Mike van de Elzen: Oma's apple tart

Oma's apple tart 

Cook time: 45 minutes 

Prep time: 35 minutes 

Serves: 6 

300g self raising flour, sifted  

100g brown sugar  

1 tsp vanilla paste  

Pinch of salt  

150g butter  

1 egg, beaten  

Plain flour for rolling  

Filling  

1 cup raisins  

3 tbsp brandy or sherry  

4 tbsp warm water  

4 apples 

Juice of ½ lemon  

3 tbsp brown sugar  

½ tsp cinnamon  

1 tbsp icing sugar 

Pre-heat an oven to 180 degrees. Combine flour, sugar, vanilla and salt. Cut butter into small cubes and add to flour mix. Rub together until the mix starts to form fine breadcrumbs. Add beaten egg and continue to mix. Once dough is formed, remove from bowl and knead by hand to form a ball. Wrap in cling film and refrigerate for 10 minutes. Take 2/3 of the pastry, wrap and return rest to fridge. Using plenty of flour, roll out to 1cm thickness on a clean work surface. Lay the pastry over your floured rolling pin, and then gently lay it into a greased 20cm tart tin. Press gently into the tin and use any leftovers to patch rips or holes. Return to the fridge while you prepare the filling.  

Soak raisins in brandy and warm water for 10 minutes. Peel apples, then cut into thick slices around the core. Place into a large bowl with lemon juice, brown sugar and cinnamon. Drain raisins, add to apples and toss to coat. Drain the apple mix well before arranging apple mix inside. Roll out reserved pastry to at least same diameter as the tart and cut into 2-3 cm strips. Using a long palette knife, lift strips off work surface and lay over apple filling in a lattice pattern. Brush the pastry lattice with water and dust with icing sugar. Bake for 40 minutes, remove from oven and allow to cool slightly. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks'd be.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our resident chief. Mike vander Ellison's with us.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Now, Good morning, good morning, And you are.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Celebrating a very important birthday today.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
Isn't it amazing? Yes, it's my mum's ninetiers wonderful.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
I think happy birthday for Tuesday. I think it was
wasn't it?

Speaker 3 (00:27):
It was April Fool's Day.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
So you're having a celebration today.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
We are, we are, and I'm not cooking.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yay.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm so pleased. You're not even contributing a designment. Nothing, nothing.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
We're taking some flowers. That's all we're doing. It's great. Yeah, No,
what a celebration to make it nineteen. You know, Mom's
still fit as a fiddle and sharp as attack, and
she still keeps me in check. So it's great. So
in ninety years, but I thought kind of as a
little bit of a celebration of that, I would talk
about fond memories of being brought up on a poultry

(01:04):
farm or the food so it was Mum would always
make an apple tart, and she would make this beautiful
apple tart. It's got super super short sort of pastry
to it, and she would make it in a massive,
big roasting tray and that will go into the pantry
and over a period of a week, it will just
slowly disappear, well quickly disappear. I'd run through that recipe today.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Fantastic, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
So the pastry. I've got a pastry recipe here, so
I just followed that. It's quite a long recipe, so
I'm just going to shorten it up. So make up
the pastry. It's a very short crust pastry. Roll it
and then line it was about twenty cent to meter
baking trot or a twenty cent to meter tartan sorry,

(01:49):
line that you want it to be about a good
a good cent to meet it in thickness. You know,
you want this to be quite thick, because it is
quite hard to deal with. Once you've lined that, pop
that into the fridge. Keep some pastry back because you're
going to lattice some of the pastry over the top
of it afterwards. For the filling. I've got a couple
of raisins. Soak that and about four tablespoons of warm

(02:09):
water and three tablespoons of brandy and just set that
aside and let those raisins soften up as they soak
up that beautiful brandy flavor. And then four apples. Peel them,
care them, cut them into like thin wedges, and then
into a bowl with three tablespoons of brown sugar, half
tea spoon of cinnamon, and the juice of the lemon.
And that juice just obviously stops the apples from browning up.

(02:32):
Set that aside, take your pastry back out, drain your
raisins out, add your raisins into your apple mix. Put
all those apples into the base of your tartan, and
then take the remaining pastry, roll that out, cut it
into little lents, and then just crisscross that over the
top of your pastry. And then I just brush it
with a little bit of water the top pastry, and

(02:53):
just ice that with a little bit of icing sugar.
Fire that into the oven. Ovens on one eight and
that's going to take forty minutes because you want those
apples to be fully cooked through. Take that out and
just let it cool a bit and then you're good
to go.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Oh it sounds divine, Mike. I hope you have a
lovely day to day with the family.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks A B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.