perfect apple pie

A standard of perfection is as fluid as the emotions that define and measure it. Because it is an arbitrary judgement, it evolves with time and varies from person to person, with no one being wrong.

I thought that the very first apple pie that I made was perfect because it looked like the picture in the cookbook. It came out of the oven all golden and full of promise. Everything but its appearance was a disappointment. 

I had piled the apples high in the center and carefully draped the top crust over them, but when I cut into it, the top crust collapsed into the cavity that was left by the shrunken apples. And although the crust was crisp on the outside– inside, it was pasty from the steam created by the cooking apples (even though I had cut vents in it). The filling, too, was a disaster. I had used the wrong apples (this was before I understood the difference between a cooking apple and an eating apple) and had sliced them too thin, causing them to break down into mush. And even though I had followed the recipe precisely, the juices turned into starchy glop. 

In all of my subsequent attempts at achieving my vision of pie perfection, I came to the realization that tossing a bunch of ingredients into a sealed crust, with no way of adjusting the texture and flavor as it cooked, was a leap of faith.

At one point, I thought that I had found the perfect apple pie when I tasted Tarte Tatin: crisp, flaky pastry; crisp-tender caramelized apples, cooked only in butter and sugar. It set a new standard in texture and flavor, but it wasn't really a pie– not in the American-as-apple-pie sense.

Later, I discovered that blind-baking the bottom crust ensured that it would be crisp and flaky all the way through, and that caramelizing the apples separately allowed me full control of their texture, But then there was the problem of the top crust. Not wanting to compromise the perfectly cooked apples with further cooking, I topped the compressed apple filling with pre-baked streusel crumbs. By my standards, I had created the perfect apple pie, but it was a Dutch apple pie– not the double-crusted, golden-domed, All-American apple pie.

I don't know what took me so long to figure out that the top crust could also be pre-baked and then 'glued' to the bottom crust to produce the iconic form with all of the components cooked separately to their respective states of perfection, but I'm glad that I did. It reinforces my belief that techniques are sometimes perpetuated because of tradition, not because they are perfect, and in the search for perfection– everything needs to be reexamined.