Apple Crisp Pizza

The crocuses came up on the south side of the house this week — the first three by Tuesday morning, then a small constellation of them by Friday, the white and purple cups pushing up through the wet brown earth in the bed Helen planted in 1985 and that I have only sometimes weeded and never replanted and that comes back every spring with the dependable small kindness of perennial bulbs. The crocuses do not care that they are forty years old. They do not care that they have outlived the planter. They come up. They open. They feed the early bees on the days when the bees come out, which this week was Thursday, when the temperature reached the low fifties and the kitchen window on the south side hummed faintly with the first bees of the year working the crocus cups.

Owen came over Saturday afternoon with Patricia, who had baked an apple cake from the windfalls Ted had stored in the root cellar and that were beginning to need to be used. The cake was excellent — Patricia is a serious baker, the kind who knows that the difference between a good apple cake and a great one is in the moisture content of the batter and the proper toasting of the walnuts, and the cake had both attributes — and Owen ate two pieces and asked me about the maple boiling and was visibly disappointed to have missed it, which surprised me, because Owen has always been more interested in the syrup than the process. I told him that next year, if the timing worked out, he could come spend an afternoon at the sugarhouse. He nodded with the careful seriousness of a twelve-year-old who has been offered a thing he wants, and Patricia raised an eyebrow at me over his head in the way that meant: that was kind. I shrugged, which meant: it is the truth.

The blog post for the week was about the apple cake — Patricia's recipe, with her permission, and a small sidebar about the interaction between a windfall apple stored in a root cellar through the winter and the cake batter, which is to say that the apples have lost some moisture and gained some sweetness over the months and behave differently from a fresh September apple in a cake recipe. The post is the kind of small technical piece I enjoy writing — concrete, practical, not freighted with anything beyond the cooking itself — and the comments came in from bakers asking the kind of intelligent questions that suggest they intend to actually try the recipe. I answered each one. The answers are part of the writing, and I have come to think of the comment thread as the second draft of every post — the original piece is what I wrote, the comments are what the readers asked, and the answers I gave are the form the post settles into in its final published version.

I made oatmeal cookies Sunday — Helen's recipe, which is the recipe everyone in the family thinks of when they think of cookies, and which has the underlined note "Don't overbake — Walt always overbakes" in the corner of the card. I did not overbake them. I have been not overbaking them for three years now, since I started paying close attention to the timing, and the cookies have come out exactly the way Helen's came out, which is to say slightly soft in the middle and slightly crisp at the edges and indistinguishable from any cookie of hers I ate during the forty-one years we were married. The notebook said five-dozen. I made five-dozen. I ate three with milk. The rest went into the cookie tin, which used to be Helen's mother's and which has been holding cookies in this kitchen since approximately 1955.

Patricia’s apple cake was the thing that got me thinking about the windfalls still sitting in the root cellar — the ones Ted had stored back in October that had been slowly sweetening in the cold dark for months. After she and Owen headed home Saturday evening I stood in the kitchen for a while thinking about those apples, and how a stored apple wants to be used in a way that lets it be what it has become: concentrated, soft, less sharp than it was in September. This Apple Crisp Pizza does exactly that — it’s an approachable, unfussy way to use late-season stored apples, and it has the same quality I most admire in Patricia’s baking: the technique is in service of the ingredient, not the other way around.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 25 min | Total Time: 45 min | Servings: 8

Ingredients

1 tube (13.8 oz) refrigerated pizza crust dough
3 medium apples (such as Cortland, Golden Delicious, or stored windfalls), peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (optional, toasted)
Vanilla ice cream or caramel sauce, for serving (optional)

Instructions

Preheat and prepare the pan. Preheat your oven to 375°F. Lightly grease a 12-inch round pizza pan or large rimmed baking sheet with butter or nonstick spray.
Press the crust. Unroll the pizza dough and press it out onto the prepared pan, shaping it into a roughly 12-inch round with a slightly raised edge. If the dough springs back, let it rest for five minutes before continuing. Bake the plain crust for 8 minutes, until just barely set but not browned, then remove from the oven.
Season the apples. While the crust par-bakes, toss the sliced apples with the granulated sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and lemon juice in a medium bowl until evenly coated. Set aside.
Make the crisp topping. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, oats, brown sugar, and salt. Work the cold butter pieces into the dry mixture with your fingertips or a pastry cutter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs with some pea-sized pieces remaining. Stir in the toasted nuts if using.
Assemble the pizza. Arrange the seasoned apple slices evenly over the par-baked crust, overlapping slightly. Scatter the crisp topping in an even layer over the apples, pressing it gently to adhere.
Bake until golden. Return the pan to the oven and bake for 20—25 minutes, until the topping is deep golden brown and the apples are tender when pierced with a knife tip. Check at 20 minutes; stored or very ripe apples may need slightly less time.
Cool briefly and slice. Allow the pizza to cool on the pan for at least 10 minutes before cutting into wedges — this lets the apple juices firm up slightly so the slices hold together. Serve warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or a drizzle of caramel sauce if desired.

Nutrition (per serving)

Apple Crisp Pizza — The Windfalls That Waited All Winter