Binding Power
Apple sauce and all its might.
Hello from NL 32. This is Bake Sense, the somewhat ordered record of ramblings that concern the world of baking, from championing flavour and wholesome ingredients to questioning where those ingredients come from and how we can make the most of them. Along the way, you’ll find recipes and insights from life in and out of the professional bakery and plenty of fruitful chat.
Apple sauce is a dish in and of itself, and not just baby food. Happen upon a good variety of apple(s) with the perfect balance of acidity and sweetness, and it needs nothing but heat and time to render it snackable by the spoonful. The cell walls of apples are pectin-packed, making for a thick and satisfying consistency. Granted, most folks will want something to eat it on or with, a pork chop or plate of Latkes, say, where the acidity cuts the fat, and the sweetness compliments the salt.
In its purest form, free from any additional sweetener or spice and concentrated just enough to remove any watery halo, apple sauce can be a useful substitute in baking, where it is commonly found functioning as a tenderiser and binder in place of fat or eggs.
The degree of substitution should be accompanied by a similarly weighted change in expected outcome. The pectins and hemicelluloses in apples bind water and interrupt gluten formation, making for tender cakes and cookies. But what they give with one hand, they take with another, so expect denser crumb structures in those cakes and a taller, thicker profiles on those cookies.
Cakes that gain loft and lightness from creaming butter or whipping egg foams are inhospitable environments for apple sauce, so real butter and real eggs are the real heroes here. Save the sauce for something else. Oil-based or melted butter-based cakes, such as quickbreads, loaves and snacking cakes, are better hosts, where 60g apple sauce can sub each egg or replace some of the fat (30% is a safe starting point).
You’ll find cookies made with apple sauce are less likely to spread and remain spongey and soft once baked. Perfect for a jumbo, soft, oaty number but less ideal for a snappy and highly dunkable tea-mate, so that’s worth bearing in mind.
Do yourself a favour and make apple sauce with abandon; use a mix of apple varieties to make the most of their varied flavours, aromas, textures and densities and freeze it in reasonably sized portions to have on hand. In the home kitchen, 250g batches are a good call. Enough to substitute a few eggs or a proportion of fat in a loaf cake and some left over to snack on, layer in a parfait for dessert or dollop on fried pork or potatoes.
Beyond these suggestions, one of my favourite ways with apple sauce is to make granola. The ability of apples to bind is conducive to cluster creation and lends natural sweetness, replacing some function of the sugar.
To make apple sauce, cut and core your apples, roughly chop and place in a pan with a splash of water. Cook over low-medium heat uncovered until the apples soften and collapse, adding more water as needed to prevent scorching. Once completely soft, you can choose to leave the sauce a little chunky or puree until smooth. If the sauce looks too watery, continue to cook at a low simmer until the water has evaporated and the sauce is concentrated.
Big Cluster Granola
More snack than cereal in my book, this recipe yields chunky hunks of oats and nuts bound by the power of apple sauce and flax. It’s baked low and slow to produce a deeply roasted and intensely nutty crisp and crunchy granola. Sweetened with honey and brown sugar, an appropriate level of spice, just enough for warmth and to compliment the toasted nuts.
I make large batches at the bakery to use the residual heat from the deck ovens. It goes in after the bread has baked, once the temperature reaches 150°C, slowly toasting the nuts all the way through; as the temperature continues to drop over the next few hours, it dehydrates and crisps, removing moisture from the apple sauce and rendering it suitable to store for up to 8 weeks, although it rarely lasts that long.
If making this in a home oven, I’d recommend baking at 150°C for 25 minutes, after which time you can use a large spoon to carefully turn the mixture, lifting the large clusters that will be forming and turning them over to allow for even toasting. Reduce the oven temperature to 120°C for a further 20 minutes.
It is usual for the granola to still feel a little soft when you remove the trays from the oven, but it will crisp on complete cooling. If, for whatever reason, the granola does not completely crisp up, then return to the oven at 120°C for a further 15 minutes.
The quantities below are a scaled-back version of the amounts I usually make on mass. As with most granola recipes, the specifics on nuts are your call; likewise, the 50g whole flax can become 50g sunflower or pumpkin seed if that’s what you have, but the 50g ground flax is a non-negotiable if you want sturdy clusters that do not fall to pieces.