Ina Garten got here to the American lots at a curious second. She arrived within the late Nineties, lengthy after Julia Baby taught residence cooks to organize duck à l’orange and years after Martha Stewart made her aspiring workers distinguish between toile, tulle, instrument, tuile, toyle, and toil.
As such, many regarded Garten as a breath of recent air. She supplied, with unparalleled ease, a imaginative and prescient of all-American simplicity that didn’t require hard-to-find components, did away with inflexible issues, and allowed you to be precisely who you have been — and discover magnificence in one thing so simple as selfmade tomato soup and a well-toasted grilled cheese.
Garten’s recipes for lemon roast rooster and shrimp scampi from her first cookbook, 1999’s The Barefoot Contessa, shortly made it to weeknight rotations nationwide. Nearly twenty years later, in her 2016 homage to her husband, Cooking for Jeffrey, she gave us one other traditional, this one a contender for the canon of timeless vacation recipes (like Marian Burros’s plum torte and Nigella Lawson’s quintessential chocolate cake): apple pie bars.
Garten reportedly acquired the inspiration for the dessert in 1978 whereas touring by means of California with Jeffrey. This wasn’t lengthy earlier than she bought Barefoot Contessa, the Hamptons specialty retailer the place she would begin to make her fame. (The earlier homeowners named it after the 1954 film with Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart, which to Garten means “being each elegant and earthy.”)
It’s simple to see why so many bakers applaud the easy recipe: it’s a shortbread-pie hybrid that requires a buttery dough that types each the bottom and the topping. Two-thirds of the dough is pressed onto a rimmed baking tray and parbaked. It’s then topped with thinly sliced apples which were cooked with butter, cinnamon, and vanilla. Lastly, the remaining shortbread scraps are crumbled on prime together with walnuts, and the pie is baked once more.
This 12 months, a lot of residence cooks and bakers are celebrating Garten’s apple pie bars. Jenny Osipova, the Australia-based baker behind Jenny’s Desk who is understood for her Intercourse and the Metropolis-inspired dishes, first made the bars after receiving Cooking with Jeffrey from a buddy. “It was the primary recipe I made,” Osipova says. “I used to be so impressed with how simple the recipe was to comply with, and as soon as they have been out of the oven I fell in love with the golden buttery goodness.”
Trent Pheifer, a house cook dinner and an Ina Garten superfan, has cooked by means of each Garten e book over the previous seven years. He estimates having made near 1,350 of her recipes. Pheifer, who’s behind the challenge Retailer-Purchased Is Advantageous (named after Garten’s catchphrase), first made the bars in 2016, and most lately, a number of weeks in the past for a buddy’s birthday celebration. “Apple pies will be intimidating except you’re shopping for store-bought pastry dough or a store-bought crust,” he says, “It’s so American that it needs to be really easy to make. However I do discover that apple pies are type of finicky.”
Garten’s recipe, he explains, “takes out a whole lot of variables that may mess up an apple pie.” He factors out that the recipe removes extra moisture by cooking the apples down beforehand, which avoids a soggy backside or what he calls a “bizarre dome” on prime. The pressed crust, too, is forgiving and doesn’t require rolling out an ideal circle or neatly trimming ribbons of dough for a lattice prime. “I really feel like she takes out a whole lot of the issues in an apple pie that may go unsuitable for an inexperienced cook dinner,” Pheifer says. Together with this recipe, he enjoys making Garten’s French-style apple tart, which makes use of an analogous format.
Pleasure Wilson, the writer of The Life-Altering Magic of Baking and the creator of Drake on Cake, makes Garten’s apple pie bars each vacation season. She thinks that the combo of granulated and brown sugars within the crust and the chopped walnuts within the shortbread topping make the recipe “really feel further particular.” When she tries a Garten recipe, Wilson provides, “I all the time really feel like I can belief that it’s going to be simple and scrumptious.”
Osipova echoes Wilson’s endorsement. “Her recipes by no means fail,” she says. “The lady can do no unsuitable. Jeffery is consuming very well!”
In my very own expertise, Garten’s apple pie bars quietly resolve all of the anxieties of pie making, providing one thing that feels nostalgic and embraces fallibility. In a world the place ease is seldom with out its trade-offs, these bars are precisely what they seem like: an uncomplicated deal with that delivers, with out apology, the whole lot we ask of a vacation dessert. If apple pie isn’t your factor, swap the apples for a blueberry, strawberry, rhubarb, pumpkin, chocolate, or pecan filling, and proceed as regular. Serve with vanilla ice cream — store-bought is greater than tremendous.
Mehr Singh is a meals and tradition reporter primarily based in New York. Her work seems in Bon Appétit, Food52, and different publications.
Extra picture illustration credit: apple pie bar picture by Trent Pheifer