- [Narrator] This is a production of PBS Charlotte.

- [Announcer] The following episode of Charlotte Cooks is brought to you by Central Piedmont Community College and viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Coming up on the next episode of Charlotte Cooks, we're making some apple dumplings.

(upbeat music) Welcome to this episode to Charlotte Cooks.

I'm Chef Pamela Roberts, and I am so glad you're joining me in my kitchen today.

We're going to be making some apple dumplings from scratch.

We're gonna be making a nice little pie dough.

We're gonna hollow out some apples, and we're gonna make a lovely little raisin cinnamon stuffing to go inside.

Then we're gonna wrap 'em in pastry, we're gonna bake 'em, and then we're going to eat these beautiful love.

They're like little mini apple pies, but they're made with whole apples.

So first thing we're going to do is make the dough, because the dough needs to actually rest before we can use it.

So for our dough, we're going to use a food processor.

And a food processor is gonna be very convenient for us because it's just gonna go very quickly.

So first of all, we're gonna start with the flour.

When you're doing your food processor though, the one thing you wanna make sure you put in first is your blade.

You don't wanna put this in after you put your ingredients in because you're gonna have to take everything out, all right?

So we're gonna put our flour in.

I'm just gonna drop it right into the bowl.

This is just like a basic pie dough.

So for a basic pie dough, we're gonna use flour.

We're going to use a little bit of salt.

We're going to use a little bit of sugar because we're making a sweet dessert with this.

Now, if we weren't making a sweet dessert, we could leave the sugar out.

You could make just a very neutral pie dough without sugar at all, but I'm gonna make it a little sweet by adding sugar.

And then I'm gonna add my fat.

Now my fat, I'm just using pure butter for this because I really like pure butter in my pastry, and I've got it cubed up.

This is about 12 ounces of butter, and I'm gonna put it in here.

And now I'm gonna process this so that it's just going to come together, and it's gonna look kind of like coarse cornmeal.

It's gonna have some large chunks of butter in it.

We don't want it completely smooth.

And that's one of the big mistakes that we can make when we make pie dough is to make it, process it too much so it's completely smooth.

If we leave the chunks of butter in there so there's still visible, the pastry is gonna be flaky.

All right, so now I'm gonna process it.

I'm just gonna pulse it to bring it together at first.

Okay, now this is the texture that I want.

It's just a little coarse.

It's not smooth, just like this, okay?

So now, I'm gonna put the lid back on.

I'm gonna add my water.

And now this water needs to be cold.

If your water, if like doing this in the summertime, and your water comes out of your faucet, and it's a little bit on the warm side, put some ice in it and make sure that your water is very cold.

The reason we wanna have cold water is so that the water doesn't melt the butter.

The butter stays solid, okay?

And that's the whole reason for doing this.

So now instead of pulsing, I'm gonna turn my machine on and slowly add the water.

Now what's gonna happen inside of here is all of this is gonna turn into a ball, and that's what I want.

As soon as that ball forms, and starts woo, going around inside of there, we're gonna stop, all right?

So here we go.

(processor vibrating) I may not need all the water.

If I do, that's great, but if I don't.

And there's my ball right there.

So now, what I'm going to do with this dough, remember, the dough has to rest.

And what does that mean?

Well, we've just worked the flour and the fat in here a lot.

And so what happens when we start adding water and things like that to flour is we develop something called gluten.

A gluten is kind of like what's in bread that makes the bread rise.

It keeps the gas from escaping.

What we're doing here in the pie dough is we do not wanna develop that elasticity.

We wanna keep it so the dough is going to be flaky.

So no gluten development.

That's why as soon as it comes together, we're stopping.

We're not gonna knead it.

We're not gonna process it.

And even when we roll it out, we're gonna be careful about how we roll it out.

So yep, my hands are gonna get gooey.

We've got this beautiful piece of pie dough.

So now we have to divide this into three pieces, and we're going to take it and wrap it up into cellophane, and we're gonna put it in the cooler, and it's going to get nice and cold before we roll it out.

So to wrap your dough and cellophane, you just take a little disk, little ball.

We divided it into thirds.

And just wrap it up.

And I like to flatten it out a little bit.

And the reason I flatten it out is just so it cools off faster.

If you're gonna put it in overnight, a little ball is just fine, but you don't wanna work the dough a whole lot.

Remember, you're just trying to let it rest.

So today, when we are doing our apple dumplings, if you go to the market, there's a lot of apples that you could choose from.

And sometimes when you look at the apples, it's very easy to get really confused as to what apple do you choose for what application.

