Caramel sauce: An apple pie game-changer
Today at the grocery store I overheard the woman in line ahead of me explain that she was buying caramel sauce to drizzle over the apple pie at Christmas dinner. I was flabbergasted. How had I never thought of this before? Why has my family never added caramel sauce to apple pie? Suddenly our old standard toppings - whipped cream or vanilla ice cream - seemed shabby and bland by comparison.
It turns out that this is a thing, adding caramel to apple pie. I may be late to the game, but I approve.
Caramel and apples go together well, of course. Caramel apples are promising, and look so delicious, but they are virtually impossible to eat. Seriously, what are you supposed to do with those things? If you cut them up, the caramel all comes off in the process. If you try to eat it whole, you get caramel all over your face and jammed into your teeth.
Thus, those little tubs of microwaveable caramel sauce represent a huge innovation in delicious fruit dessert technology. It's so much easier and better to slice an apple, then dip the slices into caramel sauce! Tasty, too.
The easiest way to deploy caramel over apple pie is to warm up the caramel sauce, then drizzle it over each slice of pie. This not only looks prettier than trying to slice up a pre-carameled pie, it also lets each diner choose if they want caramel or not. Here's a recipe for caramel apple pie if you want to bake the caramel right in.
If you really want to blow them out of the water this year, try a salted caramel apple pie. Salted caramel and apples is a huge leap forward. I love sprinkling salt on apple slices, and salted caramel is delicious. This triad of tastes is used to its best advantage in salted caramel apple pie. What a time to be alive!
Image courtesy Flickr/new_sox