Cast Iron Skillet Apple Crisp | Fall Dessert Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How do you keep apple crisp from getting soggy? ›

How do you keep Apple crisp from getting soggy? You need enough butter in your topping, try both melted or cold cut into the dry ingredients. Also, there needs to be enough texture to keep it from just flattening into the fruit below.

Butter, which encourages both browning and crispness, is the magic ingredient in getting your topping just right, so follow the recipe instructions. But if you feel your topping is still too dry and crumbly, (even for a crumble) add a bit more melted butter, a tablespoon at a time.

Under the simple butter-sugar-flour-and-oat topping is the apple filling scented with cinnamon. Our test kitchen says baking apples, like Rome or Cortland, are the best varieties to use for apple crisp, but Empire, Gala, or Braeburn apples are also good in this recipe.

Adding cornstarch and flour to the apple mixture will help bring your crisp's filling together. You want to make sure you have a nice balance of the sweet and tart in your dessert. Taste your apples for sweetness before adding sugar to your filling.

You can prepare the crisp through step 3, then cover and refrigerate for up to 1 day before baking. You can also freeze the unbaked crisp for up to 3 months. Allow to thaw overnight in the refrigerator, then continue with step 4. Bake time will be a little longer since the crisp will be cold.

Baking: Start baking the apple crisp covered with foil. This allows the apples to soften without any risk of the topping over-browning. After about 20 minutes, remove the foil and let the crisp finish cooking uncovered. Once the juices are bubbling, the topping is golden brown, and the apples are tender, it is done!

A pastry chef friend shared the technique. Instead of sprinkling the raw crumbs on top of the fruit, where they absorb the juices and turn a little mushy on their undersides, he spread them out in a pan and baked them separately, until crisp and cookielike.

Like an apple crisp, an apple crumble is a baked fruit dessert with a layer of topping. But unlike the crisp, the crumble topping rarely includes oats or nuts. Instead, a crumble's topping is more like streusel, made with flour, sugar and butter.

So what's a crumble vs. a crisp? A crumble is just a crisp without oats in the streusel. It may feature nuts, but the streusel topping is usually a simple combination of butter, flour, and sugar that is more clumpy than that of a crisp.

1 pound of apples will make about 3 cups sliced or cubed. 4 tennis ball-sized apples weigh about a pound.

What is the difference between cobbler and crumble? ›

Cobbler: A fruit dessert made with a top crust of pie dough or biscuit dough but no bottom crust. Crisp/crumble: In Alberta, the terms are mostly interchangeable. Both refer to fruit desserts similar to cobbler but made with a brown sugar streusel topping sometimes containing old-fashioned rolled oats.

If a recipe calls for one cup of peeled and chopped apples, for example, the size of your dice and fineness of your cuts will affect how you convert from pounds. Generally speaking, one pound of roughly chopped apples yields four cups.

Bake the apple crisp until the fruit is bubbling and the topping is golden brown and crisp, about 45 minutes. Serve the crisps warm with vanilla bean ice cream or fresh whipped cream, if desired.

The best way to prevent a watery apple crisp is to use a thickener in the filling – some recipes use flour, but I've chosen to use cornstarch in this recipe (or arrowroot starch, which can be substituted 1:1 for cornstarch) because I think it provides superior thickening power.

I prefer slicing the apples the day I plan to bake the crisp as they start to oxidize once they're sliced and turn brown in color. Add a little extra fresh lemon juice to help prevent the apples from turning super brown.

Don't wait any longer than overnight before baking, to prevent the apples from browning too much or drying out/spoiling. You may need to add a few extra minutes to the baking time to account for the cold fruit.

FAQ for Apple Crumble

Just watch how it comes out though - if it seems super dry and isn't holding together when you squeeze it, you can add in a little more butter.

Why is my apple crisp dry? If your apple crisp is dry, you didn't use enough butter. Make sure to follow this apple crisp recipe to ensure you've got the proper measurements.