Nothing says fall like apple crisp, the warm cinnamon scent and sweet apples as much part of autumn for many of us as red leaves and cold weather.  Or, possibly, it reminds you of high school cafeterias, where a particularly sad and limp version of apple crisp is a typical staple of dinner time. 

Apple crisp, or apple crumble if you are from the UK, seems like the kind of old time dish that has been handed down for generations.  You can pretty easily imagine the travellers eating it at the very first Thanksgiving.  Despite this antique feel, apple crisp has a surprisingly brief account. 

Apple crisp doesn’t make an appearance in cookbooks until 1924, so its creation probably only goes back a few decades before.  This is a history of a bit more than a century, making it a fairly up to date addition to the North American menu.  The dish became swiftly and enormously favored by a few years of appearing in cookbooks, as papers and word of mouth spread the apple crisp recipe. 

The advantage of apple crisp is that it’s substantially simpler to make than apple pie, another fall favorite.  Rather than needing to be ready to make a crust for a pie and then get it baked just right , an incredibly hard task, apple crisp only requires that you be able to layer the ingredients in an acceptable pan. 

At its most simple, apple crisp is just a dessert composed of baked apple covered by a crisp crust.  Often, the crust is also covered in brown sugar and cinnamon to add an extra level of sweetness to the top, as well as the brown sugar that’s to be expected with the baked apples. 

more specifically, you are going to find cooked apples, butter, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and frequently oats, brown sugar, ginger, and / or nutmeg.  There are about as many different recipes for apple crisp as there are people that eat it, and even veteran bakers seldom make it the precise same way twice. 

There are tons of variants possible , from the choice of sugars to using oats to including other fruits.  Peaches are a fairly common addition to apple crisp, and it’s not at all uncommon to find things like raspberry or blueberry crisp on the menu. 

Rhubarb is a favored ingredient, because it offers a tart taste that contrasts with the sweetness of the pie.  For the same reason, you want to consider your selection of apples, the most basic ingredient in the dish, when you decide to make your apple crisp. 

An apple, of course, is not just an apple.  They come in lots of varieties, with a huge range of sizes, tastes and textures.  Apples can range between fairly sour to terribly sweet, and making sure to get the right sweetness is critical so that you will know how much sugar to use. 

likewise, apples can have a range of textures, from crisp to almost floury, and it’s imperative to understand the feel of your apples before baked them so that you get an apple crisp that basically tastes good and has a pleasant mouth feel.

Try my favorite Apple Crisp recipe: Click Here

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