The Ultimate Apple Tart: The Original Harrods Apple Pie Recipe

Welcome to London. We are in Harrods, in the Georgian Tea Room. I'm Francesco Genovese, Head Pastry Chef of the Harrods Brigade. Harrods, for those who don't know it, is the largest department store in the world, with more than 3,000 fashion, fashion and luxury brands and many restaurants. Inside Harrods, food and pastry play a key role in the work we do. We have more than 22 restaurant outlets. My role as Head Pastry Chef is to take care of the research and development, the delivery of products on a daily basis and the management of the pastry team. Harrods has more than 6,000 employees. Within the pastry team, our brigade is made up of more than 70 pastry chefs, divided into several departments, including the chocolate shop, the bakery pastry shop, the bakery, then we have the restaurant, which goes from the high restaurant to the casual cafe, approaching any range of customers. We make large quantities, but we are a unique operation in our genre. If you take the reference of hotels, pastries in general, the offer can also be large, with few varieties. Instead, we make a lot of lines, we have more than 300 pastry shops, which makes us unique in our genre. Taking advantage of a large variety of products, thanks to the large team we have behind us, and delivering an excellent result to our guests. The most interesting part of being Head Pastry Chef at Harrods is the possibility of working on a wide range of products, ranging from the biscuit shop to the tea pastry shop, the chocolate shop, the whole breading part, and a range of fresh sweets, from the French pastry shop to the British classics. Today, for Italia Squisita, we are going to talk about a classic of English pastry, which is the apple pie. The apple pie is one of our undisputed bestsellers, always present in the pastry shop showcase, which can also be tasted in some of our cafes. In England, fruit-flavoured sweets are present in pie or crumble versions. The difference between the two is that the pie is a container where there is a fruit, externally covered with crumb, and a decoration on the surface, while the crumble, a little more homely, is usually a pan with fruit inside, sugar and possibly butter, covered with a crumbled biscuit and baked in the oven. The first books that mention the apple pie as a recipe date back to the 1300s, so it was an iconic sweet, born in England, then later exported around the world and found its consecration in American culture. Our recipe is a very classic recipe, which we are now going to explore in detail. The fundamental part of every pie is the crumb, which I am going to reuse for the recipe. Inside our planetary mixer, we are going to add all the dry ingredients, flour, icing sugar, salt, almond flour. We are going to add the butter between 10 and 12°C, so that it will allow us to get the correct sandiness. The advantage of a sanded crumb is that the butter will be incorporated into the flour and will allow us to get a more dry result. Unlike a classic crumb, where we add sugar, butter, eggs and flour, here we have a product where the crumb is wetter and it is a bit more difficult to work on large quantities. Once all the dry ingredients have absorbed the butter, we are going to add our eggs, all at once. From now on, we are going to mix as little as possible to avoid the excessive development of gluten, which will give tenacity to our dough. So, as soon as the ingredients are mixed, we stop the mixer. My advice is to let the dough rest in the fridge, spread out thinly, so that the temperature reaches the heart more directly and we stabilize the butter. The resulting dough will go in the fridge to rest for at least two hours, which is the perfect time to prepare our filling. Here, the apple becomes the protagonist of our recipe. For the apple pie, I decided to use two varieties of apples, which are Granny Smith and Pink Lady. I decided to combine these two fruits, taking the aromatic part of Pink Lady and its sweetness and combining it with the crunchiness and acidity of Granny Smith. Classically, the apples used are Bramley Apple or Golden Delicious. These are a little drier apples, which are predisposed to an excellent cooking. However, today I am going to show you a technique to be able to use any type of apple, regardless of the amount of water, because we are going to manage the free water of the apple before cooking. We are going to make two preparations. The first, which is an apple cream, and the second, the baked apples. After that, these two elements will be combined together to create the filling. For the apple cream, we slice the Pink Lady and Granny Smith to a thickness of about half a centimeter. We put them with sugar, lemon jam, salt and vanilla. We put them under vacuum and we cook them in a steam oven for about four hours. For those who do not have an under vacuum, the way to make it at home is simply to combine all the ingredients inside a pot and cook it like a classic jam. This technique allows us to use less sugar in the recipe and to take advantage of the caramelization of the apples' sugars through the prolonged steam cooking. So, at the end of our four hours, the apple mixture will look like this. Naturally caramelized, dark, ready to use. Once the mixture is obtained, it will be blended, combined with corn starch and cooked in a pan as if it were a pastry cream. With the remaining apples, we will make the baked apples. In a pot, we add the butter and the vanilla bean, without the seeds. We start