Gluten Free Unripe Apple Pie

I planned to make an apple pie for the reunion. Just a simple standard apple pie, aside from using unripe apples. The unripe apples kept me blocked for a while. I didn't know how much sugar to use! 

It's a good thing I waited. At the Friday night gathering, I found out that some members of the family are gluten free. I knew that the other pie offerings were going to include gluten, and since I hadn't made the apple pie yet, I figured I could easily (or semi easily) make it a gluten-free apple pie. 

Chatgpt to the rescue again! 

1½ cups almond flour

1 cup tapioca flour

¼ cup potato starch

¼ cup arrowroot powder

2 Tbsp sugar

½ tsp salt

10 Tbsp cold lard

1 egg

1 tsp apple cider vinegar or lemon juice

2–4 Tbsp ice water

It originally called for 1 and 1/4 cup tapioca flour, but I ran out and had to improvise with the potato starch. It also originally wanted me to use butter, but since I have homemade lard, I wanted to use that. 

The crust came together quickly, and as the recipe cautioned, it was pretty crumbly. It rolled out just fine on the countertop. I thought I would be able to use my pastry scraper to fold it and set it into the pie tin. But it was so delicate that it kept squishing and breaking into pieces. I ended up putting the pieces in the pie tin and squishing them together.

The recipe suggested rolling out the dough between two pieces of plastic wrap, so that's what I did for the top crust. That worked better, but I still wasn't able to get the whole thing on top of the pie. Instead of wasting time messing with it, I took a cookie cutter and cut pieces of crust to lay overlapping on top.

It was much easier to peel up those small cookie shapes and arrange them.

Plus it made the pie look quite fancy!

The crust turned out nice and flaky and had a good flavor. Some people who sampled it after the gluten-free people got their pieces said you would never be able to tell that it was gluten free.

I thought the filling also turned out well- a little tangy, and not too sweet. One suggestion chat GPT had was to sample an apple to see how sweet it was. Why didn't I think of that? 🤦‍♀️ 

The filling recipe:

8 cups unripe apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced (I just cored and thinly sliced them... Don't let the picture fool you - they were way too small to mess with peeling.)

3/4 cup brown sugar or maple sugar (if the apples are on the sweeter side, go down to 1/2c sugar)

2 tablespoons tapioca flour (I ground up tapioca pearls in my spice grinder to make flour)

1½ teaspoons cinnamon

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

¼ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 tablespoons lard, cut into small pieces (I forgot to add this in, didn't seem to make much difference)

I would definitely make this pie again!