A couple of days ago someone asked about a European version of apple pie that they had tasted at Ikea. It sounded a lot like appelgebak, which is a ubiquitous apple pie served throughout the Netherlands at coffee shops, bars, cafes, etc. I learned to make it from a Dutch friend of mine when I was living in Amsterdam and never wrote a recipe down. But it goes something like this:
The crust is a cross between vanilla cookie dough and pie crust. Basically, find a recipe you like for sweet pastry crust. Mix up the dry ingredients specified in the recipe (usually flour, sugar, vanilla sugar, salt) and add an appropriate amount of baking powder to provide leavening. (I think I used something like 1 to 1.5 teaspoons.) Cut the specified amount of butter/shortening into the dry ingredients. Then beat up an egg and add it little by little until there's enough moisture to hold the dough together.
Roll it out about 1/4" thick and press it into a greased round spring-form pan.
The apples are done much as we do them, sliced with cinnamon and sugar, although you always need to add raisins and perhaps currants to the mix!
Pile them into the pie crust. Then you have to make a decision about the top. Everyone treated the top a little differently. Some folks made a lattice with leftover pie crust. Some folks made a streusel topping. In bakery-made gebaks the top was often left plain during baking and then glazed with a thin layer of sweet gelatinish stuff after it had cooled. But I don't think anyone ever added a second layer of crust the way we do with American apple pies.
Then bake until the apples are tender and the crust golden and voila! Appel gebak! Traditionally served with whipped cream (appelgebak met slagroom) in most cafes.
Enjoy,
Elaine
(11/28/00)
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