Recipe of the Month: Apple Brown Betty

As the days ticked down toward Christmas and our annual trip to Indiana, I realized that I had only a limited amount of time to fit in a Recipe of the Month for December. We wouldn't be cooking anything during our time out there, and by the time we got home the month would be nearly over. So if we wanted to test out a new recipe, it would probably have to be this week.

I went through both my new vegan cookbooks to see if I'd bookmarked any recipes we hadn't tried yet, but the only ones I found were things like bean burgers and spicy grits, which weren't sufficiently veggie-focused. So I started perusing the rest of the cookbooks on my shelf, and I happened on one by Olwen Woodier with the simple name Apple Cookbook. That reminded me that the current rules of my Recipe of the Month challenge allow for both fruit- and veggie-based recipes, so there was nothing to stop me from choosing an apple-themed dessert for this month.

The one I picked was called Apple Brown Betty. I don't want to infringe on Olwen Woodier's copyright by reproducing the recipe exactly, but the basic idea is simple: thinly sliced apples layered in a pan with a crumble made from bread, sugar, apple-pie spices, and melted butter. Woodier's version also called for a bit of lemon juice in the crumble and some apple juice or cider poured over top before baking. The recipe as written wasn't vegan, but it was easy enough to swap out the butter for our homemade plant butter.

With this substitution, we already had most of the necessary ingredients for this dish on hand. The one sticking point was the apple cider. This isn't something we usually have in the fridge, and with the thermometer below freezing and snow coming down, we weren't keen to make a run out to the store for some. But since we were only making a half recipe of the brown Betty, we only needed a couple of tablespoons' worth, so Brian decided to see if he could squeeze that amount out of whole apples. He tried pressing some apple slices in my trusty Aeropress coffee maker, but all it did was squash them slightly. Then he tried grinding up the slices in our little Magic Bullet blender, which reduced them to a pulp but didn't liquefy them. Finally, he ran the pulp through the Aeropress, using the perforated metal filter disk to strain out the sediment, and succeeded in extracting enough juice for the recipe.

The dessert came out of the oven looking very pretty and very wholesome, with its chunks of whole-wheat bread topping over a base of sliced apple. It tasted wholesome, too, with the apple flavor being very much to the fore. However, when I asked Brian how much sugar had gone into it, he said the half-sized recipe used six tablespoons. That means the roughly one-quarter of the dish I ate contained four and a half teaspoons—three-quarters of my recommended daily limit. Oops, maybe not so wholesome.

Brian said we could probably get away with using even less sugar in the topping, as he does with his apple crisp, which usually contains about four tablespoons. But given that the crisp is even easier to make and probably healthier, with its hearty topping of rolled oats, there doesn't seem to be much advantage to making brown Betty instead. So we'll probably save this recipe for occasions when we need to use up a few slices of stale bread and stick to crisp the rest of the time.