And so a couple things you need to remember.

Granny Smiths, Red Delicious apples, these beautiful red apples.

These apples will fall apart on you when they cook.

And it is just the nature of the apple.

About the only apples that hold their shape when they cook are Granny Smiths and Honeycrisp apples.

And the honey, we're gonna use Honeycrisp today because number one, they don't turn brown as fast as other apples, and number two, I really like the flavor of a Honeycrisp.

They're really, really delicious.

And so if you wanted to make these out of a Red Delicious apple, you could, but you're gonna have to remember your apple is gonna get really mealy.

These are really good for apple sauce where they just fall apart completely, and they're really good for eating too.

But we're not gonna eat these today.

We're gonna bake them.

So we want something that is going to hold its shape.

I don't wanna use a Granny Smith because a Granny Smith is very tart.

And they're really good for pies.

I like to use a combination of a sweet apple and the Granny Smith apple when I'm making a pie, so you got that sweet tart going on.

But we're gonna wrap these up in pastry and serve the whole apple to somebody.

And so that's gonna be too much tartness I think for this dessert.

So what I'm going to choose for this is the Honeycrisp apple.

And in order to get our apples ready for our pastry, we have two things we have to do.

We're going to peel them, we're gonna hollow them out, and then we're gonna stuff them with a stuffing.

And this stuffing, we're gonna, I'm gonna show you really quickly how to put this together.

It is just a combination of raisins, and brown sugar, lemon zest, and butter.

And if you wanted to add some nuts, and like pecans, or almonds, or pistachios, you could, but you gotta remember, the little hole we're gonna make on the bottom of the apple is not that big.

And so you have to make sure if you're putting the nuts in there, that you chop 'em up a little bit so that they're not gonna be the only thing in the center of your apple.

We're going to need four tablespoons of butter.

Now your butter needs to be soft.

And if your butter has a tendency to get warm, you don't want it melted.

You just want it soft.

Just take it and mash it around in a bowl with a fork, and that'll soften it up.

We're gonna take some lemon zest.

We're gonna use a little bit of lemon zest in here because that adds a really nice bright flavor.

We're gonna add a little bit of brown sugar.

You can use light brown sugar, dark brown sugar, whatever your preference is.

It doesn't really matter.

We're gonna mash this together.

Now the next thing we're gonna add, we're gonna put the raisins in there.

So we're just gonna take it and just dump it right in the bowl.

We're gonna add some cinnamon, and you're gonna just simply stir all this together until it looks like this when it's done, just a nice homogenous mix.

The only lumps in here are going to be your raisins or your nuts if you put in there.

So next we're gonna get our apples prepared.

Now you wanna find tiny apples.

You don't wanna go find great big apples for this.

If you wanna use great big apples, you're gonna have to cut big pastry circles, and it's okay.

It depends on what you want.

I find for a personal individual serving, the smaller apples are better.

So when you go to the store to look for 'em, you probably have to search for the smaller apples.

So we're gonna peel it.

So all we're gonna do with this.

Now remember I told you that the Honeycrisp apples are really great, and that they don't turn brown on you quite as bad as some of the other old fashioned apples.

Red Delicious, Granny Smiths will start turning brown within a couple of minutes of being exposed and peeled, and that's just an oxidation.

That's just what the apples do.

If you're using those, and you don't want them to turn brown on you, then all you're gonna have to do is squeeze a little bit of lemon juice over it.

There's an old wives tale, I don't know if you've ever heard this before, but the old wives tale about peeling an apple.

Totally not gonna have this happen for me 'cause I've got so many bits and pieces here.

I'm try another one.

If you could peel the apple in one piece, and you throw the peel over your shoulder, it lands in the initial of the person you were supposed to marry.

I don't think it's gonna work for me.

But nonetheless, the trick is getting the apple peel off in one piece.

So I'm gonna try here.

My grandmother used to do these beautiful apple dumplings.

I used to love it when she did it.

Did it break?

I think it just broke.

So no hope for me, right?

So anyway, I used to love helping her do the apples.

We used to get bowls, and bowls, and bowls of 'em.

There were 18 kids in her family.

It was a yours, mine, and our family.

So there was always a lot of dumplings to make when we did it.

And it was a big family affair, and it was just a lot of fun.

I really enjoyed doing it.

I'm only gonna do two apples here 'cause I don't wanna take up all your time having you watch me peel apples.

But nonetheless, it's always a good chance to sit and catch up with your friends, your kids, or whoever else is helping you.

So the next thing we're gonna do is core them.

