Apple-(Sauce)-Pee-Kuchen and other disasters

To begin with, I was worried about the springform pan--I'd never baked a pie in a springform pan before (has anyone?) so the thought of its high sides and bumpy bottom was a little daunting. I asked Edeltraud if there was any chance her frying pans were safe to bake in, but she didn't look too thrilled about that prospect, so I resigned myself to constructing the tallest apple pie in Munich.

By the end of the day, I had pretty much forgetten about the springform pan (aside from the fact that Edeltraud wanted to open it and let the hot pie ooze out onto her clean new tablecloth...) No, by the time we finally sat down to eat way too much else had gone wrong to be worried about the stupid springform pan.

I had picked out the apples several days before. Surprisingly a major hassle in a city littered with Bio-Märkte and greengrocers. Apparently most Muncheners are far more interested in good eating apples than apple-pie baking apples. Go figure. Still, a fancy-looking fruit-shop down the street from the Rachel Carson Center in hoity-toity Schwabing seemed to have just the thing: a crate of beautiful German Boskoop apples. The sign specifcally mentioned that they were sour.

For some reason I decided that vegetable shortening, unlike apples, would not be difficult to find in Germany. Oh, how wrong I was. A visit to the local Rewe, which probably has the best selection of any normal supermarket in Munich, was unsuccesful, but I wasn't worried. For some reason I was convinced that somewhere else in Munich there would be German-made shortening. There wasn't.

Increasingly worried that Edeltraud and Kurt would return home from their shopping trip to a pie-less kitchen, I dragged Jamie to supermarket after supermarket. Finally, we squeezed through the throng of tourists and shoppers enjoying downtown Munich, and found some Crisco on the American specialties shelf in the gourmet section of a pricey department store... Right next to the marshmallows and the fake maple syrup. After all, what else would it be worth importing all the way from the US?

Crisco in hand, we threaded our way back through the crowds to the U-Bahn, and returned home. We headed up to the kitchen, put on a Johnny Cash CD and started peeling apples. They were nice, sturdy apples, plenty sour, so I figured we would need a bunch of sugar. Soon I realized my first mistake (besides not having a pie plate and presuming that Germans eat shortening on a regular basis)--despite having been to almost every store in Munich, I'd forgotten to buy a lemon to keep the apples from browning as we cut them. Jamie volunteered to run back to Rewe and pick up the missing Zitrone as well some ice cream to enjoy with the pie. By the time she was back, I had the crust ready and most of the apples sliced.

We finished slicing together, and I had to move the beautiful, sour slices into a new bowl since there were so many. I got out the sugar and poured on about half a cup. I added some cinnamon and flour and gave the apples a big stir. It smelled like apple pie. I was happy.

Then I sampled an apple. It tasted terrible.

My mind raced.

Too much cinnamon?

The apples were really sour and just needed more sugar?

Nope, I had mistaken the salt for the sugar and heaped on enough to turn the Starnberger Lake into a minor Ocean. We tried to rinse off the apples, but it was far too late. They were salty to the core (well, we'd cored them already, but they were salty through and through).

I started to lose it. As Jamie knows far too well, things are not pretty when I screw up a recipe. It wasn't pretty.

Luckily for me, Jamie is far more relaxed and resourceful than I. She got me to run downstairs and start a new apple search in Sendling. Of course before we even made it to the first store, Kurt and Edeltraud appeared in the Alramstraße, shopping bags in hand. They had successfully found winter coats, and they were ready for some apple pie (or as the Germans pronounce it, "pee").

Jamie volunteered to head them off while I scoured the first store for apples. Nothing.

About five stores later, we finally found some more slightly less atractive sour Boskoop apples. We returned home and peeled and sliced them in record time. Jamie tested the sugar to make sure it was sugar, Edeltraud explained to me that even the best housewives make mistakes, and we put the pie together.

We baked it for an hour, and soon you could smell apples and cinnamon all over the apartment. I should have been happy, but I was nervous--what else could Murphy have up his sleeve?

We pulled the pie out of the oven and sat down to eat. I had no idea how to cut a pie in a springform pan, so Edeltraud smartly suggested that we take it off the table so that it could be butchered over on the counter and all we would see was our individual pieces of pie--not the oozing pie carcass trapped inside the springform pan.

Then I found out what my last mistake was: Boskoop apples are terrible baking apples. My pie was an apple-sauce-pee-Kuchen. Instead of tender apples slices, we had a springform pan full of apple-y mush. At least it still tasted good. I didn't have the heart to tell Kurt and Edletraud that this pie was a fake. The real thing probably would have been too much like a big round Apple Strudle, anyway, so why worry.

It wasn't until that evening that we realized how envious the hostess of Smittenkitchen.com would have been if we had beautiful picutres of our masterpiece to illustrate this post. I think a shot of all the salted-apples in the trash would have looked especially appetizing. Luckily Jamie didn't try to take one at the time. I probably would have thrown the crust out the window...