Goat Cheese and Apple Pie

For the crust:

In a large bowl combine the flour, salt and white sugar. Stir thoroughly.

Using a mixer (I used a handheld one and found it was easy to make the dough, but I’m sure a stand mixer would be easier) add the butter slowly to the bowl. Mix until the mixture is the size of breadcrumbs. It should be fine and coarse. Think thick breadcrumbs.

Add the water and mix further until a dough forms. It will be thick and sticky. Add a little more water if you feel you need to, but not too much.

On a floured surface, knead the dough. You only want to knead until the dough just comes together. Feel free to add flour to your dough to help it do this.

Form the dough into a ball; it should be thick and smooth looking, and not too floury. Wrap the dough in plastic and place in the refrigerator. Like I said, I left my dough overnight, but as long as the dough is properly cold and holds together well. This should take between one and two hours minimum.

When the dough is ready, place it on a sheet of baking paper and roll the dough out until relatively flat. The dough will thicken in the oven, so it can be very thin. As this pie is free-form and messy, make an oval-ish shape with the dough but it does in no way need to be perfect.

Preheat your oven to 230 C and move the parchment paper to a baking tray.

For the filling:

Peel, core and cut the apples. You can cut the apples however you please. As I couldn’t be bothered to make mine look perfect, I simply cut mine into small cubes, which looked and tasted fantastic.

In a bowl, combine lemon juice and cinnamon. As you are cutting the apples put them into the lemon juice to stop them from browning.

Once all of the apples have been cut and coated in the lemon juice mixture, add the honey to the mixture and make sure all apples are coated with the cinnamon, lemon juice and honey.

Spread the goat cheese over the dough. Try to keep the cheese in the fridge immediately prior to doing this. If the cheese is hard, simply crumble it, but try to spread it. My cheese was kind of spreadable, but it did get stuck into the dough and didn’t so much as spread as break the dough. I ended up using my fingers to spread it rather thickly. It doesn’t matter how you do it, just try to not break the dough and if you do, don’t fret, just patch it up. The dough is strong. Do not spread the cheese all the way to the edge as you have to fold the dough over itself. Therefore, leave a border of about 5 centimeters.

Add the apples to the top of the cheese, drizzling any leftover juice over the apples.

Fold the sides of the dough over the fruit filling, and again don’t worry if the dough tears, just patch it up. Once the filling is safely folded inside the dough, bake for 10 – 20 minutes. I say this because it really does depend on how baked you want your fruit to be. I baked mine for approximately 15 minutes, maybe a little less. At that point, my crust was very brown and the apples slightly crispy.

Serve warm or cold.

Inspired by: Scarletta Bakes and Sugar Laws (I mixed both recipes together to create this one).