We're gonna core them from the bottom because we kind of like, especially if you get an apple that has a nice long stem, you can use that as part of your decoration.

We're gonna use a small melon baller.

We got big ones, we got small ones.

You wanna find something relatively small.

If you don't have a melon baller, you know what really works really well is that little bitty quarter teaspoon that's on your measuring spoon, okay?

You're gonna go from the bottom, and you're gonna scoop.

And we're just gonna scoop this whole entire core out.

Now what you're looking for are all of the seeds.

Now try not to move to the side.

You wanna just go all the way.

You don't wanna take the stem out.

So you're gonna go all the way up to where the stem area is.

And see, in there you can see some of the seeds, and that's what you wanna get out, okay?

You see that beautiful little star shape?

It's kinda neat when you cut the apples this way.

You get that pretty star shape in the center.

And you just wanna get all those seeds out.

So once you see all those seeds are out, you're going to be almost at the very, very top of the apple.

Now that's where you gotta be careful not to go all the way through and take your stem out.

Before I put the filling in, let me go ahead and do another one of these for you so you can see the whole procedure again.

Take your melon baller.

And the melon baller is good because it's got a nice sharp edge on it.

Just get in there, twist it out.

Now you're gonna think, oh, there's no seeds.

There's no seeds.

But the seeds are usually there towards the top, especially on the Honeycrisp.

On some of the older apples, the seeds will be throughout the core.

And then when you get that little clump of seeds out, it's nice and clear on the inside.

Now we're ready to put the filling in.

You can use your hands.

You can use a spoon if you don't like getting your hands dirty, but I like using a spoon so you don't have to get your fingers in there.

Okay, and just take it and press it in there until the little cavity is full.

Take another little bit.

That's a lot there, but we're gonna take out what we don't need.

Stuff it in there where we could really get nice filling and raisins.

'Cause remember your butter's gonna gonna melt.

So we wanna get that raisin in there so we get some texture in the middle.

And now we're gonna roll out our dough, and I'm gonna show you some fun things to how to decorate these.

Instead of just wrapping 'em up and making plain Janes, we're gonna make 'em a little bit fancier.

So next, I'm gonna go get my dough outta the refrigerator, and I'm gonna be wrapping my apple.

So my dough is nice and chilled.

And now I'm gonna roll it out.

And I wanna get a nice thin sheet of dough because I'm gonna double it up a couple times when I put my decorations on there.

For my decorations, I'm going to use some random cutters that I have.

I'm gonna need a big circle cutter.

Because number one, a circle cutter, you can use anything for your circle cutter.

This is a lid to something that I had back in the kitchen 'cause I didn't have a cutter that was actually a big enough circle.

But you wanna make sure when you put your apple in the center of it, you're gonna have about an inch of room all the way around it.

That's the size that we need.

That's why I chose this thing to use.

I'm gonna show you how we're gonna roll this out.

Gonna take a little bit of flour and sprinkle your board.

You can use a lot of flour, a little flour.

I don't like using a lot of flour on my board, and that's because I don't want my dough to get too dry.

I want it to be just perfect.

Undo your plastic wrap.

And we are going to take our dough, and we're gonna take our dough and lay it right down there on the flour.

Now, right away you can see some of the butter that is still in the flour that hasn't been completely mushed out, and that's good.

That means that's gonna be flaky, but it also means it has a tendency to be a little sticky there.

So make sure you put a little bit of flour on that side and a little bit of flour on this side before we start rolling 'em out.

So we're gonna roll it, we're gonna turn it, and we're gonna roll it some more.

If you wanna get rectangles, circles, the trick to this is picking your dough up and not just standing here and doing this one area.

You gotta do your dough in both directions, in diagonals, back and forth.

If you don't have room to actually get your dough out into a circle, well then you could do a rectangle.

We are just gonna be cutting some shapes out of this.

How thin do you want your dough to be?

We want our dough to be probably about an eighth of an inch, and we're gonna spread it out over our cutting board.

And if any of these pieces start getting sticky, guys, just get a little flour and dust them up.

You can see the butter flecks in here.

Sometimes those butter flecks will come to the surface, and then your flour will help keep those from getting really sticky and making your dough just stick to your cutting board and stick to your rolling pin.

So I've got this rolled out now about thin enough that I'm gonna cut my pieces out of it.

This is really nice.

Okay, so take my piece, put it to the edge, cut a couple circles out.

And the nice thing about doing this dough, as long as you don't handle it too much, any scraps you can take out, and you could reroll them out.

And my father used to, my father taught me this actually.

He said, "Don't throw out the pie dough when you have extra scraps.

