Scandinavian Sour Cream Apple Pie

Keywords:	Dessert ¦ Pastry ¦ Vanilla ¦ Apple ¦ My favorite articles
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The first time I went on the Internet was at the University of Geneva in 1994. A relative who had a teaching position there let me use his computer for an hour and print all I wanted. After about 10 minutes, I located the rec.food.recipes newsgroup and started downloading and printing amazing recipes. Fascinating! I must have printed at least 80 pages that day. The recipe that most captured my attention had been published by an American lady of Scandinavian decent who said her family's apple pie won all the apple pie contests. Here it is:

For a European home chef, measuring everything by volume is very surprising. A cup of this, a tablespoon of that, we are far from the apparent precision found in French pastry recipes where everything is weighed to the gram. Three cups of peeled, cored and cut apples was fun but manageable. The flour was another story. The recipes calls for '3 tb flour', which I understand means 3 tablespoons or about 45ml flour. This is not a lot of flour. The first few times I did this recipe, I used a whole cup of flour. Tell a French pastry chef you changed proportions of flour, eggs, milk or butter in a cake and he'll bake you alive in his oven. I admit you get a very different pie if you use 1 cup instead of 3 tablespoon instead of flour, but both worked terrific and I made this recipe half a dozen times already.

Coat the apples in the sugar, flour and salt before adding any liquid (photo) - in traditional French baking we would first make the dough, then mix the apples in. I have always been surprised by this step, but eh, the recipe works.

The recipe calls for vanilla extract but I scrape a beautiful Tahitian vanilla pod and mix it with the egg so the seeds will be evenly spread in the pie.

I love sour cream and it is the only liquid in this pie.

Fold in cake pan and bake for 40 minutes.

The pie is baked - now we make the topping.

Mix everything to a crumbly texture. Keep in the fridge if you make it in advance.

Cover the pie with the topping. It will melt anyway so don't waste your time trying to make a streusel.

Bake in the oven for 15 minutes.

The topping becomes miraculously crispy with caramelized sugar and the melted butter all over the pie.

If you can't wait and serve the pie straight from the oven, it will look like a very soft crumble. Delicious, but better leave it to cool and firm up for about one hour.

Here is the finished pie. Another success in FXcuisine! I already baked this one 6 times and it's one of my 10 favorites pies.

I would love to be in touch with Mrs Karen Baldwin who published this recipe - let me know if you can find her present details. I fear the worst for she posted heavily on cooking and rose gardening forum between 1994 and 1999, then dropped off the surface of the Internet.