Its been almost a year since I wrote about pie. This weekend is the fall festival at our church. One of the events at the festival is an Apple Pie contest. Once the voting in the contest is done, they sell the pies by the slice. This is the second year that I've entered a pie and I decided to combine salty and sweet by making a bacon apple pie. I followed the recipe from the most recent issue of Taste of the South. Many of the recipes for this type of pie use bacon to make the lattice top. I liked that this particular recipe because it incorporated the bacon into the pie.
I liked that this pie recipe uses a variety of apples. Most apple pies use Granny Smith apples and I'm not a huge fan of sour taste of those apples. I used four different apples: Honeycrisp, Golden Delicious, Pink Lady, and Granny Smith.
I hate the tedious process of peeling the apples. Once all the apples were pealed and sliced, I combined them with apple pie spice, lemon juice and corn starch. I let that sit while I cooked up the bacon.
I couldn't decide on hickory or maple flavored bacon. My gut said to get the hickory to add smoky flavor to the pie to counter all the sweet apples. Kyle said to go with the maple bacon and that's what I did. I didn't taste the pie so I'm not sure if it was the correct decision.
I cooked the bacon in a cast iron skillet. I LOVE crispy bacon so that's how I cooked the bacon for the pie. I made six slices because more is better with bacon. I put the apple into a chilled pie shell making sure to not add too much of the juice.
I crumbed the cooled bacon over the top of the apples. I rolled out another pie crust to make the lattice top. I baked the pie for 20 minutes at 425, then I turned the temperature to 325 and baked for 40 more minutes. After the first 20 minutes, I covered the pie with tinfoil because the crust was already turning golden brown. I took the tinfoil off for the final few minutes.
