Crabapple Pie

slice of crabapple pie (photo by jhy)

• You will need: crabapples- about a gallon of whole fruits
• pie crust for a 10" pie, double crust- ready made or your favorite recipe
• 2 cups sweetener (sugar, or combined with something such as Splenda™ or Stevia™)
• 1/2 c flour (or a little more)
• butter or margarine

knife and cutting board
large bowl
10" pie plate
spoons, scrapers

Preheat oven to 425 F.

cutting crabapples- can you tell that I got some help with this step? (photo by jhy)

Cutting the fruit is the longest part of this preparation, but at least you don't have to peel the crabapples! Do wash them, but you can ignore the stems and blossom ends. Then just cut four slabs off the sides of the apple, and discard the whole core. You'll need 7 cups of crabapple slices. Add 1/2 c flour, and 2 cups sugar or a mix of sugar and granulated sweetener. I find that about half and half tastes good and cuts the calories a lot.

7 cups crabapple slices (photo by jhy)

Fit the bottom crust in the pie plate and heap the fruit mixture into the plate. This will be very full, but it cooks down to leave a nicely rounded pie. Dot with butter or margarine. Cover with top crust and seal the edges. Cut a few slits in the top crust. Cover edges with foil or with pie crust shields.

crabapple pie ready to bake withpie crust shields in place. You can see that I have a drip pan on the lower shelf and a few blobs of leftover crust. (photo by jhy)

Bake for 40-50 minutes until filling bubbles through the slits. Cool before cutting. I adapted a recipe for apple-cranberry pie to this. The resulting crabapple pie is a wonderfully tart pie with red filling. It has immediately shot to near the top of my favorites list. The flavor is quite tart, so you might possibly want to add more sugar/sweetener. The filling was a tiny bit runny, but congealed more by the second day. You could add a couple more tablespoons of flour if you want. Made with all sugar, a slice equal to 1/10 of a 10-inch pie has 442 calories. If half sweetener is used, the calories are reduced to 365 per slice.

crabapple pie (photo by jhy)