Fall Baking Kept Simple: Crustless Apple Pie

It's often said that you can spot a good baker by how meticulously they measure things. Given that my other blog is called No Recipes, I'll let you come to your own conclusions on my talents (or lack there of) as a baker. That's why most of my baking is limited to simple stuff like cookies and crisps.

But Thanksgiving is my favorite food holiday, and its one of the few times every year that I feel like being a little more daring with my oven. A number of years ago I did a crustless pumpkin pie that was a hit with my guests. It involved hollowing out a pumpkin and filling it with a milk custard before steaming it.

It got me thinking what a crustless apple pie might be like. I got to work hollowing out some Fuji apples, and mixed the carvings with dates, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter, and a little tapioca starch. Apples stuffed back into the carved out shells, I started thinking about what to do for the topping.

My first instinct was to make a pie dough and cover the apple with a top crust, but I just couldn't see the crust sticking to the waxy skin of the apple . Instead, I decided to add some extra sugar and oats to the crust and crumble it on top.

It turned out great. Baking the apples rendered the skins tender enough to eat, infusing the adjoining flesh with all the flavor from the skin. The inside was like a traditional apple pie with caramel notes from the dates, and the topping formed a crisp crumbly layer with a gooey inner layer. All the components of an apple pie minus the fuss of rolling out dough.

Fuji, Honeycrisp and Pink Lady are my favorite apples to bake with because they have a great balance between sweetness and acidity and a powerful apple flavor that doesnt fade with cooking. They also tend to retain their shape much better than varieties such as Red and Golden Delicious. Granny Smiths could work for this recipe however you're going to need to either add more dates or sugar to offset the tartness of the apple.

I used two freakishly large fuji apples that weighed close to a pound each, but you can use smaller apples, youll just need to use more of them (840 grams in total) and reduce the baking time a little.