Baking Bouchon - Recipe 24: Apple Turnovers

If I hadn't made the puff pastry for these turnovers, this would have been a ridiculously easy.  Luckily, I made a bunch of puff pastry for a test I'm conducting (stay tuned, for that one!) so all I really had to do was make the filling.

Seriously, apples, sugar water and lemon juice.  That's it!  Truthfully, I didn't even use the lemon because you only need it if your sugar gets all crystally (crystaley, crystalley - don't you hate it when you can't decide out how to spell made up words?) which mine did not.  There's not even cinnamon, brown sugar or salt in this filling which gave me some pause.  I really love the cinnamon/apple combo.

I resisted the temptation to add extra stuff in here and followed the recipe for the filling.

I used pink lady apples for this because they're my favorite.  The recipe recommends Fuji or Golden Delicious but I'm not a fan of either of those.  I like that pink ladies are a little bit tart.

I first cooked the sugar with some water until it was thoroughly melted, then added the apples and cooked and stirred and cooked and stirred and cooked and stirred and cooked and stirred some more.

It took an awfully long time to cook the apples until they were "broken down and thickened".  I would have stopped cooking much earlier in some other context, but the recipe wanted me to pipe the filling onto the puff pastry with a piping bag (which I didn't actually do) so I figured it needed to be pretty darn broken down.

It was pretty amazing how much smaller those apples got after they were cooked for an hour.

Assembling the turnovers was pretty simple.  I rolled out the puff pastry and cut out circles, then rolled those circles a little bit more to create ovals.


There was a lot of refrigerating involved as you want to make the sure the puff pastry stays cold until it goes into the oven so the butter doesn't melt before baking time.  Otherwise you get no puff and puff pastry with no puff is just pastry.  (which doesn't actually sound bad, but after you go through all the work to make the puff pastry it better freakin' puff).

The ovals get some egg wash and a dollop of filling, then folded over, pinched to seal and egg washed again.  The egg wash ensures that you get a nice, pretty golden crust.  It's nice when food looks pretty but pretty doesn't always mean it tastes good.  I've eaten some nasty things that looked pretty and some delicious things that were hideous.  It's kind of like people, but that's a whole intellectual discussion I'm not going to get into today because we're talking about food.  Can you tell I'm easily distracted?



Once assembled, the turnovers get refrigerated again to make sure they're nice and cold before baking.

Once they're cold, you cut a few slits in the top of each one and bake.

It took about 45 minutes for them to be nice and puffed and golden.  It was quite satisfying to stare through the oven door and watch them puffing up.  My overarching thought was "thank God I didn't screw up all that puff pastry."  Considering the disaster that occurred the last time I baked puff pastry, I think my concerns were justified.

See, pretty!  Not only were they pretty, they were pretty tasty too.  The pastry was super light and flaky and the filling was a very classic apple filling.  I took some in to work today and some of my friends enjoyed them for breakfast.  I actually think they're a pretty good breakfast food because they're not too sweet.   I probably would have preferred a little brown sugar and some cinnamon but don't feel bad for me.  I'm about to heat up another one of these puppies and put vanilla ice cream on it.  It's cool if you're jealous.

Julie