Savory Home Cooking

The words, “recipe apple pie“, brings back 1,430,000 search results.

Just in Google! Yahoo! brought back 17,800,000 results, and msn brought back 10,200,000. And 6 of the first 10 results from each search engine were different. At this point, I’m already thinking that an internet search may not be the best way to find the best recipe for apple pie.

If you love apple pie as much as I do, you’ve spent some time looking for the best recipe. And how do you know it’s perfect? You try it, of course.

As in: you use the recipe to bake an apple pie, then eat it and see what you think. So, if you’re searching using the phrase above, you’d need to bake 22 apple pies (which would take over 3 weeks, even if you only baked one a day) just to get through the first page of search results on the top 3 search engines.

I thought there had to be a better way.

So I went back to my search results and, to maximize my chances for success, I only counted recipes from food sites that made it into the first 2 pages of results (I realize this is an arbitrary cut off point, but there are millions of results, I’m only one person, and only so many days when apples are in season). That meant I’d only need to try 14 different recipes.

That’s still too many.

So I narrowed it down even more: the first decision was the crust – purchased or handmade? I wanted a handmade crust, so I looked to see if it called for lard, shortening or butter. I avoid hydrogenated fats and had no lard, so butter it was. That helped eliminate some results.

Now I was down to 9 recipes (which would still take more than a week, if I baked a pie a day), and I still wasn’t sure what kind of apples to use, what kind of extracts, what spices, how much sugar, etc… Who ever would have guessed there were so many decisions to make to pick the best recipe for apple pie? (But then who ever would have guessed that a search for “recipe apple pie” would return 29,430,000 results?)

At this point, I started thinking, “I’d gladly pay somebody to do this for me.”

I baked for a week (and I think I used almost that I had the perfect recipe yet. Then I ran across a little one page site that sells a downloadable cookbook called “Cooking with Apples“. The author said she’d been looking for the perfect apple pie recipe for years, and had collected a bunch of them (along with like 90 more apple recipes) and put them together into this cookbook. I decided to give it a try.

Boy, was I glad I did; there are 7 different apple pie recipes in the book, and every one I’ve tried is really good! (I’m not a big fan of sugarless pies, so I haven’t tried that one yet, and probably won’t.) In case you’re curious: my favorite used Honey Crisp and Granny Smith apples, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice, lemon juice and lemon zest, almond and vanilla extract at about a 3:1 ratio, and had no flour or tapioca added to the filling.