Apple Crumble

Ingredients

• 900 g bramley apples, peeled and cut into chunks
• 80 g caster sugar
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• 200 g plain flour
• 120 g cold butter, cubed
• 100 g demerara or brown sugar
• 60 g rolled oats
• custard, to serve

Method

1. Cook the apples first

   Cook the apples with the caster sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice in a pan for 8 minutes, until softened but still holding some shape. Raw apple under a crumble shrinks in the oven and leaves a gap between fruit and topping.

   8 min

2. Let it cool a little

   Tip into a baking dish and let the steam escape. Piling crumble onto scalding fruit steams the topping soft from below.

3. Rub in the butter

   Rub the cold butter into the flour with your fingertips until it looks like coarse breadcrumbs, with some larger lumps left. Cold butter and a light touch — warm hands melt it into a paste and you get a biscuit lid instead of crumble.

4. Add sugar and oats last

   Stir in the brown sugar and oats. Added before the rubbing in, the sugar dissolves into the butter and you lose the loose texture.

5. Bake

   Scatter the topping over loosely without pressing it down and bake at 190°C until deep gold and bubbling at the edges. Bubbling fruit visible round the rim is the sign it is cooked, not the colour of the top alone.

   40 min

6. Rest

   Rest 10 minutes before serving with custard — straight from the oven the fruit is molten.

   10 min