The Washington Post
Irma S. Rombauer et al., The All New All Purpose Joy of Cooking
Linda Stradley, What’s Cooking America.
Vintage Recipes

This week, a bit of a tutorial. Have you ever contemplated canning as a way to save some of your seasonal harvest for the forty weeks of the year when there’s not a fruit share?

If so, you’re not alone, as going homesteader is hip these days – or so I gather by a recent article gracing the front page of the weekend Philadelphia Inquirer on “21st Century Homesteading.”

Among other pastoral pursuits, the article highlights home canning: “Chris Scherzinger, general manager of Jarden Home Brands, maker of Ball and Kerr home-canning supplies, reports a 60 percent increase in sales from 2007 to 2009, the biggest hike since the 1970s. ‘The economy is certainly a factor,’ he says, ‘but so is the growing interest in gardening and fresh food.’” A poke around the internet turns up enthusiastic blogs such as (Philadelphia’s own) Food in Jars and Tigress in a Jam These are not your grandmother’s canning resources, with recent recipes such as Nectarine Preserves with Summer Savory and White Pepper and White Peach Sauce with Vanilla.

Well, if you’ve never tried canning and you’re interested in giving it a try, canning peaches (straight up, nothing fancy) is a great place to start. Forget Labor Day, or Back to School, the real harbinger of the end of summer is the peach finale. Just a few more weeks, folks, so get ‘em while they last. This realization set me in a bit of a panic this week, dropping everything for an afternoon or two so I could “put up” my personal stash of peaches for the winter.

Peaches are “easy” because they’re a high-acid food that you can raw pack. Translation: you can process them in a hot water bath (you don’t need a pressure canner), and you can pack them into jars without cooking them first, which saves you a step and some extra dirty dishes. Basic canning is not difficult; it just takes time and the ability to follow directions. The big concern in canning is preventing botulism. We can see, smell, or taste many problems caused by microorganisms in our food (moldy bread, spoiled milk), but this is not the case with botulism, and it’s no joke. The tiniest amount of botulism is deadly. But good news: it simply can’t survive in a high-acid environment, and this includes peaches. If this is your first time canning, please review the basics and make sure you’re being safe at the USDA’s Complete Guide to Home Canning or the Ball canning jar site, which has a useful FAQs section.

The best peaches to use are ones that are firmly ripe, probably about two days after you bring the fruit share home. Yellow or white or a mixture, it’s up to you. I found that about 6 medium peaches or nectarines fills one quart jar. You’ll want to prepare a syrup, which will help the peaches keep their shape, color, and flavor. You can use sugar or honey; I used a honey syrup that consisted of 1 cup honey to 3 cups hot water, and this amount was enough for six quart jars. The proportions for your syrup are flexible – even using water would be safe. For a light sugar syrup, combine ½ cup sugar with 2 cups water. For a heavy sugar syrup, combine 2 cups sugar with 2 cups water. Or you can choose any quantity in between.

Things you’ll need:
canning jars with (new) lids and screw bands*
a large pot big enough to hold your jars plus a few inches of water above them
a small pot large enough to contain your lids
a medium pot for boiling your syrup
a ready supply of clean dish towels
a skinny rubber spatula
peaches
sugar or honey

* You can reuse proper canning jars and the screw bands, but you should always use new lids. I prefer the wide mouth jars because they’re easier to fill and to clean. Either pints or quarts will work.

Things that are nice to have:
a canning rack (holds your jars in place during processing)
a canning funnel
canning tongs
a kitchen thermometer
several mixing bowls
lemon juice
whole spices, such as cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, or cloves

Step by Step:

1. Fill your large pot with your clean, empty jars and add enough water to cover them with about two inches of water. (Note: when the jars are filled, the contents will displace some of this water.) You can use a canning rack to hold your jars in place, or, if not, a trick I learned from the Italian grandma of a friend of a friend: cushion your jars with towels. You don’t want the jars to hit each other or the sides of the pot. Start heating the water. It’ll take awhile. You want to bring the water to about 140°, or when tiny bubbles just start to appear on the sides of the jars. Do not let it come to a boil at this point.
2. Place your new lids and screw bands in the small pot. Cover with water and bring to a simmer. Then just leave them in the hot water until you’re ready for them.
3. Make your syrup, and start heating it. You’ll need it to be at a boil when it’s time to fill your jars.
4. Prepare your peaches. You’ll want to slice and peel them. You can blanch the peaches in boiling water to help remove the skins, but I find that when they’re nice and ripe, it’s just as easy and less mess to simply peel them with a knife. I’ve found that a small, serrated knife works best. I like to cut the peaches into eighths or even smaller, so that they’re easier to pack into the jars. As you cut them, you can drop them into a bowl of water to which you’ve added a teaspoon of lemon juice to prevent them from darkening.
5. Pack your hot jars with the peach slices. If you’d like, you can add whole spices, such as cinnamon, cardamom, or cloves. Pack the fruit in as tightly as you can, then top it off with your boiling syrup, leaving a ½ inch of headspace between the liquid and the rim of the jar. To remove any air pockets, run your spatula around the inside edges of the jar, and correct the amount of liquid if needed to maintain that ½ of empty space.
6. Carefully wipe the jars with a clean, damp cloth; you especially don’t want any food to be left on the rims of the jars (where the lid meets the jar), or it will prevent a good seal. Place the lids on the jars and gently screw on the bands.
7. Place the jars back into the water bath. Be careful that the water hasn’t reached a boil while you’ve been filling the jars – a drastic temperature difference could make the jars crack. Make sure that there is two inches of water over the tops of the jars. Cover the pot, and bring the water to a boil (this can take awhile).
8. As soon as your water boils, set a timer: 30 minutes for quart jars, 25 minutes for pint jars. Make sure that the pot stays covered and the water stays at a full boil and completely covers the jars for the entire processing time.
9. When the time is up, turn off the heat. I like to let the jars sit in the water bath for a good ten minutes; if you take them out immediately, the contents can leak out of the lid, ruining your seal. Remove the jars to a wooden rack or onto a counter covered with a few dry towels, to prevent cracking. Let them cool, untouched. Check them to see if the center of the lid is down and stays down when you press on it. If so, your jar has sealed. If not, you should reprocess your jar, keep it in the fridge, or throw it in the freezer.
10. Enjoy your peaches sometime in midwinter, when the last apples have been eaten and the fruit CSA seems like a distant memory. It might be a far cry from feeding your family all winter from a cellar-full of jarred goods, but it’s one small, satisfying step towards being a bit more involved in your personal food system.

If this piques your interest, and you’d like to learn more, a few good places to start are Preserving Summer’s Bounty by the Rodale Food Center (where I got most all of this information) and The Complete Book of Year-Round Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Delicious Recipes by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard, which is geared toward someone canning in rather small batches in the home kitchen.

Comments or questions? You can contact me at northstarerin@gmail.com.
Past, present, and future writings posted on my blog (link to: http://fruitsunheardof.wordpress.com/)