Tag: apples

Old Fashioned Apple Dumplings

writ­ten 10/15/2023

What

Old-Fash­ioned Apple Dumplings: Peeled and Cored apples wrapped in dough and baked

Ingredients

Main: Apples, Brown Sug­ar, Gran­u­lat­ed Sug­ar, Apple Pie Sea­son­ings (cin­na­mon, nut­meg, all­spice, or what­ev­er you’d like), But­ter (reg­u­lar or veg­an), Dough (hand­made or bought pie crust), water/apple juice

Sup­plies: Peel­er, Cor­er, Bak­ing Dish, Roller, Work Sur­face, Saucepan, Bast­ing Brush

Option­al: Ice Cream

Time

1 hour (peel, core, roll, wrap, and make sauce) + 1 hour (bake) = 2 hours Total

Making

  • Choose your apples
  • Peel and core them
  • Pre­heat the oven to 375F (190C)
  • Acquire and roll out the dough (whether you make it or buy pie crust)
  • Place the apple in the mid­dle, and then cut a rough­ly cross shape
  • Using a 2:1 Brown Sug­ar to White Sug­ar mix + apple pie spices, put a bit inside the cored-out area, plus a dol­lop of but­ter (I topped mine off with some more sug­ar)
  • Add some around the base of the apple
  • Wet­ting the pieces so they stick (I used apple juice), wrap the apple up
  • If you’d like, this is where you can get cre­ative with hid­ing the seams or using them to your dec­o­ra­tive advan­tage (I used some dough to make fun shapes)
  • Put apples on a bak­ing dish
  • In the saucepan, add but­ter + brown sug­ar + apple juice (I used the apple juice from wet­ting the dough and the sug­ar mix­ture)
  • Stir it fre­quent­ly until it becomes a syrupy sauce
  • Using a bast­ing brush, brush it onto the sur­face of the apples
  • Bake for 50–55 min­utes
  • Take it out, and use remain­ing sauce to drizzle/brush over­top

EAT with ice cream

Notes

I had to bake mine for 1 hour and 30 min­utes because I made the mis­take of using ALL of the sauce over­top the apples which then cre­at­ed a pool at the bot­tom of the dish. AVOID THIS. I spec­u­late that’s why it took so long to bake. That’s why I rec­om­mend just brush­ing it over­top and not pour­ing over the top like most recipes call for

Over­bak­ing caus­es the apples to dry out and the tops to get super hard espe­cial­ly with the sauce over top

If you don’t like crust (like me), make that dough THIN

I don’t think I’d do this again, instead opt­ing for cut apples in a bak­ing dish and a lay­er of dough over­top that with fun shapes. I’m not a mas­sive fan of crust

If I were to do it again, though, I’d roll the crust thin­ner, and maybe add some liq­uid to the inside of the apple (con­tem­plate leav­ing the bot­tom of the apple or mak­ing the crust thick­er there). It just felt dry even if I did over­bake it

Be care­ful of the seams that will bust open and release any sauce inside

Apple Themed Smoked Ribs

Writ­ten: 1/2/2023

Notes for char­coal smoked St. Louis ribs with an apple theme pulling from a vari­ety of online recipes and ideas

What

Char­coal-smoked St. Louis ribs

Ingredients

1 rack of St. Louis ribs, mus­tard, rice wine, soy sauce, apple juice, 1–2 apples, apple­wood chips, spices

Spices: coarse/Kosher salt, fresh-cracked pep­per­corn, brown sug­ar, gar­lic pow­der, onion pow­der, cumin, papri­ka, dill weed/pickle sea­son­ing

Foil or peach paper

Time

Prep, Overnight, 3–5 hours in smok­er

Steps

  • Com­bine the spices in a bowl: coarse salt, pep­per, brown sug­ar, gar­lic pow­der, onion pow­der, cumin, papri­ka
  • Very impor­tant: remove the con­nec­tive tis­sue lin­ing the bone side of the ribs: Slide a but­ter knife under the film on a bone. Care­ful­ly wig­gle until you can grasp the film and then pull. It should come right off clean­ly.
  • Cut the rack into 2 if you want (you can also sea­son them dif­fer­ent­ly if desired)
  • Add soy sauce, rice wine, and mus­tard, spread­ing even­ly on both sides
  • Rub the com­bined spices into the meat on both sides
  • Very light­ly, sprin­kle a hint of dill/pickle sea­son­ing
  • Use plas­tic wrap to tight­ly bind the rack
  • Refrig­er­ate overnight

Smok­ing day

  • Take the meat out and let it get to room tem­per­a­ture
  • Option­al­ly, soak some apple­wood or pecan chips (there is plen­ty of argu­ment about the func­tion­al­i­ty of this on the inter­net)
  • Pre­pare the smok­er (my set up is quite involved, so it’s a good time killer)
  • Start the char­coal in the chim­ney starter (don’t use lighter flu­id)
  • Fin­ish prep­ping the ther­mome­ters, tongs, and work­space
  • Cut the fresh apples into pieces
  • When the char­coal is ready, pour it into the fire­box and add a few chips and 1 or 2 apple slices. Yes, apple slices! (apple gives off this neato per­fume when it burns)
  • Let the tem­per­a­ture get to be around 250F or so and put the ribs bone side down at the high­est point (I’m using a ver­ti­cal off­set smok­er)
  • Ribs can be smoked any­where between 225F to 300F and they’ll still end up great. Faster cook at high­er temps, slow­er at low­er temps (duh.)
  • Note: When cook­ing with char­coal, big­ger chunks are good for longer even burn­ing, and small­er chunks give high heat faster. Adjust accord­ing to your cook­ing goals
  • About 30 min­utes in and at 60 min­utes throw in your wood chips and apple pieces. Remem­ber that you can add smoke fla­vor, but you can’t take it away, so be wary of over-smok­ing your meat. I per­son­al­ly don’t like a lot of smoke fla­vor, so that’s it for the chips at this step for the rest of the cook.
  • About 1.5 to 2 hours in (depend­ing on amount of meat), remove the ribs. They should have a nice bark on them at this point.
  • Brush on or spritz some apple juice all over the meat
  • Using peach paper (or foil), wrap the ribs
  • Place them back in the smok­er
  • Add more char­coal to main­tain the tem­per­a­ture and any remain­ing chips or apple pieces
  • After 1–2 hours, do the bounce/bend test: if you give the ribs a nice shake and they start to crack, then they’re done. If not, then brush on some more apple juice and let ’em keep cook­ing.
  • Good inter­nal temp for the meat is, appar­ent­ly, 180–200F
  • When they’re done, let the ribs sit for a lit­tle and then serve

What hap­pened to me is that it was get­ting dark, the air tem­per­a­ture was rapid­ly drop­ping, and I did­n’t want to start up anoth­er batch of char­coal, so I took them inside and put them in the con­vec­tion toast­er oven at 275 for an hour. The end prod­uct was real­ly, quite good. I like sub­tle fla­vors, and this was sub­tle on every lev­el: light­ly sweet from the apple juice, per­fect hint of smoke, no over­pow­er­ing spices, a good bark crust despite the apple juice and peach paper. No need for BBQ sauce! The only thing that could have made it bet­ter was cook­ing at the high­er tem­per­a­tures the whole time (except I had oth­er meats in there, too) and putting enough char­coal in there to achieve that.

I love apples!