sour cream apple pie

The other apple pie I made was a sour cream apple pie (sorry, Dinah, still not the Barefoot Contessa's!).  The combination of flavors sounded very tempting, but I was nervous about how it would turn out.  The recipe also dictates that the pie should be served cold, which kind of eliminates one of my favorite parts of savoring warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream.  BUT, this apple pie is really good and totally worth the lack of warmth.  Especially if you live somewhere where it's not freezing cold yet...this could be a nice alternative to your traditional apple pie.

I always have such a hard time throwing away apple peels.  They're so good and (I think) contain most of the apple's nutrients.  Ugh it pains me to throw them in our compost pile.  Does anyone know of something to do with the peels other than eat them as you go?  I have been doing this until my stomach starts to hurt. 

Did I mention yet that this pie is relatively easy to make? It's not nearly as involved as the first recipe I shared with you.  AND, it is topped with crumble (as you'll see below) and comes with its own simple crust recipe, which involves pressing the crust into a pie plate: a step that totally eliminates my inabilities to adequately roll out a pie crust. Yay!  Don't you love it when recipes don't make you feel like an idiot?

The crumble topping ended up being a bit crunchier than I had expected.  I'm not sure if we should have taken the pie out earlier or not, but Dan and I both agreed that we liked the topping from Ina Garten's take on an apple crisp (recipe to be posted soon), that we would like to substitute that crumble in this recipe the next time around.

The pie kind of looks cheesecake-y, but I don't really remember it as tasting that way.  We made last week, so already the memories are fuzzy.  I need to be better about posting!

Sour Cream Apple Pie 

from Maine Ingredients

Crust:

1 cup flour

3 ounces cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup butter

Filling:

6 large McIntosh apples (we used Northern Spies)

1 2/3 cups sour cream (I added about 1/2 cup of ricotta, because I ran out of sour cream)

1 cup sugar

1 large egg

1/3 cup flour

2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp salt

Topping:

1 cup chopped walnuts (we had pecans)

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup brown sugar

1 tbs cinnamon

pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Combine crust ingredients. Blend well with pastry cutter.  Press into 9-inch pan. 

Peel, core, and slice the apples.  Combine sour cream, sugar, egg, flour, vanilla and salt.  Mix well.  Stir in apples. Pour mixture into pie crust.  Bake for 10 minutes.  Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees and bake for 35 minutes.

While pie is baking, combine all topping ingredients.  Mix well.  Spoon over baked pie.  Bake and additional 15 minutes.  Serve cold.