Pear and Apple Yellow Crumble
I think apple crumble is one of the my favourite treats. Fruit crumbles in general are great. They are delicious and economical, it takes less than one hour to make them and they can be served warm or cold. I had the best time when I was living in England, going from place to place trying to find the perfect apple crumble. Actually, they all were perfect to me, I can’t remember having one that I didn’t like. Crumble is not a typical Italian dessert, and that’s the reason why I had to have as much as I could before coming back to Italy. Now that I’ve been here a while, I make my own crumbles. I’ve always used wholemeal flour, because white crumbles don’t taste right to me anymore (if you get used to whole grain it’s hard to go back to refined flours). For lighter crumbles I also substitute butter or vegan margarine with either corn oil or extra virgin olive oil. In this recipe I mix the two, so that none of them confers a strongly marked flavour to the crumble. In this healthy pear and apple version, I almost entirely replace wholemeal with organic corn flour, which makes the crumble unbelievably sweet and fragrant. For this recipe I used organic ingredients.
Ingredients (makes 6-8 servings):
For the filling
3 Bartlett pears, peeled, cored, and sliced
3 Golden Delicious apples, peeled, cored, and sliced
juice of 1 lemon
¼ cup muscovado sugar
ginger powder (to taste)
For the crumble
1 cup corn flour
½ cup wholemeal flour
¼ cup muscovado sugar
¼ teaspoon whole sea salt
¼ cup corn oil
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
ginger powder (to taste)
Heat oven to 150° C and lightly grease a baking pan.
Filling
In a large bowl, combine pear slices, apple slices, sugar, lemon juice and ginger. Mix well, transfer the fruit mixture to the baking pan and bake at 150° for 20 minutes.
Crumble
In a medium-sized bowl, combine the corn flour, wholemeal flour, sugar and salt. Mix well ensuring that everything is combined. Add lemon juice and oil. Rub everything together using your fingers until the oil has been evenly dispersed through the flour and the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. If the mixture happens to be too dry and powdery, add some more oil and lemon juice.
Assembling the crumble
Remove the pear and apple filling from the oven and arrange the crumble randomly on top of the filling. Sprinkle with ground ginger. Bake for another 20 minutes until golden.
Serving suggestion
Cold or warm, this crumble is good on its own…but you might as well try it topped with non-dairy cream or soy yogurt.
