Crumble is a five-ingredient pudding, better when it’s not assembled ahead of time. Rough-chop the apples in the blender, pulse the topping together in the same jug, and stash the two in separate tubs in the fridge. Tomorrow the apples tip into the dish, the crumble goes over, and it bakes while we eat dinner. Stored apart overnight the topping doesn’t get a chance to soak up the syrup from the fruit, so the crumb stays dry and the bake comes out clean.
Yield and time
- Makes: a rectangular dish, six to eight servings
- Hands-on: 30 minutes
- Total: Monday evening prep, Tuesday evening bake – about an hour of oven time the next day
Ingredients
The fruit
- 1kg cooking apples (Bramley if you can get them, otherwise Granny Smith; about 6-8 medium fruit), peeled and cored
- 1 lemon (zest and juice)
- 80g caster sugar (more if your apples are sharp Bramleys, less if you’re using a sweeter eater)
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 tablespoon plain flour
- A pinch of fine salt
The crumble
- 200g plain flour
- 100g cold unsalted butter, cubed into 1cm pieces
- 100g demerara sugar (or 50g demerara, 50g light brown – demerara gives crunch, brown gives caramel)
- 60g rolled oats
- 30g flaked almonds (optional but worth it)
- ½ teaspoon fine salt
You’ll need a Le Creuset stoneware rectangular dish (about 33x21cm, 4-5cm deep) – stoneware holds heat steadily and gives the base a clean bake. A Ninja (or any high-powered jug blender) does both the apple chop and the crumb in under five minutes; pulse, don’t run.
Monday evening: prep
Squeeze the lemon into a large bowl of cold water. Peel and core each apple, quarter it, drop the pieces straight into the lemon water as you work. This stops the cut surfaces browning while you finish the pile.
Drain the apples well – give the colander a good shake. Tip a third at a time into the Ninja and pulse in short bursts until you’ve got rough 1-2cm chunks; six or seven half-second pulses is enough. Don’t run it long enough to puree. Tip into a dry bowl and do the rest. Add the lemon zest, 80g caster sugar, cinnamon, 1 tablespoon flour, and the pinch of salt. Toss with your hands until every piece has a thin coat. Into a lidded tub, into the fridge.
Rinse the blender jug and tip in the 200g flour, the cold cubed butter, and ½ teaspoon salt. Pulse in short bursts until the mix looks like coarse breadcrumbs with a few pea-sized lumps still in it – ten to fifteen seconds of pulsing, not a continuous run. Tip into a second tub, stir through the 100g demerara, 60g oats, and 30g flaked almonds, and into the fridge. Don’t skip the salt; without it the topping tastes flatly sweet against the apples.
The fruit will weep a little in the fridge overnight. Keeping the topping out of that puddle is the point – when the two finally meet in the oven the crumb bakes as a dry crust rather than soaking from below.
Tuesday: bake
Heat the oven to 180°C fan.
Tip the apples (and any syrup that’s pooled in the tub) into the stoneware dish and level the top – about 4cm of fruit, mounded a little in the middle. Scatter the crumble evenly over the fruit. Don’t press it down; you want it sitting loose so the steam can find its way through.
Set the dish on a tray (it will leak syrup, and the tray catches it before it hits the bottom of the oven). Bake on the middle shelf for 40 to 50 minutes, until the top is deep gold, the apple juices are bubbling up through the topping at the edges in dark amber pools, and a skewer slides into the fruit through the crust without resistance.
Pull it out. Let it sit for ten minutes – straight from the oven, the syrup is lava-hot and the apples haven’t reabsorbed any of their juice yet. Ten minutes on the bench gives you a crumble that holds together on the spoon.
To serve
Cold pouring cream, custard, or vanilla ice cream.
Storage
Leftover crumble keeps three days in the fridge, covered. Reheat individual portions in a 160°C fan oven for ten minutes – the topping crisps back up almost completely. Microwaving works but the topping goes soft; the oven is worth the wait.
To get further ahead, freeze the two components separately. The coated apple goes into a freezer bag, flattened so it freezes in a thin slab. The crumb goes into a second bag. Both keep three months. To bake, tip the still-frozen apple into the stoneware dish, scatter the still-frozen crumble over, and bake at 170°C fan for about 70 minutes – foil over the top for the first 40 minutes so the crumb doesn’t burn before the middle thaws. The fresh-fridge version is better; the freezer version is a useful fallback when you’ve over-ordered apples.