This week's cover recipe is from the August issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller.
My personal collection of AGT magazines spans eight years from January 1997 through 2004, at which time I had two babies 2 and under. I'm sure it's understandable that my interest in gourmet cooking waned a little around that time.
I have cooked the cover recipe, Apple & Blackberry Pandowdy, twice in the last week. The first time I made a family size and then made 4 individual servings last night with the left over pastry.
The sour cream pastry is divine. It is nicest sweet pastry I can remember making and I will definitely be making it again. I don't have a food processor so I used my K beater on my Chef and it still came together really nicely and easily. I used 1tsp vanilla extract instead of scraping a bean. However the 2 hour rest in the fridge could be your undoing if you decided to whip this one up before dinner.
Given the less than extensive range at my local woolies blackberries unfortunately weren't an option so I went with raspberries instead. Strawberries are cheap and in season at the moment so if you wanted to use fresh berries instead of frozen a punnet of those babies, sliced would do nicely.
Granny Smith apples seem to be fairly gigantic at the moment so I only used three instead of the prescribed 4. For my second go I peeled the apples. The recipe doesn't say to so I left them on the first time around. The long cooking time means the apples do get pretty mushy and the skins fall off and to be honest they aren't that appetising when you get a slightly chewy bit of skin. We definitely loved it more with the skins off.
Now for my big omission. When I cooked the pandowdy the first time around I somehow managed to completely overlook the 300g sugar in the recipe. I did think it was a little strange when we were eating it that there wasn't any sugar but it didn't bother me because I'm not a huge lover of very sweet food, and 300g of sugar would make this very sweet (it is a southern american recipe so the mega sweetness isn't a huge surprise).
For the individual serves I peeled and sliced 2 granny smiths and 2 pink ladies and layered a half of each type of apple into individual serve cooking dishes (like ramekins for example). A added about 1/3 cup frozen raspberries to each and topped with a pastry lid. I skipped the lemon and hadn't reread the recipe so omitted the sugar again!
These made a super fast, not too sweet quick dessert that I was happy to give the kids as a special treat. (we rarely eat dessert and ice cream after dinner gives them enough of a sugar high to make them difficult to get to bed)
The recipe can be found on the Gourmet Traveller website together with a video, how cool is that! For convenience I'll share it with you here too, that also makes it a touch easier to see the substitutions/omissions I've made.
There are plenty of other delicious looking recipes in the magazine. I have bought a cauliflower and I'm tossing up between the roast cauliflower soup and cauliflower pasta with pangrattato. There is mouthwateringly good looking fried chicken with barbecue sauce from George Calombaris' new melbourne restaraunt and I think I might make the mississipi mud cakes, from the same southern cooking special, this afternoon.
Apple & Blackberry Pandowdy
| 4 each | Granny Smith apples and pink lady apples, cut into eighths |
| 300 gm | caster sugar |
| 150 gm | frozen blackberries |
| 40 gm | plain flour |
| Juice | of 2 mandarins |
| Finely | grated rind of 1½ lemons |
| For scattering: | Demerara sugar or crushed sugar cubes |
| To serve: | pouring cream |
| Sour cream pastry | |
| 250 gm | (1 2/3 cup) plain flour |
| 40 gm | pure icing sugar, sieved |
| Scraped | seeds of 1 vanilla bean |
| Finely | grated rind of 1 lemon |
| 140 gm | cold butter, coarsely chopped |
| 120 gm | sour cream |
| 1 | For sour cream pastry, process flour, sugar, vanilla seeds, rind and ½ tsp salt in a food processor to combine, add butter, pulse until small lumps of butter remain (30 seconds). Add sour cream, pulse to combine, turn onto a work surface, bring together with the heel of your hand, wrap in plastic wrap, refrigerate to rest (2 hours). |
| 2 | Preheat oven to 200C. Combine apples, sugar, blackberries, flour, juice and rind in a bowl, then transfer to a 24cm-diameter 5cm-deep pie dish. |
| 3 |
Roll out pastry on a lightly floured surface to 4mm thick. Brush edges of pie dish with water, place pastry over filling and press over rim of pie dish to seal, then trim edges with a sharp knife. Pierce a hole in centre of pastry, brush pastry with water, scatter with demerara sugar then bake until pastry is light golden and crisp (30-35 minutes). Remove from oven, break pastry into large pieces with a fork, press down into filling, then bake until filling bubbles up over pastry and pastry is golden brown (20-25 minutes). Stand for 15 minutes then serve with cream.
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