Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

Beware! Once you make this Super Apple Pie, you might find that your favorite family apple pie suddenly tastes of cinnamon and sugar and not much else. This one tastes like apples.Sometimes around here we try crazy food experiments, just to see what happens. Grant said to Matthew one day, &quot;Hey, how many apples do you think you can get into a pie?&quot; It turned out to be 114. 114 apples in one pie! How? If you use apples in their raw form, you can stuff about 12 apples into a ridiculously high-domed pie. But, if you play with the form of those apples, you can intensify the flavor dramatically. We used freeze-dried apples, dehydrated apples, and apple juice concentrate to pack in a little more than 100 apples. 9.5 freeze dried apples + 5 1/2 dehydrated apples + 6 cans of concentrate (16.5 apples per can x 6 cans = 99) = 114 apples in one pie. That is a whole lot of apples. The result was an intense candy-apple pie. We also put apple in the crust by making a powder of freeze-dried apples. We hydrated freeze-dried apples with apple concentrate, then freeze-dried them again. After the second freeze-drying, we hydrated the apple mix a second time and made our pie filling from those apples and the dehydrated apples, lightly cooked with butter and spices and married together with an apple-vanilla gel. The final apple filling is such an intense sweet and sour apple flavor that we needed some a la mode to help cut the tartness. So of course, we made ice cream out of the apple pie too.Look, sometimes we try these creative exercises and they flop hard. We learn the boundaries and dial back to something that makes more sense. But this one? This crazy experiment worked. This Super Apple Pie has super-intense apple flavor and super-acidic notes too. It’s singular. Honestly, though, it might ruin the experience of eating your favorite pie after you make it. So, be sure you want this before you make this.