Vegan Apple Pie with shortcrust pastry

📝 What you need

Ingredients

• Cooking apples (eg Bramleys)
• Eating apples (eg Braeburns or Granny Smiths)
• Lemon
• Dairy-free block margarine (eg Flora Plant Block or Naturli Block)
• Dairy-free yoghurt
• Dairy-free milk 
• Sultanas
• Icing sugar
• Soft light brown sugar
• Caster sugar
• Ground cinnamon
• Plain flour
• Cornflour

Equipment

A loose-bottomed or springform tin makes this apple pie really easy to remove from the tin to serve. Mine is this lovely holey one from MasterClass which helps to get the pastry really crispy with no soggy bottoms, but anything similar will do.

🍏 What varieties of apple to use

A great apple pie is all about the apples, and this pie filling is particularly good because it mixes two varieties of apple.

• The cooking apples break down when cooked into a mushy apple sauce
• The eating apples keep their shape and texture to give a delicious crunch

For the cooking apples, my no. 1 recommendation would be Bramleys. They are fairly tart (hence pairing them with sweeter eating apples) with a white, juicy flesh.

For the eating apples, I like to use Braeburn - very crisp and hold their shape when cooked, or Granny Smiths - a lovely, crunchy all-rounder.

The combination of eating and cooking apples was such a winner in my Vegan Apple Crumble recipe that I've used exactly the same filling ratio here, just leaving out the liquid to avoid soggy pastry.

❄️ Freezing

Homemade apple pie is absolutely fine to freeze, either before or after baking, but I would really recommend freezing un-baked for best results.

Make sure you make it in a foil or metal pie dish, (not glass). Then just follow the recipe (even adding the plant milk glaze and sprinkling with caster sugar), then wrap tightly and freeze.

Bake from frozen, but be aware that it will take longer to cook than the recipe states, and therefore you might well have to cover it with foil if the pastry starts to turn golden brown too soon.

🔪 Top Tips: Shortcrust Pastry

The ratio of fat to flour in pastry is what makes a shortcrust pastry 'short' - that is, crumbly. The more fat you add the more deliciously crumbly it becomes, however that also makes it harder to roll out with a less firm structure as it cooks.

So, this pastry is perhaps a little less 'short' than I would prefer, but that means it is easier to roll out much more thinly. And crisp, thin pastry is such a joy with this sweet apple filling, far more so than a thick and claggy crust.

My top tips for making knockout shortcrust pastry are:

• Hands off! Try to touch the ingredients and dough as little as possible. Rub in the 'butter' as little as possible - stop as soon as the last lumps disappear. Work quickly and lightly. You hear a lot of advice about keeping everything very cold - chilling your butter, flour, even chilling your mixing bowl! But actually if you just try to handle everything as little as possible then the temperature doesn't matter so much.
• 'Butter' temperature Your block margarine should be cool but still pliable. Not oily and spreadable, but also not rock hard from the freezer.
• Chill the dough Resting the pastry in the fridge makes it easier to handle.
• Don't panic if your pastry tears You can press it back together in the tin. It is much better to roll it just once and patch it up in the tin than it is to keep re-rolling until it is in one perfect sheet.

🍽 If you liked that...

.... you might also enjoy these vegan recipes from The Veg Space: