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Dried, Fried Apple Pies - Page 2

© Lee Ward

Grandma cooked the apples with water and sugar and used pie crust dough to wrap the apple mixture in.

Today, drying apples in this manner isn't practical for most people. Dried apples can be bought in some grocery stores or you can dry them in the oven.

In the book "Butter Beans to Blackberries," author Ronni Lundy gives the following advice: "I buy dried apples at the farm market in the fall or from our local health food store, because the fruit there has gumption. The apples available in plastic packs at the grocery usually have been treated to keep them pale white. They are also flaccid and tasteless. Apples dried the old-fashioned way are a ruddy beige and full of flavor."

Lundy also suggested laying out apple slices in the back seat of cars that will be sitting in the hot sun all day. And she gives directions for drying apples in the oven.

Lundy says some evening when you want to dry apples, core and quarter clean, dry apples. Then, slice the quarters into thin slices - a quarter or sixteenth of an inch wide. Then spread them out on screens or on baking sheets. Set the oven on 120 degrees and preheat. Put the baking sheets in the oven, turn the oven off and, Lundy says, go to bed.

The next morning, turn the oven on again for five minutes, then turn it off. Repeat three or four times in a day, but check the apples after three times. Make sure they are drying but don't let them burn, because they become intolerably bitter if they do.

When they come to room temperature, if you aren't planning to go ahead and cook them, you can pack them in plastic freezer bags and freeze them until you're ready to use them.

Lundy adds that if you use baking sheets you must turn the apple slices throughout the drying process or they will stick.

I dried some apples this week, and ended up burning a few of the thinner slices and they had to be thrown away. I didn't have any screens so I used baking sheets with baking racks on them. They didn't stick and they dried evenly.

Whatever method you use to obtain dried apples, you'll soon want to make fried apple pies.

Lundy's book includes a recipe, and it's similar to the way I make them. I don't use my grandmother's recipe, as it was lost when she died, but I have tried to re-create them, and my mother says I've suceeded.

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