Apples!

It’s that time of year here in Michigan when we’re inundated with apples. The cider mill is in full swing, and the Michigan State University Horticulture farm is selling off bushels of them for 12 dollars a bushel. We already got a bushel of apples, from my husbands work, and I’ve been busy making them into apple crisp and apple sauce. Since we’ve been eating wheat free for my daughter, it’s an experiment to make the crisp topping. I’m finding that it’s near impossible to get a result without wheat that is exactly the same. Mainly it’s the texture and color that are a little odd. I think partly it’s a matter of adjusting our taste and partly it’s a matter of experimenting with all the different flours that are out there. Each flour has different properties. My WonderMill grain grinder is coming in really handy with all this experimentation.

Melissa’s Gluten Free Apple Crisp

for the filling:

3-5 lbs of apples peeled cored and sliced, enough to fill your dish to the top. I use a 9×13 glass pan

1/2-1 c. sugar, depending on your sweet tooth and tartness of apples

2 Tbsp. of tapioca pearls (to thicken the apples)

for the topping:

1c. rice flour (brown or white, but if it’s brown make sure it’s not rancid)

1c. potato starch

1/2 sugar

1 Tbsp. cinnamon

1/2 tsp. cloves

canola oil

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Mix the apples with sugar and tapioca and fill your pan right up to the top. They will cook down. Mix the dry ingredients for the topping in a bowl and get out your oil. You can use melted butter to good effect, but I wanted to make mine dairy free. Add about a 1/4 c. of oil and mix well, until there are no big chunks of oil and it’s all crumbly looking. Keep adding oil a little at a time until the all the mixture is moist, but still crumbly. Because it doesn’t have oats in it, it’s a little tricky to get it to be crumbly, but I find that by adding oil a bit at a time I can get a good consistency. That way the moisture in the air and the flour can be taken into account. So once the crumble mix is ready, generously pour it over the top of the crisp and pop it in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour. Let cool and serve. If you can have it, vanilla ice cream is awesome with it.