I really like home-made apple pie. I’ve made it in the past. And I recently had a hankering for apple pie, but I didn’t feel like making it. It’s a pain for me. First off, I stick to a low-fat diet, so I can’t use the classic pie-crust recipes calling for solid shortening (or heaven forbid, pig lard). I can use canola oil for my pie crusts, but oil crusts are harder to deal with; they don’t hold together too well after you roll out the dough, so you have to put the pie crust together in patches, as opposed to laying down one big sheet. Another problem: since I live alone, I eat the pie over the course of maybe 2 or 3 weeks, which means that I have to keep it in the refrigerator. And my refrigerator is a bit crowded (given that I do all of my cooking and store a lot of pre-cooked food for serving during the week). A round pie wastes too much floor space, given the round and flat configuration of a pie.

So I did some re-thinking about how to make an apple pie. First off, I decided to try a different geometry, based upon a pound cake loaf pan (hopefully a glass pan, but a metal bread loaf pan will do). That way, the “pie” would be square and deep, and would fit better in my refrigerator. As to the crust, I decided to go with something more like a cookie dough crust, using sugar (but not eggs). So I mixed together some wheat flour, a bit of oat flour (not terribly exotic; just take some rolled oats and put them in a food processor or grinder), some brown sugar, some canola oil, a pinch of salt, and a bit of honey or Karo dark syrup (not the light syrup, which is high in corn fructose, the bad kind of sweetener) for added moisture (thus lessening the amount of oil needed). If you get your proportions right, this should have the consistency of a relatively dry putty, and is easy to line the pan with. The thickness of this pan crust should be about ¼ inch, a bit thicker than the classic pie crust (which is around 1/8 inch).

Then you peel and core your apples and mix the slices with a bit of flour or corn starch, a bit of sugar (don’t need as much as for regular apple pies, since the sugary crust will contribute some sweetness), and the classic spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice, if you’ve got it handy). Since I’m a natural fiber kind-of fellow, I don’t throw away the apple peals; I put them in a food processor and turn them into a fiber mash, then mix that with the apple slices (along with the flour, sugar and spices).

Next, you pile the sliced, coated apples into the crust-lined pan; pile them up deep, so that they heap up above the edge of the pan. During the baking phase, these apples will shrink and the top of this “pie” will get lower and lower. So you want enough filling in there so that it won’t go too low. Now, we have to put something on top of the apple filling. You could use the same putty-like sugar dough that we used for the sides of this “pie loaf”. But given all the apple filling compression that happens for a deep “pie” like this, a solid roof would allow a big air gap between the top crust and the filling. So I prefer more of a crumb top. You just mix a little more flour and oat flour (and perhaps more sugar and spice) into the dough mix, as to dry it out just a bit and make it more “crumbly”. Then you grab it and crumble it and sprinkle it over the apple filling. You want to cover the filling sufficiently (as to keep the top of the filling from drying out during baking), but not so much as to merge into a “solid roof”.

Then you bake the thing. I’d say 375 degrees for least an hour. A glass loaf pan is good for this, since it lets you see how dark the crust is getting. You don’t want it to burn, but you can let it get darker than the usual apple pie crust would get. More of a middle-brown, versus the darker tan shades that pie crusts generally are baked to.

So this was my “apple pie loaf” experiment. Below is a pic of the results. It doesn’t look too bad, IMHO. And when I finally cut and lifted out a slice and heated it for desert, the actual eating wasn’t that bad either. It may take another 2 or 3 tries to find the right mix and the right baking time and procedure (I might experiment with putting a foil cover over the pan during part of the baking phase, as is sometimes done with apple pies). But this was certainly a good start, and will provide me with some enjoyable deserts over the next few weeks.

Oh, does it taste like apple pie? No, not exactly. But it will still satisfy that occasional urge for something that blends together apples, sweetness, spice and baked crust. And it lends itself to different fruit combinations, e.g. apple and pear. I can’t wait to try it with peaches during the summer! (Just remember to add more flour or corn starch when dealing with peaches, as they are more “wet” than apples.)