Passion fuels Niagara cook's award-winning apple pie recipe

Posted By Albert Cipryk

Posted October 3, 2007

Alison Kicul is a bit of a folk hero, well in the Kicul family anyway. She may not yet be of the historical stature of Laura Secord or Harriet Tubman, or share the celebrity status of TV chefs, but in the realm of apple pie baking, it was Alison whom Chief Pie Judge - Anna Olson of Food Network Canada's Sugar (and also a food writer for The Standard) - named as winner of the First Annual Niagara Food Fest Baked Apple Pie Contest for her Drunken Apple Pie. Whoo Whoo!!

I asked Alison, who is a graduate of Niagara Culinary Institute and currently head baker at the Shaw Festival Cafe in Niagara-on-the-Lake, if there was a secret to her success. "Passion," she said. Passion and grandparents like Mary and Mike Kicul who have been undyingly supportive. "It was my grandmother who told me I had to enter," Alison said.

At the Food Fest in Welland, 46 baked apple pie entries with a back-up pie for good measure showed up for the moment of truth at the contest, sponsored by World Kitchens of Niagara Falls (known also as the mother ship for Pyrex).

Les Marmitons, a self-professed or self-confessed gang of wannabe chefs (and architects of the contest), did all the leg work and raised the sponsorship of World Kitchens, who supplied two deep-dish Pyrex keeper pie plates for the contestants and a truckload of prizes for the top three winners.

Although today we think of pies as being mostly sweet, it was not always so. In the days before refrigeration, pie crusts were made for the sole purpose of storage and preservation of food, particularly meats. Pies were made with closed crusts, resembling a modern day calzone or empanada, often with very hard and inedible crusts. Open crust pies were called "tarts" (still used by the English today). An English recipe for apple tart from 1361 ("For to Make Tartys in Applis") is one of the first records of the modern apple pie, and shows how far back recipes for apple pie go. This "Tartys in Applis" was virtually identical to 21st Century apple pies made in America, with the exception of certain spices.

When the English colonists arrived in North America in the early 1600s they found only crab apples, the only native apples to the United States. European settlers arrived and brought with them their English customs and favourite fruits. In colonial time, apples were called winter banana or melt-in-the-mouth.

Somewhere in the 1890s, according to the historians of the Cambridge Hotel in Washington County, N.Y., Professor Charles Watson Townsend dined regularly at the hotel. He often ordered ice cream with his apple pie. Berry Hall, a diner seated next to him, asked what it was called. He said it didn't have a name, and she promptly dubbed it Pie a la Mode. Townsend liked the name so much he asked for it each day by that name.

When Townsend visited the famous Delmonico Restaurant in New York City, he asked for Pie a la Mode. When the waiter proclaimed he had never heard of it, Townsend chastised him and the manager, and was quoted as saying - "Do you mean to tell me that so famous an eating place as Delmonico's has never heard of Pie a la Mode, when the Hotel Cambridge, up in the village of Cambridge, N.Y., serves it every day? Call the manager at once, I demand as good service here as I get in Cambridge."

The following day it became a regular at Delmonico and a resulting story in the New York Sun (a reporter was listening to the whole conversation) made it a country favourite with the publicity that ensued.

And now, sharpen your knives and rolling pins, folks for:

Alison Kicul's Drunken Apple Pie

First prize winner of the 2007 Niagara Food Fest Annual Apple Pie Contest

(makes 1 10"/25 cm pie)

Crust:

2 cups (480 ml) pastry flour

1/2 cup (120 ml) cold unsalted butter, cubed

1/2 cup (120 ml) cold shortening, cubed

1/2 cup (120 ml) ice water

1teaspoon (5 ml) salt, dissolved in the ice water

Method: Rub the butter, shortening and flour together in your hands, breaking up the lumps with your fingertips until it is all like coarse meal. Do not over mix, it should remain dry. Add ice water and stir all together with a fork until a loose dough is achieved. Place the dough on a floured board and knead lightly six or seven times until it comes together. The dough need not be really smooth. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 30 minutes. More won't hurt.

Filling:

6 medium Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and sliced

Juice of one half lemon

  

Method: Preheat oven to 425øF (220øC).

Divide pastry in half and roll one half for bottom crust.

Fill bottom spread evenly with apples that have been tossed with the lemon juice. Make a lattice top with remaining half pastry. Refrigerate while making the caramel sauce.

Caramel sauce:

In a heavy bottom sauce pan melt:

1/2 cup (120 mL) unsalted butter

Whisk in 4 tablespoons (60 mL) all purpose flour

Whisk in 1/2 cup (120 mL) brown sugar and 1/4 cup (60 mL) white sugar

1 teaspoon (5 mL) ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon (2.5 mL) ground nutmeg

1/2 cup (120 mL) Captain Morgan dark rum

1/2 cup (125 mL) 35% cream

Bring to a boil for one minute, whisking. Remove from heat and whisk in one half cup 35% cream.

Remove pie from fridge and brush edges of crust with sauce.

Pour the rest of the hot sauce slowly over the pie, ensuring that all the lattice gets covered with sauce and the sauce seeps into the apples.

Bake 15 minutes in 425øF (220øC) oven. Lower oven temperature to 375øF (190øC) and bake 40 to 50 minutes more until the bottom crust is done.

If you have a question for Albert Cipryk, teacher/chef at Niagara College, he can be reached via Niagara Culinary Institute, 135 Taylor Road, RR4, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., L0S 1J0, or e-mail acipryk@niagarac.on.ca