Dutch Apple Pie: Crumb Topping, Crisp Crust, Why It’s Dutch

Dutch apple pie vs apple pie: what losing the lid changes

The short answer: a regular American apple pie has pastry underneath and on top, and a Dutch apple pie has pastry underneath and a crumb topping, a streusel of flour, sugar and butter, on top. Same plate, same kind of filling. In American usage “apple crumb pie” is the same pie under a plainer name.

The lid is the only difference, but it changes three things that comparison pages do not mention. First, steam. King Arthur Baking describes a streusel top as “obviously much more effective than a solid-top crust at releasing steam quickly”, so the juices concentrate in the oven instead of being trapped. Second, the gap. Under a pastry lid, raw apples shrink away and leave a hollow; crumbs simply settle with the fruit. With no raw lid to seal to it, the bottom crust can also be par-baked, which King Arthur says double-crust pies “aren’t a good choice” for. Third, the calories. A Dutch apple pie is not the lighter option. In this recipe the streusel carries about 197 kcal per slice, where a second crust of the same dough would add about 172, and the streusel alone holds about 14 g of the sugar in each slice.

It is not the same as an apple crumble or an apple crisp, which have no bottom crust: America’s Test Kitchen’s apple crumble is fruit and streusel in an 8-inch (20 cm) square dish. The relationship is close, though. A 1956 recipe sheet from Trudy McNall’s television program Home Cooking, in Rochester, New York, defined one by the other: “For DUTCH APPLE PIE Follow Apple Crisp recipe”, with the apples put into a pie pan lined with unbaked pastry and the crumbs sprinkled over.

And it is not the apple pie of the Netherlands. A Dutch appeltaart is a different object. It is baked in a straight-sided springform tin, not a sloped pie plate. Its shell is a sweet, crumbly butter dough made with sugar and egg, closer to a cookie than to flaky pastry, pressed over the base and up the sides, and the top is a lattice of strips of the same dough. The filling is small slices or pieces of apple, classically the tart Belle de Boskoop, usually with raisins or currants and often with cinnamon and lemon. It is served in wedges with coffee, often with whipped cream. A crumb-topped tart does exist in the Netherlands, under its own name, appelkruimeltaart, and the history section below shows how late that name turns up in Dutch newspapers.

Raw slices or a cooked filling: which one this pie should use

Most ranking recipes toss raw slices with sugar and flour and fill the shell at once. One top-ranking recipe cooks a butter, flour and sugar sauce and pours it over raw apples. The test kitchens are split. Cook’s Country leaves 2 1/2 lb (1.1 kg) of raw sliced apples in their sugar for 1 to 2 hours and bakes the pie for about 1 hour 10 minutes at 350°F (175°C). Cook’s Illustrated sautés 4 1/2 lb (2 kg) of apples, drains them, boils the juice down, fills a fully baked shell and gives the assembled pie only about 10 minutes in the oven. Both work. They are different pies.

This recipe uses raw slices, for four reasons. Our apple pie filling page argues for pre-cooking because it fixes three problems: the hollow under the lid, mushy slices and watery juice. One: under a streusel the hollow cannot form, because there is no lid for the fruit to shrink away from. Two: the watery juice is eased by the open top, which lets steam out far faster than pastry does. Three: the long bake that raw apples need is the same long bake a bottom crust needs. After baking apple pies in metal, glass and stoneware on different racks, King Arthur Baking concluded, “The longer you let it brown and bubble, the better your bottom crust will be.” Four: it is one bowl and one bake, which is what most people looking for this pie expect. That leaves the mushy slices, and the next paragraph deals with them.

Raw has costs, and the recipe is built around them. Nothing protects a raw slice from the heat, so the variety has to be a firm one; by J. Kenji López-Alt’s figures, quoted on the filling page, apples whose pectin has not been set start to fall apart at about 183 to 185°F (84 to 85°C). Raw fruit sinks as it bakes and takes the crumbs with it, which is why the slices sit in their sugar for an hour first. And a raw pie is not done until its center has bubbled, which takes the full 60 to 70 minutes.

A cooked filling is the better route in five cases. You already have a batch of our apple pie filling in the fridge or freezer. You only have soft or very sweet dessert apples such as McIntosh, Fuji or Gala; the gentle hold at 140 to 160°F (60 to 71°C) in that recipe pays off most on exactly those. You want more apple in the pie: a batch of the cooked filling starts from 3 1/2 lb (1.6 kg) of whole apples and packs in level, because the shrinking happened in the pot, and Cook’s Illustrated gets 4 1/2 lb (2 kg) into a deep 9-inch (23 cm) plate that way. You want to assemble on the day from parts made ahead. Or you are baking in glass or ceramic and want the shortest possible time with wet fruit on the pastry.

To use it here, line and chill the plate as in the recipe, spread one completely cooled batch of the filling, 4 to 4 1/2 cups (1 to 1.1 litres), level in the raw shell, and scatter the chilled streusel over it. In the 5 to 5 1/4 cup (1.2 to 1.25 litre) plate this recipe is sized for, that batch sits a little below the rim; only the smallest 9-inch (23 cm) plates are filled to the brim by it. Leave out this page’s apples, sugar, lemon, spices and cornstarch; the filling brings its own. Bake on the lower-middle rack at 425°F (220°C) for about 25 minutes, then at 375°F (190°C) for 25 to 30 minutes more, laying foil loosely over the streusel once it is golden, until the pastry is deep golden and the filling bubbles at the edge. That is the schedule from the filling page: the apples are already cooked, so you are baking pastry and crumbs and reheating the fruit. A frozen disc of the tapioca version goes into the raw shell still frozen, in a metal plate, with the 20 to 25 minutes extra that Penn State Extension allows. Cool the pie for several hours before cutting, as with any starch-set filling.

