Cranberry-Apple Crisp (ATK)

• doses: 8-10

Ingredientes

Topping

¾ cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon tablespoons

12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch pieces and chilled

3/4 cup old-fashioned oats

Filling

1 pound fresh or frozen cranberries (about 4 cups)

1 1/4 cups granulated sugar

1/4 cup water

2 1/2 pounds Granny Smith apples (6to 8 apples), peeled, cored, and cut into ½-inch pieces

2 1/2 pounds Braeburn apples (6 to 8 apples), peeled, cored, and cut into ½-inch pieces

1 cup dried sweetened cranberries

3 tablespoons Minute Tapioca

Instruções

1. For the topping: Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 400 degrees. Pulse flour, sugars, cinnamon, and butter in food processor until mixture has texture of coarse crumbs (some pea-sized pieces of butter will remain), about 12 one-second pulses. Transfer to medium bowl, stir in oats, and use fingers to pinch topping into peanut- sized clumps. Refrigerate while preparing filling.

2. For the filling: Bring fresh cranberries, ¾ cup sugar, and water to simmer in Dutch oven over medium-high heat and cook until cranberries are completely softened and mixture is jam-like, about 10 minutes. Scrape mixture into bowl. Add apples, remaining ½ cup sugar, and dried cran- berries to Dutch oven and cook over medium-high heat until apples begin to release their juices, about 5 minutes.

3. Off heat, stir cranberry mixture and tapioca into apple mixture. Pour into 13 by 9-inch baking dish set over rimmed baking sheet and smooth surface evenly with spatula.

4. To assemble: Scatter topping evenly over filling and bake until juices are bubbling and topping is deep golden brown, about 30 minutes. (If topping is browning too quickly, loosely cover with piece of aluminum foil.) Transfer to wire rack to cool. Serve warm.

Notas

My problem with cranberry-apple crisp is getting the right balance of flavors. When I add cranberries to the apples, the flavors don't come together-the cranberries taste too sour, even when I add extra sugar. Plus the apples bake unevenly, and my topping never lives up to the name "crisp." Please help. -Beth Haber, Providence, R.1.

Adding cranberries to a homespun apple crisp sounded pretty easy, but after a few initial tests I had my doubts. Like yours, my crisps had no balance of flavors; one bite tasted super-tart and over- loaded with cranberries, while the next tasted of apples, with no cranberry flavor at all. To make matters worse, the soggy topping was a long way from crisp. After several tests, I realized that tossing raw cranberries and apples together and then adding the topping was never going to work. The berries were too bitter, and their juices were making the topping soggy.

I ran across a crisp recipe that called for canned cran- berry sauce. The idea of using canned cranberries when my supermarket was overflow- ing with bags of fresh berries seemed ridiculous, but what if I made my own cranberry sauce with fresh cranberries? That way I could get even cranberry distribution (a sauce would be easy to stir into the apples) and sweeten the cran- berries before they met the apples. I cooked fresh cranberries with sugar and a little water until they burst and thickened into a homemade sauce. I then added the mixture to diced Granny Smith apples (the test kitchen's favorite for baking) and topped the fruit with the classic combination of butter, flour, sugar, cinnamon, and oats. in the oven, when the fruit juices started to bubble up, I thought I had a winner. The scarlet filling looked like it was packed with cranberry flavor, but it actually tasted pretty dull and the consistency was soupy. A colleague suggested that dried cranberries might be the berries gave my crisp a one- two punch of concentrated cranberry flavor and added a welcome textural hit that my tasters loved. And as the dried berries rehydrated, they absorbed some of the excess juices, making for a drier topping. Adding some tapioca to the filling (better than either flour or cornstarch) also helped to thicken the fruit juices. Now that I had the berries sorted out, I took another look at the apples. I liked the way Grannies held their shape in the oven, but they were awfully tart. To get a better balance of flavors, I tried combining the Grannies with sweeter apples like Gala, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, and Braeburn. The Braeburns were my tasters' favorite, followed by Golden Delicious. The crisp was taking nearly 90 minutes to bake. Any less time and the apples were too firm, but in 90 minutes the topping turned almost as hard as a stale granola bar. Since I was already dirtying a pot to make the cranberry sauce, I thought I'd use the same pot to jump-start the apples on the stovetop. Just five minutes of stovetop cooking was all it took to reduce the baking time from 90 to 30 minutes. The apples now cooked evenly in the baking dish, and the topping was no longer a dark, hard shell. After peeling my way through bushels of apples (more than 150 pounds!) and puckering up to pounds of cranberries, I had finally found the path to perfect cranberry- apple crisp. -Diane Unger

If you can't find Braeburn apples, Golden Delicious will work. Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

Make Ahead

While this crisp is best eaten the day it is cooked, the topping and filling can be made ahead. After pinch- ing the topping into small clumps in step 1, transfer the mixture to a zipper-lock bag and refrigerate for up to 5 days or freeze for up to 1 month. The cooked filling can be refrigerated for up to 2 days.

To bake, sprinkle the chilled topping evenly over the chilled filling, loosely cover with foil, and bake for 20 minutes. Uncover and bake until the juices are bubbling and the topping is deep golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes longer.

Kitchen Know-How CRISP ESSENTIALS

1. Cook the cranberries, sugar, and water until the mixture is thick and jammy. 2. Mound the topping in the center of the dish, then use your fingers to rake the topping out toward the edges of the dish.

2 cranberries are better than one

To pack cranberry flavor into our cranberry apple crisp we cook, fresh or frozen berries to a jam consistency then add chewy dried cranberries for texture and sweetness.

Partially cooking the fruit filling before baking brings the flavors together and cuts the oven time by two thirds.