The Mission of a Christian

A visit from Grandma leads to… apple pie!  She brought over tomatoes and cucumbers from her garden, and apples from her tree.  I was so excited to use the apples to make apple pie!  Yum!  I made one the day she came over, and another the next day.  The recipes for the first pie I used as is, though it didn’t turn out as great (picture to the left) as my second pie (picture far below), which I tweaked slightly and it turned out much, much better.  Here are the tweaked recipes in the order I did it…

Apple Pie Filling:  

• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup whole wheat flour*
• 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg 
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• Dash of salt
• 6 cups thinly sliced apples (6 medium)

Mix sugar, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt.  Stir in apples.  Set aside.

Whole Wheat Crust:

• 2 cups sifted stone ground whole wheat flour*
• 1 cup sifted stone ground whole wheat pastry flour
• 4 teaspoons sugar (We use evaporated cane juice sugar)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup unsalted butter
• milk as needed to hold together dough

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Combine flours, sugar and salt.  Sift again.  Cut in butter till largest pieces are pea-size.  Sprinkle 7-10 tablespoons milk over mixture, 1 tablespoon at a time, tossing with a fork after each addition till moistened just enough to hold together.  Add less or more as needed.

Divide dough and quickly form into balls, working dough as little as possible.  Lightly sift flour onto large piece of flattened waxed paper or baking parchment.  Roll out each ball in center of parchment paper 1/8″ thick.

Gather pastry loosely onto floured rolling pin by gently rolling it up and peeling away waxed paper as you go.  Lay pin over pie plate and carefully unroll pastry.

Pat crust into pie pan, then pour in apples.  Dot with margarine.  Cover with top crust that has slits cut in it; seal and flute.  Cover edge with 3-inch strip of aluminum foil to prevent excess browning.  Bake for 30 -40 minutes.

* You can purchase your whole wheat from the store, or like us, we purchase our wheat berries in bulk and freshly grind them right before baking.  This time we used hard and soft white wheat berries, along with spelt berries and flaxseed.  We grind it all together and use this as our whole wheat flour.

We lightly sprinkled sugar on the top of the pie crust after baking.

Not only is this whole wheat crust flaky and delicious, but you can feel better about eating it!

Best served warm with vanilla ice cream!

Filed under: Desserts/Cookies, From the Kitchen, Recipes Tagged: | apple pie, homemade apple pie, whole wheat, whole wheat pie crust