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Women.com presents

Country Living's food editor, Cynthia Nicholson LaGrone
Cooking with apples

October 13, 1999

Country Living's food editor, Cynthia Nicholson LaGrone, is joined today by Greg Patent and Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, co-authors of the new cookbook "A is for Apple." The book contains more than 200 recipes and ideas for eating, munching, and cooking with America's favorite fruit.

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HomeArts: Welcome to our chat with Country Living's food editor, Cynthia Nicholson LaGrone. Today, Cynthia is joined by Greg Patent and Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, co-authors of the new cookbook "A is for Apple." The book contains more than 200 recipes and ideas for eating, munching, and cooking with America's favorite fruit. If you have any questions or ideas on what to do with apples this fall, this is definitely where you want to be. Welcome back, Cynthia, and welcome Greg and Dorothy!

Cynthia: Well, it's great to be back and I would like to turn this chat over to some great colleagues of mine, Greg and Dorothy Patent.

Dorothy: Hi! I'm really glad to be here today and I just wanted you to know that I have been enjoying apples all my life. My dad grew up on an apple ranch in Idaho and as I was growing up, every fall, my grandfather would send bushel baskets full of delicious variety apples to our home, which we all enjoyed.

Greg: Well, I didn't grow up on an apple ranch (laughing) but, I grew up loving to eat and cook with apples. How about some questions on cooking with apples or different varieties or growing apples - whatever you want to ask! (Aside from specific recipes.)

EZguest54: What kinds of apples are best for making apple pie?

Greg: Okay, I'll take this one. The best kinds of apples for a pie are those that will maintain their shape and will not dissolve on you, or turn mushy. So, that pretty much eliminates McIntosh varieties unless you use only a small amount of, say, a McIntosh or a Macoun. And when I say small amount, I mean no more than, say, 1/4 of the amount of apples that you are putting into a pie can be a softer variety - the rest should be firm. So if you can get Mutsu (or Crispin), that's a really wonderful pie apple, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening, and what I like to do is to mix a number of varieties. Maybe mixing three or four different types for texture, as well as sweetness and tartness. Avoid Fuji. They are very sweet, and when you cook a Fuji all the wonderful interesting things about its taste kind of go away - they kind of disappear in the heat of the oven. And you want to avoid red delicious also, because red delicious has become really insipid, and it's not a very good eating apple any more. The original red delicious was wonderful, it's hard to describe.

Dorothy: Actually, the original variety was just called delicious, and it had a unique flavor that was very rich and sweet without being insipid; something like a Fuji, maybe. The Fuji comes closest to what a properly ripened delicious apple used to taste like - but it had more character than a Fuji. Over the years they've been developing the productivity of the trees and the color of the fruit and forgetting about the flavor, so the flavor has been lost. Today's red delicious are too sweet for pie.

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