Tarte aux pommes

Appeltaart is the dutch word for ‘apple pie’. I know I’ve complained earlier about the dutch cuisine, but I have to admit that the dutch apple pie is a masterpiece in the baking kitchen. It combines apples and dough in the best way possible. Eduard is the baker in our house and appeltaart is his signature cake within this genre. He often makes it for his birthday (in October).

With tons of apples in stock, I convinced him to bake apple cakes for weekends on a row, outside his routine baking period. Today he baked nr. 6 in two weeks. We are placing most of them in the freezer, and are saving them for late autumn as it’s virtually impossible to eat them all at once. We still have kg’s of apples to deal with, so I don’t know if nr. 6 will be the last one. We’ll see. In the meantime I wanted to share the recipe with you. It’s really good.

Eduard always uses the same recipe from a cookbook he got from his father when he became a student and left the house where he grew up. It’s a very classic cookbook for this reason I think. It’s Het nieuwe Haagse kookboek, which translates into: `The new cookbook from the Hague’. It was originally written in the ’30 by a teacher of a domestic science school in the Hague. It’s very old, so it must be good, as it’s still in print, right? We use the recipe from the cookbook as a starting point, and always add some things to it.

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Below you can see what and how much ingredients we use for a 25cm springform. We make a bit more dough than the original recipe advises, because I like a thick crusty crust and Eduard doesn’t mind making it like that for me. We also add more apples to have more filling. And we often – but not always – add nuts on top of the filling to give it a bit more bite. Here comes Eduards recipe for a dutch appeltaart.

Dutch apple pie

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klassieke appeltaartIngredients:

Filling
– 60g sugar
– 1,2kg sour apples
– 60g raisins (let them swell in warm water)
– cinnamon
– lemon rinds (teaspoon)
– handful hazelnuts or almonds

Dough
– 240g flour
– 170g butter (cubed)
– 110g brown sugar
– 1/3 egg
– 4g salt

– 1 watered down egg to smear over the crust

What to do:

Start with the dough. Mix the dough ingredients together and knead the dough quickly till everything is mixed together properly. Then put it on a flat surface (like a table) and roll it out. Use the biggest part of the dough to fill the 25cm springform (bottom and sides). Keep a small part aside to use for the top part of the cake.

Now prepare the apples. Peel them and slice them. Mix them up with all the filling ingredients. Keep the nuts aside. Use quite a bit of cinnamon to spice the apple mix up to taste. Add the mix on the dough in the springform. Divide the nuts on top of the apple mix. Now roll out the last piece of dough out on the table and cut slices of about 2cm to put on top of the pie in a checkers pattern. Now use the slightly watered down egg to smear a bit of egg top of the cake.

Bake it off for 50-60 minutes in an oven at 180C. For us it often takes a bit longer. We bake it until it’s nice and light brown. The filling should also be quite dry. You shouldn’t be able to see water running on top of the cake. When it’s done, you can dig into the cake when it’s still warm, or wait till it’s nice and crispy cold. In the Netherlands we eat it with or without whipped cream on the side.

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hollandse appeltaart