to fry our butter, then we add the apples. We will cook the apples for a few minutes. Once the butter is absorbed and the apples are dry, we add sugar, salt and the vanilla seeds. At this moment, you will see an instant release of water from the apples. The classic apple pie has raw apples cut directly inside. The problem with this technique is that the apple releases water, it tends to make a soufflé effect and then collapses at the end of cooking. This cooking technique allows me to use any apple to dry the liquid and my starting volume will be equal to the final cooking volume of my apple pie. After about 5 minutes, the liquid has completely dried inside the pot. We remove the apples from the heat, add the cinnamon and the lemon jam. My Mediterranean touch inside a British classic. I spread the apples on a plate so that they cool down faster. Once they are cold, we will combine them with the apple cream and that will represent the filling of our apple pie. Once the shortcrust pastry has rested, we will knead it slightly to give plasticity to the dough before laminating it and lining our pan. When we laminate the dough we have specific machines that help us to obtain a good consistency. Today I will use a rolling pin and I will use these two bars of 0.5 cm that will give me a homogeneous thickness to the shortcrust pastry on its entire surface. Once we have obtained the thickness of 0.5 cm, we will line our pan. For the pie, we will use a fairly thick shortcrust pastry because each pie will weigh about 1.3 kg or 1.5 kg, so it will have to keep a lot of dough inside and we need a solid shell to be able to collect all the filling. So we are going to use a slightly higher thickness than a classic shortcrust pastry. The pan we are using has a diameter of 23 cm and will serve between 8 and 10 people. And now we are ready to fill the pie. Let's take our pan and sprinkle a layer of biscuit or crumbled sponge cake in order to absorb any loss of cooking liquid which will allow me an optimal cooking of the shortcrust pastry. Inside the pan we will add about 1.2 kg of filling. Let's decorate the surface with some shortcrust pastry and some flowers. Let's brush with some egg yolk. Let it rest for 15 minutes and we are going to apply a second layer of egg yolk to our shortcrust pastry. Let's add some cane sugar and we are ready to cook. We are cooking inside a 200°C oven for about 1 hour or 1 hour and 10 minutes. You can easily cook in a home oven at 170°C for about 50 minutes or 1 hour. While the pie is cooking we are going to make an Italian classic combined with an English product. We will make an ice cream with clotted cream. Traditionally this cream accompanies scones in the afternoon tea. Scones are a product of British shortcrust pastry that can be presented plain or with sultanas inside. They are typically filled in half and with clotted cream and jam. My idea was to transform a classic British product like clotted cream in an Italian version fresh to accompany a dessert so in an ice cream. For the ice cream with clotted cream I chose to use an egg base that is not too rich. We are going to combine with granulated sugar ice cream stabilizer powdered milk and dextrose, which is a pastry sugar used a lot in ice cream shops to lower the freezing point. We are going to combine everything with our Harrod's whole milk and we are going to cook all the ingredients like a classic English cream in a pan at 82°C. Once our English cream is cooked, we are going to pour it on the clotted cream and emulsify it. Before it is whipped the mixture has to rest for approximately 12 hours. Once the base is cooled a fundamental step before whipping is the emulsion. The fat globules in the cooling phase tend to create quite large molecules. The emulsion allows us to break the fat and create a more defined aroma for our ice cream. We are going to use Carpigiani's Freeze & Go to whip our mix. Freeze & Go allows us to whip small amounts of ice cream and have more whipping phases during a restaurant service cycle, so to have an ice cream always perfect to use and, above all, at an ideal temperature for tasting. After 30 minutes of cooking, it is time to check the pie and move our pan inside the bakery oven. We are going to cook for another 30 minutes and then our pie will be ready. After about 7 minutes our ice cream is perfectly whipped. We are going to extract it from our whipper and we are going to put it in the freezer for 10 minutes before making our quenelles. The ideal temperature to taste an ice cream is between minus 7 and minus 9. The conservation temperature for us in the laboratory is about minus 13 degrees. The pie is ready. We take it out of the oven and let it cool at room temperature before serving it. The apple pie can be served at room temperature as we do or hot. To reheat it, it takes 5 minutes in the oven at 200 degrees. I advise you to slice it before heating it, since once it is hot it is much more difficult to obtain precise slices. Let's cut the apple pie. As you can see, the pie is perfectly cooked. We have a layer of apple inside that stays together thanks to the apple cream we added. Let's serve it with base apple cream, hot crumble and clotted cream ice cream. It was a pleasure to have you inside Harrods for a day to show you our reality in all its facets and to make the apple pie together. I hope this recipe inspired you. Now you just have to make it at home or come to find me inside Harrods to taste our version. Greetings to all friends of Italia Squisita. See you in the next video!