Given our collective scientific knowledge and culinary skill — and here I mean the “we” of humanity — should we not have adjusted our flour and fat ratios, balanced our spices, determined the proper slice dimensions and cooking temperature to have already, some 700 years into baking variations of it, arrived at The Apple Pie? Happily, no.
We cannot even decide upon the best variety of apple.
We do, however, have opinions. The Platonic ideal of apple pie hovering in each of our minds is colored by individual tastes and peculiarities, memories and imaginings. I recall first moving to California and encountering the obsession with Gravenstein apples that relegated Granny Smith to the bottom of the bushel, as well as my first curious bite of cheddar draped atop a slice of New England apple pie.
If you’re not sure what you want, judging the Humboldt County Fair’s apple pie competition will bring your tastes into laser focus. As sure as my fellow judges and I were about our dream apple pies at the start of the event, by about pie No. 17, we were on a whole other level.
I admit to some hubris. When organizer Ani Knight suggested we divide the entries between two tables of judges, I scoffed, sure we could taste 27 pies and still make it home safely. That I was unaware two youth entries were waiting in the wings does little to diminish my responsibility. (Fellow judges, I owe you an apology and a ginger ale.)
Sharing a table with me were Amber Saba, co-owner of Slice of Humboldt Pie, Emily Walker, still giddy from winning a spot in a Facebook contest, and 81-year-old Pat Lindley, who boasted, “My mother was the best pie baker in the world.” I cannot say what transpired at the other table with local filmmaker Griffin Loch, John Kreitzer of Golden Gait Mercantile, Shelly Mendes of Buttercup Coffee and Tony Enos. But our table may as well have been a deliberating jury.
We took on the Dutch apple pies first, streusel-topped pies ranging from the soft and sandy to crunchy and crumbly to something resembling a rockslide. What the group seemed to like best was something like the edge of a soft cookie that yielded to our forks but held its lumpiness.
Then the lattices started showing up — some with elaborate braiding, twists and rosettes, others dressed in a simple woven grid. Saba perked up at one with apples peeking out between thick ribbons of crust. “OK, OK,” she mumbled, nodding in recognition. Minimalism won out if only because the dough was not overworked.
My personal hangup is the bottom crust, which should be baked and flaky, preferably browned on the pan side. (Preheating a baking sheet and baking the pie atop it helps.) This is the hill I will die on with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
The more pies we looked at, the more I started to consider looks less in regard to perfection and more about inspiring appetite. As with people, imperfections can make for charm — a little juice bubbling over the edge, a crooked crimp — can entice. Homemade pie, after all, should tell us it’s homemade with a little character.
Filling proved trickiest and it was a good thing Lindley, whose poker face might be worse than my own, sat with her back to the growing crowd watching the live judging advertised on the flier. While most kept to the usual suspects of cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, ginger, allspice and cardamom, at least one was spiked with orange zest, while another bore an almond fragrance. One crossed the limit for cinnamon, with a gritty syrup, and another was downright soapy, possibly from too much nutmeg.
Saba is an advocate for prepping the apples by letting them sit in the sugar and spices to break down a bit. Thin slices won out over chunks, and nobody wanted apples that dissolved into mush. And if you bake a pie for Lindley, you’d better peel them.
When the numbers were tallied, Ed Reagan emerged the victor. His husband of 47 years, Tom Schrader, scored fifth place with his own pie. Both are retired, Reagan said, and bake together all the time.
Reagan’s pie was browned and pleasantly lumpy, modestly decorated in pastry leaves with a center vent and one fallen edge where golden filling shone through. Butter crust, he said, is “Hard to work with but worth it.” The pie was filled with an 80/20 mixture of sliced Honey Crisp and Granny Smith apples (peeled, of course) he tossed in a caramel-like syrup of sugar and spices he first cooks down in a saucepan. Like the crust, it was worth it.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in ‘No Signs of Recovery’.