The keywords, “recipe apple pie“, brought back 1,430,000 search results.

Just in Google! Yahoo! returned 17,800,000 results, and msn returned 10,200,000. And 6 of the first 10 results from each search engine were different. At this point, I’m already thinking that this may not be the best way to find the perfect recipe for apple pie.

If you love apple pie as much as I do, you’ve spent some time looking for the perfect recipe. And how do you know it’s the best? You try it, of course.

As in: you use the recipe to bake an apple pie, then eat some and see what you think. So, if you’re searching online using the phrase above, you’d need to bake 22 apple pies (which would take over 3 weeks, if you only baked one a day) just to get through the first page of search results on the top 3 search engines.

I figured there had to be a better way.

So I went back to my search results and, to maximize my chances for success, I only counted recipes from recipe sites that made it into the first 2 pages of results (I realize this is an arbitrary cut off point, but there are millions of results, I’m only one person, and only so many days when apples are in season). That meant I’d only need to test 14 recipes.

Still too many.

So I narrowed it down even more: the first decision was the crust – store-bought or handmade? I wanted a handmade crust, so I looked to see if it called for lard, shortening or butter. I avoid hydrogenated fats and had no lard, so I opted for butter it was. That helped eliminate some results.

Now I was down to 9 recipes (which would still take more than a week, if I baked a pie a day), and I still wasn’t sure which kind of apples to use, which kind of extracts, which spices, how much sugar, etc… Who ever would have guessed there were so many decisions to make to pick a recipe for apple pie? (But then who ever would have guessed that a search for “recipe apple pie” would return 29,430,000 results?)

At this point, I started thinking, “I’d gladly pay somebody to do this for me.”

I baked for a week (and I think I used almost that I had the perfect recipe yet. Then I ran across a one-page site that sells a downloadable cookbook called “Cooking with Apples“. The author said she’d been looking for the perfect apple pie recipe for years, and she’d collected a bunch of them (along with like 90 other apple recipes) and put them together into this cookbook. I decided to try it.

Boy, was I glad I did; there are 7 different apple pie recipes in the book, and the ones I’ve tried are all really good! (I’m not a big fan of sugarless recipes, so I haven’t tried that one yet, and probably won’t.) In case you’re curious: my favorite used Honey Crisp and Granny Smith apples, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice, lemon juice and lemon zest, almond and vanilla extract at about a 3 to 1 ratio, and had no flour or tapioca added to the filling at all.

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