Go ahead and roll 'em out, spread it with a little bit of butter, a little bit of cinnamon, and roll 'em up, and put 'em in the oven, and cook 'em."

And I just love that stuff.

I cannot tell you how much I love that.

Every time I make it, I think of my daddy.

Make sure that it all comes up nice.

Okay, I'm going to take my apple, put it in bottom side down on both pieces.

If your dough's stuck a little bit like this, you see that that's not really perfect there.

That's not gonna look nice and smooth.

Am I gonna worry about it?

No.

Am I gonna make another one?

No.

Am I gonna use it?

Of course.

Stick apple right in the middle.

And the reason I'm not gonna worry about it is because now nobody knows it's stuck.

It's all covered up by the apple.

I'm gonna take this and do the same thing.

Now y'all are at home and you're gonna say, well look it, she's got all that apple sticking out of the top, right?

What's gonna happen there?

But we're gonna take some of these cutters.

This is what we're gonna use the cutters for.

I like using these.

These are like little plunger cutters.

You could find these in craft stores.

They're actually, they're used for fondant icing and things.

So you gotta put this down.

The trick is, if you just push it down once, you're not gonna get a cut out of it.

So watch this.

(Pamela banging) Gotta bang on it a little bit.

And then it comes out, and then you can just plunger it out.

And now you got a nice little leaf shape.

And this is what we're gonna cover the tops of these with.

See look, we're gonna take these little things.

We're gonna put them all over here.

And so you can cut out some more.

But remember, if you're using the plungers, (Pamela banging) gotta give it a little attack so it gets up into the plunger, and it actually puts the pattern onto your dough.

Isn't that cute?

I think it's just adorable.

I'm gonna keep on going.

(Pamela banging) And you can use different sizes.

This is the biggest one I think that I have in this little kit.

So I might wanna grab a little one or a medium size one.

(Pamela banging) Pick it up.

And sorry for the pounding, but it's really what it takes to get these to come out.

And so I've already cut out a whole bunch of 'em over here.

So you could actually cut your shapes out, and you can use any shape you want.

That's the beauty of this.

If you wanted to use hearts, you can use flowers.

I'm using these leaves 'cause I think it's gonna be a nice addition, especially when we come into fall.

Just put them on there and press them on.

And then the next thing we're going to do is take egg wash and egg wash everything.

And the egg wash is gonna do two things.

It's gonna make sure that all of these beautiful little leafy things are gonna stick, and they're gonna stay on, and it's gonna give it a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sheen when we're done, okay?

Grab another one of these bigger ones here.

There we go.

Come on out.

This is why your dough needs to be really cold too, guys, because if your dough is cold, it handles better.

I should plunge it out instead of just trying to pick it out.

There we go.

Lay it on there.

Does this have to be perfect?

Absolutely not.

Does not need to be perfect because when it's all baked off, it's gonna be beautiful.

Okay, so now, next thing I'm going to do, an egg wash.

Here in my egg wash, one whole egg and two tablespoons of water.

You just want it to have enough water to make the egg liquid.

And so we're going to brush this all over with the egg wash. And you don't wanna get it totally saturated, you just wanna brush it.

So it's gonna have a nice gloss to it when it's finished.

And then you also wanna make sure, can go down and you can press things in, make sure everything's gonna stick.

And if you see any places you wanna add another little leaf or something, add it.

Stick it on there.

Just make sure you give 'em a little egg wash too.

Okay?

What we're gonna do now is we're gonna sprinkle a little bit of granulated sugar over them, and we are going to have that beautiful result of the golden brown pastry that's gonna be pretty and glossy because it has the egg wash on it.

And then the sugar on the top of it is gonna give it a nice golden brown sugary crunch, which is just gonna be just delightful.

You wanna sprinkle the sugar on your apples before they hit the sheet pan.

What's gonna happen is the sugar will start burning on the sheet pan, and you'll be thinking your apples are burning before they're actually cooked, and they won't be.

So just a little sprinkle.

Put them on the sheet pan, parchment lined so they come off.

Just take this and sprinkle this.

Now this could even be cinnamon sugar if you wanted.

Be really nice with cinnamon sugar, but I do have a tendency to think that cinnamon can burn.

So just be very careful with that.

So now we're gonna take these, and we're gonna put them in the oven.

The oven is set at 350 degrees.

If you find it's cooking too slow, we want to raise a temperature to 400, but they usually take about an hour to cook.

Whoa, an hour, really?

And that's because we've got the raw apple, and we got pie dough.

Pie dough has a tendency to take a while to cook unless you've got nothing on it.

