As American as ... apple crisp? It’s easier than apple pie

When I was 16 and got my driver’s license, I’d often pile friends into my silver VW bug for Sunday road trips. Our destination: Julian, to sit in a pine-paneled diner and eat apple pie.

Julian, a historic gold mining town known for its apples and apple pie, is about 60 miles northeast of San Diego, where I grew up. The trips were an expression of our freedom, and the pie a trophy of our independence. But how apples came to be pie remained a mystery to me until a decade later, when I got a job baking seasonal fruit pies at a food shop in the Hamptons.

For years afterward, I proudly brought fruit pies I’d baked to countless occasions, and taught just as many friends, neighbors and relatives how to make pies of their own.

My passion for pie runs deep. So it’s no light matter for me to tell you that for homey, baked apple desserts, I now skip the pie. Rustic, no-fail crisps, crumbles and cobblers are not just easier than apple pie, they’re better. They are the apple dessert of America’s future.

Choose your own apple adventure: apple crisp, apple crumble and apple cobbler.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

An apple crisp is defined by rolled oats in its rustic, crunchy topping. A cobbler is covered with dough, usually biscuit, sometimes cookie dough. And a crumble is topped with buttery streusel.

None of them requires you to roll out pie dough.

Crisps, cobblers and crumbles can be assembled in any baking dish you have around, even a cast-iron skillet; throw it in the oven and leave it there for an hour without babysitting. The toppings, easily made days in advance, also tolerate longer baking times than pie crust, which often burns before the apples are thoroughly cooked and juicy. This is why many apple pie recipes call for the apples to be precooked, which is way more than I’m willing to do for any pie, no matter how iconic.

Much of the appeal of apple pie is its symbolism, the feeling it evokes of a time and place in which some idealized American family sat upright around a table (an actual dining table, in chairs!), no cellphones in sight, enjoying a wholesome meal, meaningful conversation and, of course, a slice of pie. A lot of the effort we make, or at least that I have made, around Thanksgiving especially, has been an attempt to replicate that imagery. But many of us are at least two generations removed from knowing how to crimp the edges of a pie crust. Or we come from other traditions. We are mixed and mingled, broken and chopped and grafted back together on our own terms. Sometimes that means picking up pie at the last minute from the grocery store.

Yet an apple crisp and the like are much more aligned with who we are and how we cook, bake and eat today. They’re comforting and communal. Friendly and inviting. They don’t ask to be sliced just so, perfectly portioned and handed out on fancy plates. These down-to-earth alternatives beg you to relax in true American spirit and dig in any way you please.

I’ve made many crisps, crumbles and cobblers in my life, but in classic frontier fashion, I wanted to push myself, to see what more I could do with the form. I made more than a dozen of them and enlisted friends to make some too.

First, I played with the fruit, using pears instead of apples, only to find that any flavor they may have had as I cupped the juicy pears in my palm to peel them had evaporated by the time I removed the crisp from the oven, leaving me with a nicely spiced, sweet, flavorless mush. (There’s a reason we’re not waxing on here about pear pie.)

I next tried a fall fruit mélange, adding cranberries to the apple base as well as quince, a furry, lumpy, apple-sized thing that some believe was the original fallen fruit, although you’d never want to take a bite out of one raw. The quince imparted a pretty, rosy hue and a subtle citrusy flavor to my crisp (or was that one a crumble?), but those nuances didn’t justify hunting down this sometimes elusive fruit. And while I appreciated the pops of color the cranberries added, I didn’t love the pops of bitter fruit in my mouth.

In the end, I decided that as flexible and forgiving as apple crisps, crumbles and cobblers may be — improvise with the spices, get creative with the toppings — the one must is that you use apples. And only apples.

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1. Carolynn Carreño pours brown butter over diced apples for apple crisp. 2. Then the apples and butter are combined by hand. (Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

I traded in my standby, Granny Smiths, for Honeycrisps, a sweet, tangy and crunchy hybrid, and Opal, a golden-hued, recent apple immigrant from the Czech Republic related to one of the great baking apples, Golden Delicious. Both Honeycrisps and Opals, easily available on the West Coast, had more flavor and held their shape better than the Grannies. Along with the juices released from the apples when baked, brown butter, brown sugar and vanilla create a rich, caramelly filling, redolent with cinnamon.

Yellow Opal apples and red-tinged Honeycrisps ready to dice for apple crisp.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

As for the toppings, I went with four options — a classic oat-studded crispy crisp topping; a spiced, earthy whole-wheat crumble; a snickerdoodle cookie cobbler; and a gluten-free topping fortified with finely chopped walnuts or pecans, so good you can serve it with pride even to a gluten-consuming crowd.

Choose your own adventure. What could be more American than that?

You-Choose Classic Apple Crisp, Spiced Crumble, Snickerdoodle Cobbler or Nutty Gluten-Free Crisp