There's a nice side effect of this project: we eat a hell of a lot more dessert than we used to. So while Christina was busy stirring up that delicious lentil soup (which we made again last night, and will be making again and again and again...), I turned my attention to what would follow it: apple crumble.
Everybody loves apple crumble, so when it came time to choose our hundred recipes from the book, this one easily made the cut, even though I must've had hundreds of apple crumbles over the years. And besides, we had to see what Gordon would do to tart it up.
First trick - mess with the texture by grating half of the apples instead of just chopping them into chunks. For future reference, grating apples while you've got three fingers in a splint is not a great deal of fun.
Second trick - caramelise the sugar! Never done this before, so obviously I made the classic beginner's mistake of stirring the sugar, and just about ruined my skillet in the process. After a brief interlude of boiling water in the pan to get all the toffee unstuck, I started again. Much better the second time, but I was still fairly terrified of burning the sugar, so I probably didn't do it long enough. Still, it smelled like caramel, and I think that's what we were going for.
Then in with the apples and cranberries - cranberries being the third trick, messing with the texture again - and let them stew for a bit with the cinnamon, lemon juice and vanilla seeds - trick four - before covering it all with the crumble.
If I have a complaint about this dish - and again, we're splitting hairs, obviously it was delicious - it would be the crumble topping itself. I found it to be much too fine in texture, and the granola mixed in didn't really add anything. Overall it got lost, and it was more a dish of stewed apples than a crumble.
Again, though - delicious.
Everybody loves apple crumble, so when it came time to choose our hundred recipes from the book, this one easily made the cut, even though I must've had hundreds of apple crumbles over the years. And besides, we had to see what Gordon would do to tart it up.
First trick - mess with the texture by grating half of the apples instead of just chopping them into chunks. For future reference, grating apples while you've got three fingers in a splint is not a great deal of fun.
Second trick - caramelise the sugar! Never done this before, so obviously I made the classic beginner's mistake of stirring the sugar, and just about ruined my skillet in the process. After a brief interlude of boiling water in the pan to get all the toffee unstuck, I started again. Much better the second time, but I was still fairly terrified of burning the sugar, so I probably didn't do it long enough. Still, it smelled like caramel, and I think that's what we were going for.
Then in with the apples and cranberries - cranberries being the third trick, messing with the texture again - and let them stew for a bit with the cinnamon, lemon juice and vanilla seeds - trick four - before covering it all with the crumble.
If I have a complaint about this dish - and again, we're splitting hairs, obviously it was delicious - it would be the crumble topping itself. I found it to be much too fine in texture, and the granola mixed in didn't really add anything. Overall it got lost, and it was more a dish of stewed apples than a crumble.
Again, though - delicious.
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