How to Make Apple Crisp

Eight Granny Smith apples is what fills a 9x13 dish. Take the skin off all of them with a standard vegetable peeler, turning the apple against the blade as you go.

Granny Smiths are the pick for two reasons. They are tart, which stops the sweet topping taking over the whole dish, and their flesh is firm enough to still be apple-shaped after nearly an hour in the oven. A soft eating apple goes to sauce in that time.

No apple corer in the drawer? Stand the peeled apple upright on the board and cut down each of its four sides, keeping the blade clear of the middle. You are left with a square of core holding every seed, and that goes in the bin.

Now cut those four pieces down. Half moons are the traditional shape but they are a lot to get a fork through. Downshiftology halves them again into chunks, which is what ends up in the dish in the video.

Here is the shortcut the video is built around. Push an apple onto the prongs stem side first, press the lever to drive it against the blade, and turn the crank. The machine peels, cores and slices in one pass and hands back an apple that looks like an accordion.

Five seconds an apple. All eight go through in a minute or two against the fifteen minutes the knife took. Slice the accordion in half for half moons, or twice for the quarters she prefers here.

Tip all the apple into a bowl big enough to stir in. Over the top goes 1/3 cup of maple syrup, 2 tablespoons of flour (arrowroot in the video, though any flour does this job), 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon.

Stir until every piece carries a film of it. That spoonful of flour matters more than it looks. Apples throw off a surprising amount of liquid as they bake, and with nothing to thicken it you get a puddle under the topping instead of a glaze.

Pour the whole bowl into a 9x13 inch baking dish and push the apples down flat with the back of a spoon. A level layer cooks at one rate. A mounded one leaves the middle raw while the edges are done.

Skip the greasing. Downshiftology has never oiled the dish for this and has never had it stick, because the fruit gives off enough of its own liquid to keep everything loose.

Into a second bowl go 1 cup of almond flour, 1/2 cup of coconut sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon of kosher salt. Whisk the dry ingredients together before anything cold or wet joins them.

Almond flour is what gives this topping its nutty edge. Coconut sugar is a straight swap for whatever granulated sugar is already in the cupboard, so there is no need to buy it specially.

Half a cup of unsalted butter, cold out of the fridge and cut into cubes. Press a pastry cutter down through it over and over until the bowl looks crumbly and every piece of butter is small and coated in flour.

Cold is the entire point. Those butter pieces melt in the oven and leave air behind them, and that air is what makes a topping craggy. Butter that has gone soft smears into the flour and bakes into a flat greasy lid.

Add 1 cup of old-fashioned rolled oats to the bowl and stir them through the buttery crumbs. This single ingredient is what makes the dish a crisp rather than a crumble.

Rolled oats, not quick oats and not steel cut. Quick oats are cut too thin and go to paste under the fruit steam. Steel cut never softens inside 50 minutes and stays gritty on top.

Spoon the topping over the fruit and work it out to the corners. Downshiftology does not pack it down and neither should you, because loose crumbs brown better with heat moving between them.

Cover the apples right to the edges of the dish. Bare patches sit there bubbling with nothing on top, and those are the spots that boil over the side.

Into a preheated 350F oven for 45 to 50 minutes. You are watching two things at once: a topping gone light golden brown all over, and apple juice bubbling up around the edges of the dish.

The bubbling is the reliable one. A top that has coloured while the edges sit quiet means the fruit underneath has not finished, and a golden crust does nothing for an undercooked apple.

Serve it hot. A crisp has no resting time and the creator is firm about that: take a serving spoon to it the moment it leaves the oven. The apples come out soft and glazed but still holding their shape, with a little bite left in them.

Vanilla ice cream on hot crisp starts running into the fruit within seconds, which is the entire appeal. Warm custard is the other route, and the video tries both before calling it a draw.