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Behind the Recipes

Apple Lover’s Apple Crumble

A rustic dessert such as crumble should show off the fruit’s tangy freshness—not bury it in sugar. We rebuilt this classic from the bottom up so that it does right by the apples.
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Published July 25, 2019.

Apple Lover’s Apple Crumble

My Goals and Discoveries

High ratio of fruit filling to streusel topping

Starting with 4 pounds of apples and baking them under a foil cover before applying the topping allows them to collapse into a thick layer of filling.

Bright flavor; moderate sweetness

Tossing the apples with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice enhances their bright flavor. Adding just 2 tablespoons of brown sugar to the filling prevents the apples from tasting too sweet.

Crunchy, cohesive topping

Adding nuts to the streusel loosens its consistency so that it doesn’t bake up dense, and a couple of teaspoons of water hydrates the flour so that the mixture clumps nicely. Applying the topping midway through baking minimizes its exposure to the juicy fruit.

Recipe

Apple Crumble

Soggy topping and flavorless filling are the norm for this simple dessert. How do you make crumble crisp and the apples actually taste like apples?
Get the Recipe

A rustic apple crumble has always been my favorite way to highlight apples: It lets their bright, tart character shine. But even recipes that promise to put the apples first inevitably have you bury the fruit in sugar and then double down on that sweetness by blanketing it with a thick layer of streusel. By the time you add a scoop of ice cream, the whole ensemble tastes sweet from top to bottom and totally misses the point—it’s like heating really good olive oil so that it loses its grassy bite or cooking a thick, well-marbled steak until the center goes gray.

Don’t get me wrong: I love everything about apple crumble—the pragmatism of using up the fruit, the throw‑together ease, and the satisfying contrast of tangy, tender fruit against a buttery, delicately crunchy topping. And I’m not antisugar; the fruit’s acid needs a healthy dose of the sweet stuff to make a dessert that feels gratifying and balanced. But for the sake of apple lovers such as myself, it was time to bake a better crumble: one that celebrates the apples by dialing down the sweetness and packing in as much fruit as possible.

Out of Proportion

Using a tart apple might seem like the most logical starting point for a bright-tasting filling, but if you’ve done much baking with apples, you know that you can’t base the choice on flavor alone. Bracingly tart Granny Smiths, for example, can collapse into mush when baked, so we often avoid them in the test kitchen when we want the cooked fruit to retain some shape. Instead, I opted for Golden Delicious, an apple variety that offers year-round and near-universal availability, balanced sweet-tart flavor (later, I’d work out a way to make it brighter), and structural integrity.

When we compared the textures of different varieties of apples that were cooked for the same amount of time, we found that some varieties retained their shape while others turned to mush.

Most recipes call for piling 2 to 3 pounds of apples into an 8-inch square baking dish, making sure to leave at least ¼ inch of headspace for the streusel. But this leads to a ratio problem: Apples shrink down as they cook, and by the time they’re tender, you’re left with a scant layer of filling (2 parts filling to 1 part topping is a common result). Plus, the moisture that the apples exude during baking saturates the part of the streusel where the filling and topping meet, producing a soggy, pasty interface.

Putting More Apple in Apple Crumble

Baked fruit desserts such as apple crumble should have a substantial ratio of filling to topping (in our book, about 5 to 1) so that you primarily taste the bright flavor of the fruit and then the crunch and sweetness of the topping. To achieve that goal, we take advantage of the apples’ tendency to shrink as they cook.

 

To bulk up the ratio of filling to topping, I started with 4 pounds of apples, peeling, coring, and cutting them into small chunks so that they’d fit as compactly as possible into the baking dish and seasoning them with 2 tablespoons of sugar—less than half the amount that I’ve seen in other recipes—and a little cinnamon. But the fruit mounded over the edge of the dish, so when I tried covering it with a simple streusel (flour, dark brown sugar, salt, and melted butter), the soft clumps tumbled off.

That explained why most recipes refrain from loading up on the apples, but I realized that there was a way to fit all 4 pounds of fruit by taking advantage of its tendency to shrink: I parcooked the apples before applying the topping, so they collapsed and created a substantial but compact layer of filling with just enough headspace for the streusel. The trick was baking the apples on the lower rack in a hot oven (the closer that food is to the oven floor, the closer it is to the heat source) with a sheet of aluminum foil crimped over the baking dish to trap steam, until they started to collapse. Then I uncovered the dish, smoothed the apples into an even layer that sat about ¼ inch below the lip of the baking dish, scattered the streusel over the top, and returned the dish to the oven for another half-hour to brown the topping.

Chockablock with apples and capped with just enough streusel, the crumble’s proportions were in good shape—about a 5:1 ratio of filling to topping. But the texture and flavor of the fruit were not. The apples touching the edges of the dish had broken down into sauce by the time the topping browned, so going forward I moved the crumble to a higher oven rack after I applied the topping; that put some distance between the apple layer and the heat source so that it cooked more gently during the second phase and brought the streusel closer to the heat reflecting off the oven ceiling, helping it brown quickly. (Using a metal baking pan also helped prevent carryover cooking, since it retains less heat outside the oven than a glass dish.) To punch up the apples’ acidity and overall flavor, I tossed the fruit with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and a touch of salt before baking. (This also lowered the pH of the dish, helping the fruit maintain its shape during cooking.)

Our Incomplete, Highly Controversial Glossary of Fruit Desserts

If there’s anything more satisfying than tucking into a crumble, grunt, or sonker, it’s their quirky (and controversial) monikers. Each of these desserts is composed of fruit and a sweetened topping, the latter of which can be anything from a pastry or biscuit dough to a pancake-like batter to a loose streusel—and the definitions often vary by region. Here are a handful of our favorites and their defining characteristics.

 

Over the Top

Waiting to apply the streusel until midway through baking had the added benefit of minimizing the time it spent soaking up liquid from the fruit, so now there was less of that soggy interface. But the dough touching the fruit was still a bit soft and damp, while the rest was actually loose and dry, like a too-short cookie. It was a textural schism, and to fix it I needed two opposing solutions to work in tandem.

Don’t Dive In Too Soon

Waiting at least 45 minutes before digging into the crumble will be hard but worth it. As the dessert cools, the apples’ pectin molecules (which dissolve in the fruit’s water during cooking) form a gel that immobilizes the water, resulting in a nicely set filling. Cut into the crumble before that gel has firmed and the filling runs out like hot soup.

The first was water—an unusual addition to streusel dough that hydrated the dry flour, dissolved some of the sugar so that it was less gritty, and helped the dough form larger clumps. Two teaspoons of water plus two teaspoons of vanilla extract (which also added depth to the streusel’s flavor) moistened the dough. The second was nuts. Plenty of crumble recipes call for mixing them into the topping, and when I worked in some chopped almonds, they added not just crunch but also fat that made the filling more resistant to the fruit’s exuded moisture. What’s more, the nuts loosened up the structure of the topping so that it didn’t bake up compact and dense. I also made sure to scatter the streusel loosely over the apples to allow more of the fruit’s moisture to escape during baking.

Scooping out the fruit-packed crumble was visual proof that the apples were finally getting their due. Tasting the clean, bright punch of the filling alongside the nutty, buttery, not-too-sweet streusel topping was even more convincing.

Apple Crumble

A rustic dessert such as crumble should show off the fruit's tangy freshness—not bury it in sugar. We rebuilt this classic from the bottom up so that it does right by the apples.
Get the Recipe

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