Homemade apple pie

After finished the class I had this urge to make something at home and I decided to make an apple pie using the dough recipe I’ve got today. I’ve baked apple pie several times but it’s been one year since I made the last one. I remember that we have lots of trouble this past year finding a good housemaid that can help me as cook assistant. And after changing 3 housemaids we found a good one now, she’s a good cook and quite reliable as a kitchen assistant.

So at home I only prepare all the ingredients and measure them right and let our housemaid to finish the dough and prepare the apple sauce. But I still have to roll the dough and put it on tray and check the oven myself. We only have a simple portable oven at our home, so if we want to use it then we have to heat the oven on top of the gas stove. We can’t possibly know the oven temperature, the only way to know is using our feeling and checking the oven often until our food is well baked.

I didn’t make any decoration, I didn’t have any idea at all and besides I really just wanted to make it right. I did use the extra dough and made some Pooh and Tiger shape cookies but somehow my kitchen assistant forgot to check the oven and they became burnt, and of course I didn’t want to take their pictures.

Well, if someone is still reading, I want to share about my time at the cooking school.

For these past two days we made several dough; pizza dough, short pastry dough, and puff pastry dough. I didn’t take pictures for any of those because they won’t look good. My pizza, while it taste good it didn’t look great (I will make some pizzas again maybe after I finish all my classes) and so is my quiche lorraine. It also didn’t look great because we used disposable foil tray that made the pie not in perfect circle shape.

As for the quiche lorraine itself, it’s a meat pie using shortcrust pastry dough for the base, with smoked slab bacon, eggs, and cream filling and grated gruyere cheese on top. Most Indonesian only eat sweet pie (with sugar coating, sweet cream, fruits, fruit jams, etc.) so I and the other students didn’t like the quiche; the taste was good (but salty) and we somehow have this expectation in our head that all pie are sweet so when we eat a salty pie, it just don’t feel right for us.

We also prepare a puff pastry dough but we will use it on our next class. To make a good puff pastry dough we must make it in a cold room (about 18 degree Celcius), if the room temperature is higher than that then the puff pastry won’t expand well in the oven. I think the temperature in the school kitchen is more than 25 degree so we’ll see how bad the pastry will be tomorrow.