Crackers. Borrring!
Make them Ritz crackers and jack them up with some apple pie filling, smoked bacon and straight-up raw bourbon. That’s how you fancy up a cracker.
Chef Matt Rosen (also more popularly known as Chef Rosie) of The Loose Moose, took the slightly cheesy Ritz cracker and made a pretty Ghetto Gourmet apple pie with a bacon, bourbon and Ritz crumble. That’s a lot of flavour to jam into a mini pie.
His mindset, “I thought of the show Chopped and how you’re supposed to take these ingredients and do something really different than what they’re meant for.”
The tart shell baked up flecked with brown, almost looking like a whole wheat crust, with ground Ritz crackers, flour, sugar, butter and buttermilk. The buttermilk was to give it a bit of an extra tang. The pastry “basically hemorrhages butter”, says Matt. With the fat in the crackers, the buttermilk and the butter — it oozes richness.
Perfect cubes of Cortland and MacIntosh apples are made into a traditional pie filling (with more butter), sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon and nutmeg. Matt piles that into the baked crust and then shows me a ball that looks like cookie dough, but it’s a very wet crumble topping. The crumble adds a nice saltiness and crunchy texture to the pie with crushed smoked bacon, bourbon — “Jim Beam to keep it ghetto,” adds Matt — almonds, Ritz crackers, brown sugar, salt and good old Canadian maple syrup.
“It’s a take on the apple pie with cheddar cheese”, Matt states of the cheesy flavoured cracker. Neither of us knows where the tradition of putting a slice of cheddar on apple pie originated, but a young cook in the kitchen says it’s definitely a popular dish in Scotland where his family has always eaten pie with cheddar.
With a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a drizzle of caramel sauce, the Ritz apple pie with bacon and bourbon crumble is salty, sweet, hot, and cold all at the same time.
In case you’re curious — Ritz crackers and apple pie is actually real “thing”. But in a fake apple pie. Many recipes exist — even on the Kraft website — for “mock apple pie” that contains NO fruit. Instead, it’s made of Ritz crackers layered to look like apple slices. I think Chef Rosie did them one better.
____
