The Gluten-Free Chicano Bakes Apple Brown Betty

Apple Pie Analog: Gluten-free Apple Brown Betty

The Gluten-free Chicano, Michael Sedano 

It's apple-picking time in Southern California and maybe your neck of the woods. Plentiful manzanas means good eating. Growing up in Redlands, California a short drive from Oak Glen's apple harvest, I got to enjoy the seasonal bounty of fresh, just-picked  apples. It helped that I had familia working in the groves.

Empanadas, apple pie, baked apples, apple salad, fresh crunchy apples chomped out-of-hand, hasta apple butter, all these filled the apple niche of my youthful diet. The best of these, the crusty pasteles, remain impossibilities for gluten-adverse and celiac apple lovers. The gluten-free Chicano long ago abandoned his quest for suitable pie shells and empanada crusts They just don't work. 

Rather than attempt sure-to-disappoint fake crust, The Gluten-free Chicano goes for a crunchy amalgam of oats and raisins, sugar and butter.

Brown Betty--apple casserole--offers a gluten-free alternative to customary pastel. You have the baked sweetened apples swirling in their own juices. Topped with buttery avena flakes, it's not intended to be a pie. Brown Betty fills the need when you have fresh apples and are all antojado for apple pie. 

This recipe works in an unmechanized kitchen--no blender nor cuisineart, just some bowls and a mixing fork. Get the oven hot at 350º or 375º

In the bottom of my glass baking dish, wet with a teaspoon of water, I scatter 3/4 cup brown sugar, stir in raisins, dot with half a cube salted butter. Dust the sugar with cinnamon and vanilla, then douse lime juice across everything. Finish with a pinch of sea salt crystals, and set it aside. (You could add more water for a syrupy pie filling. Spray the glass with non-stick coating)

 

I peel then slice or chop or dice a variety of apples. Densely packed fruit yields that soft amalgam you expect in a quality apple dessert

I half-fill the baking dish with chopped and sliced apples. Dot the top with half a cube of butter, cinnamon, scant pinches of brown sugar, a few salt crystals, lime juice all over.

Now comes the heart-breaking part. You can't have good crust because satisfying crust analogs don't exist. 

 

The Gluten-free Chicano tops the chopped apples with a mixture of chopped raisins, rolled oats, butter, brown sugar. 

Microwave a cup or more of oats, half a cube butter, cinnamon, chopped raisins, scant pinch salt. Stir and get the mix spreadable. Toppings are a subject unto themselves and variations are worthwhile. There's no one right way to make Brown Betty.

A decorative touch offers baked apple rings on the packed layer of buttered oats. 

Put the dish on a cookie sheet, slide that into the oven at 350º for an hour, or 375º forty-five minutes. Baking extracts juices from the apples. Inspect the dish in progress, when you see the fruit boiling, keep it going for half an hour or longer.

Ready for the Oven

The Gluten-free Chicano grew up eating warm apple pie in Oak Glen pie shops, and Brown Betty at home. My Mom served ours wih a slice of cheddar cheese and vanilla ice cream. This is how we customarily did apple pie, equivalent to corn flakes and milk, pan dulce y chocolate. 

Recently, the Gluten-free Chicano was astonished to learn his customary cheese-and-ice cream presentation is foreign to some apple pie eaters. 

If you grew up in a dusty Texas town, or next door to us in Redlands, and you don't know about warm apple concoctions served with cheddar cheese and ice cream, plan to have some the next time you get your hands on hot baked apple goodies, wheat or gluten-free.

Provecho.

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Look for The Gluten-free Chicano's cold weather focus on caldos, restaurant and home made, in upcoming La Bloga-Tuesday columns.