Ina Garten got here to the American plenty at a curious second. She arrived within the late Nineties, lengthy after Julia Little one taught residence cooks to organize duck à l’orange and years after Martha Stewart made her aspiring staff distinguish between toile, tulle, software, tuile, toyle, and toil.
As such, many regarded Garten as a breath of recent air. She provided, with unparalleled ease, a imaginative and prescient of all-American simplicity that didn’t require hard-to-find elements, did away with inflexible issues, and allowed you to be precisely who you have been — and discover magnificence in one thing so simple as home made 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 20 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 bought the inspiration for the dessert in 1978 whereas touring via 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 popularity. (The earlier house owners named it after the 1954 film with Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart, which to Garten means “being each elegant and earthy.”)
It’s straightforward 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 have been cooked with butter, cinnamon, and vanilla. Lastly, the remaining shortbread scraps are crumbled on high together with walnuts, and the pie is baked once more.
This yr, 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 pal. “It was the primary recipe I made,” Osipova says. “I used to be so impressed with how straightforward the recipe was to observe, and as soon as they have been out of the oven I fell in love with the golden buttery goodness.”
Trent Pheifer, a house prepare dinner and an Ina Garten superfan, has cooked via each Garten ebook 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 not too long ago, a number of weeks in the past for a pal’s party. “Apple pies might be intimidating except you’re shopping for store-bought pastry dough or a store-bought crust,” he says, “It’s so American that it ought to be really easy to make. However I do discover that apple pies are type of finicky.”
Garten’s recipe, he explains, “takes out quite a 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 high. The pressed crust, too, is forgiving and doesn’t require rolling out an ideal circle or neatly trimming ribbons of dough for a lattice high. “I really feel like she takes out quite a lot of the issues in an apple pie that may go mistaken for an inexperienced prepare dinner,” Pheifer says. Together with this recipe, he enjoys making Garten’s French-style apple tart, which makes use of the same 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 combination of granulated and brown sugars within the crust and the chopped walnuts within the shortbread topping make the recipe “really feel additional particular.” When she tries a Garten recipe, Wilson provides, “I at all times really feel like I can belief that it’s going to be easy and scrumptious.”
Osipova echoes Wilson’s endorsement. “Her recipes by no means fail,” she says. “The lady can do no mistaken. Jeffery is consuming rather well!”
In my very own expertise, Garten’s apple pie bars quietly remedy 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, every little thing 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 normal. Serve with vanilla ice cream — store-bought is greater than effective.
Mehr Singh is a meals and tradition reporter based mostly in New York. Her work seems in Bon Appétit, Food52, and different publications.
Extra photograph illustration credit: apple pie bar photograph by Trent Pheifer