The Best Apple Crumble Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How do you make Martha Stewart apple crumble? ›

In a large bowl, toss together apples, granulated sugar, 2 tablespoons flour, lemon juice, cinnamon, and 1/4 teaspoon salt; transfer to prepared dish. In a bowl with an electric mixer, beat butter with brown sugar until fluffy. Mix in 1 cup flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt until large pieces form. Scatter over filling.

Like an apple crisp, an apple crumble is a baked fruit dessert with a layer of topping. But unlike the crisp, the crumble topping rarely includes oats or nuts. Instead, a crumble's topping is more like streusel, made with flour, sugar and butter.

Place the flour, demerara sugar and butter into a mixing bowl and rub with your fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the oats. Scatter onto the apples and then sprinkle the extra sugar on top.

The main reason your crumble topping isn't crunchy is probably because you haven't used Demerara sugar. Although, it could also be that you've got your topping ingredient quantities wrong: either too much or not enough flour and butter alongside the sugar.

Butter, which encourages both browning and crispness, is the magic ingredient in getting your topping just right, so follow the recipe instructions. But if you feel your topping is still too dry and crumbly, (even for a crumble) add a bit more melted butter, a tablespoon at a time.

This is known as oxidation and occurs when the cells within the fruit are exposed to air. Lemon juice helps with this, acting to coat the flesh and protecting it. It also adds extra flavour to your apple crumble recipe and offsets the sweetness of the sugar.

There is no difference, crumble and streusel can sometimes be different but in this case they are the same. The streusel or crumble is made from butter, flour, sugar, and vanilla.

Cobbler: A fruit dessert made with a top crust of pie dough or biscuit dough but no bottom crust. Crisp/crumble: In Alberta, the terms are mostly interchangeable. Both refer to fruit desserts similar to cobbler but made with a brown sugar streusel topping sometimes containing old-fashioned rolled oats.

In the Original Picayune Creole Cook Book (1901) a recipe identical to the Brown Betty traveled under the name “Mulatto's Pudding” furthering the idea that the sweet-sounding Brown Betty was more a race-based epithet towards its maker than a homey moniker denoting golden-brown bread crumbs.

Best Apple Crumble Recipe Tips

For this recipe, you'll need excellent baking apples. They should have a firm texture and hold their shape when cooked. Some of my favorite types of apples for baking include Honeycrisp, Gala, Pink Lady, and Granny Smith apples. Choose just one, or use a mix!

What is apple crumble called in America? ›

Apple crisp is a dessert made with a streusel topping. In the US, it is also called apple crumble, a word which refers to a different dessert in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Ingredients usually include cooked apples, butter, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and often oats and brown sugar, ginger, and/or nutmeg.

If you overcook it, it could curdle, go lumpy or have an 'eggy' flavour. The creme Anglaise will thicken more when it cools. Pour immediately into a jug (or a milk bottle) to stop it from cooking further. Serve the crumble with creme Anglaise, ice cream and or runny cream.

Since we know that three medium-sized apples (or four small ones) make a pound, you can use this as a guide to know how many large apples make up a pound. In general, 2 large apples can often make up a pound, with large apples that are close in size to a softball.

When you cook apples, the pectin in them breaks down, making the apples watery. The lower pH value of tart apples reduces the amount of pectin that breaks down, so the apples hold their shape and get less mushy.

Use cold, cubed butter.

Making the crumble with room temperature or melted butter will cause the topping to spread as it bakes, rather than creating a landscape of craggy, crunchy sweet pieces. Using cold butter will help all the crumble ingredients bind together before baking and then saturate them evenly in the oven.

Making Crumble Topping

First, adding a teaspoon of baking powder to the flour mixture makes the crumble topping more tender. Second, using cold butter and working it into the flour mixture makes for a pastry-like topping reminiscent of pie crust.

And yet, some recipes demand light and others dark. The good news is that light and dark brown sugar are interchangeable: You're not going to ruin your cookies, your crumble, or your banana bread by swapping one for the other.