So about an hour, but keep your eye on 'em.

You want it to be golden brown when they're done.

The apples will be cooked, and you can tell by taking a little knife and putting a little tease inside of there.

It's gonna be delicious.

So while our apples are in the oven, we can make a little sauce.

So this isn't gonna be a thick sauce.

It's just a little drizzle of a sauce to add some nice apple flavor to our plate.

And all you need for that is some frozen apple juice concentrate.

You're not gonna dilute it.

This is just the frozen apple juice concentrate that's thawed out.

We're gonna go ahead and turn it on.

And we just want this to be slightly warm, and we're gonna add a cinnamon stick and a couple of whole cloves.

And this is just to give, not too many cloves.

Just two is all we really need.

These cloves are really quite powerful.

And we're just gonna let this come to a simmer, and then we're gonna cool it down.

And all this is going to do is put some cinnamon and clove flavor into this apple juice concentrate, which gives it a beautiful flavor.

And so that's what we're gonna use for our sauce.

Ooh, our apples look like they are ready.

So I'm gonna get them out of the oven.

Ooh, look at these babies.

Aren't they delightful?

And see, look at.

I think they're gorgeous.

Aren't they pretty?

I mean, I just think they're really pretty.

And so now we are going to plate.

I'm gonna show you how to plate this up.

We're gonna use a couple plates.

Now because we have a sauce on here, we wanna go ahead and make sure your plate has a lip.

A lot of times right now, one of the trends is to use really flat plates.

Well, if you had a really flat plate and there's liquid sauce on there, what's gonna happen?

(Pamela mumbling) It's gonna go all over the side.

What we're going to do to serve our apples is we're gonna use a spatula.

We're gonna take a spatula, and we're going to carefully put the apples on the plate.

I'm gonna use this one too.

Ah, this one's prettier.

Such a thing as a pretty apple, right?

I'm going to use a little bit of whipped cream.

Got some whipped cream in a pastry bag.

Got a couple of strawberries here just to give us some brightness on the plate.

So in my whipped cream, I've got it in a pastry bag.

Now look at this, guys.

This looks kind of silly, doesn't it?

But this is the way you can put things into a pastry bag without having it all leak out of the tip.

And then when you're ready, you just take it, twist it.

Look at that.

Isn't that kinda neat?

And there it is.

It's gonna be ready to come out.

Now using a pastry bag, guys, this is not your squeeze hand.

This is your guide hand.

And a lot of times I see people taking the pastry bag and squeezing it with this hand.

This is your squeeze hand.

You twist it, and you give a squeeze.

And you go around on here.

I'm gonna come over here, and I'm gonna put this around the base of this apple.

And if you want a little more, do a little more.

Why not?

It's whipped cream.

It's delicious.

And it goes really, really, really good with, twist and continue to squeeze.

Okay, I'm gonna put a little whip cream up top because it's good there.

And to finish this off, I'm going to take a strawberry fan.

It's been sliced.

Put it right here on the side.

I'm gonna open 'em up.

There we go.

Now, on this dish, I am going to also add some fresh tyme just because it's really pretty, and I think it adds a lovely flavor and aroma to the apple.

So just lay the sprigs right on there.

And then for your sauce, we're gonna take some of the sauce and just a little bit.

We don't wanna lot.

We don't wanna make soup on this.

We just wanna put a little bit over the top so that it drains out a little bit on the bottom.

So it adds a little bit of that beautiful apple flavor, and it drains every so slightly out on the plate.

We do the second one 'cause I know you got a friend.

All right, just a little bit over the top.

In there.

It smells great.

And here you have it, folks, apple dumplings.

Now wouldn't you like to have a dessert like that?

I think they're fabulous.

I think this is one of my favorite desserts.

It's pastry, it's a baked apple, it's whipped cream, and it's really delicious.

This is a perfect thing to do for a fall buffet.

That is a great thing.

You can make 'em ahead of time, you could freeze 'em, you could bake 'em off, you could freeze 'em off, and then you could bake 'em off when you're ready for 'em.

So if you're doing a party, make 'em ahead of time.

But no matter what you do, when you do 'em, make sure you make 'em because they are delicious.

If you wanna grab these recipes, you can get 'em off of our website at pbscharlotte.org, or you can send me an email at Pamela, P-A-M-E-L-A, dot Roberts, R-O-B-E-R-T-S, @cpss.edu, and I will send you a link that has all of our recipes on our website so you don't have to go searching for it.

Thank you for watching this episode of Charlotte Cooks, and I will catch you again next time.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] A production of PBS Charlotte.