Streusel by weight: the ratio, the butter and why crumbs melt

Recipes for the topping give cups and no reasons. Put on a scale, the tested ones fall into a narrow band, and the band explains most failures. The German baseline, as printed in a basic recipe from the magazine Lecker, is 2 parts flour to 1 sugar and 1 butter (300 g, 150 g and 150 g). Three America’s Test Kitchen formulas written years apart, Cook’s Illustrated’s Dutch apple pie, Cook’s Country’s Pennsylvania Dutch apple pie and the test kitchen’s apple crumble, all use melted butter and all come out at about 1 part flour to 0.7 sugar and 0.55 to 0.6 butter. King Arthur Baking’s Dutch apple pie uses cold butter and far more of it: 120 g flour, 107 g brown sugar and 113 g butter, about 1 to 0.9 to 0.95. This recipe is 150 g flour, 110 g brown sugar and 85 g melted butter, which is 1 to 0.73 to 0.57. The American ratios are calculated from the published cup and spoon measures, so read them as close, not exact.

Look at the butter as a share of the whole mix and a pattern appears. In the five toppings above it is between 24 and 33%. The three melted-butter ones sit at the bottom of that range, at 24 to 26%, and King Arthur’s cold-butter one at the top, at 33%. Two other cold-butter streusels we put on the scale, King Arthur’s general streusel topping (counting its flour, sugar and butter and leaving out its oats) and America’s Test Kitchen’s coffee-cake streusel, come to 32 to 34%. Here it is just under 25%. The German baseline is the exception, with chilled butter at 25%, but it also carries far less sugar. Our reading of those numbers, which none of the sources states outright: melted butter wets the flour completely, so less of it is needed to bind, while cold butter leaves dry flour around lumps of fat, so those recipes carry more. Change the state of the butter without changing the amount and you get the two classic failures, a greasy topping (melted butter at a cold-butter quantity) or a dusty one (cold butter at a melted-butter quantity).

Does cold or melted butter give bigger crumbs? The sources disagree on the surface. Lecker baked the versions side by side and reported that the more liquid the butter, the finer the crumbs. Cook’s Illustrated tosses melted butter in with a fork “until evenly moistened and mixture forms many large chunks with pea-sized pieces mixed throughout.” Both are true. Melted butter makes something close to a dough, and whether that ends up fine or chunky depends on how far you stir it and whether you chill it and break it up afterwards. Cold butter makes loose rubble whose size is set by your fingers. Neither is the one true way to big crumbs, and any page that says so is describing its own habits.

Why crumbs melt into a sheet, and what to do. Chill them: the German test found that after an hour in the fridge the crumbs held their shape better in the oven, the baking authors quoted by the German news site t-online say at least 1 hour and preferably overnight, America’s Test Kitchen’s streusel topping says “Chill thoroughly before using”, and Cook’s Country refrigerates its topping while the crust chills. Keep to the ratio, because too much butter or too little flour is the usual reason crumbs run. If the mix is sandy, it was rubbed too far or is too dry to clump; America’s Test Kitchen adds 2 tsp water and 2 tsp vanilla to its crumble topping for that reason. If it bakes dense, it was packed down: scatter it loosely. And give it a level, compact bed of fruit to sit on, which is what the hour in the sugar is for.

One more idea is worth knowing, with its limits stated. America’s Test Kitchen’s apple crumble bakes the fruit covered for 35 minutes until it has collapsed and only then adds the topping, so the crumbs spend less time over juicy fruit. That is a crumble, not a pie, and none of the tested Dutch apple pies does it. If your streusel has drowned before, you could borrow the idea: cover the filled pie with foil for the first 15 minutes at 425°F (220°C), then uncover it, lifting the foil away from you because the steam under it scalds, scatter the cold streusel and carry on at 350°F (175°C).

Variations, by weight. For a cold-butter streusel, use King Arthur’s formula as it stands: 1 cup (120 g) flour, 1/2 cup (107 g) brown sugar and 8 tbsp (113 g) cold butter, rubbed in until lumpy. For oats, replace 1/4 cup (30 g) of the flour with 1/3 cup (30 g) rolled oats (porridge oats), a fifth of the flour, which is the swap the German authors suggest for extra crunch. For nuts, stir in 1/2 cup (about 55 g) chopped pecans or walnuts once the crumbs have formed; America’s Test Kitchen found that finely chopped almonds “loosened up the structure of the topping so that it didn’t bake up compact and dense.” And if you want crumbs to garnish plates, bake a spare handful on its own: King Arthur gives 325°F (163°C) for 15 minutes on a parchment-lined sheet, stirred every 5 minutes, and it keeps in an airtight container at room temperature once fully cool.

This is also why a homemade pie tastes different from a bought one. On the three frozen supermarket Dutch apple pies whose ingredient lists we read in the USDA’s branded-food database, the fat in the topping is palm oil, or palm and soybean oil, and none of the three lists butter in its crumb topping.

A crisp bottom crust and a doneness test you can trust

Start with the plate, because a “9-inch” (23 cm) plate is not one size. When America’s Test Kitchen measured pie plates sold as 9-inch (23 cm), brimful capacity ran from 4.25 cups (1 litre) for the classic glass plate to 6 cups (1.4 litres), and the metal plates it preferred held about 5.25 cups (1.25 litres). That is a 40% spread, and the classic glass plate is the smallest of them. This recipe is sized for a plate of 5 to 5 1/4 cups (1.2 to 1.25 litres): 3 lb (1.4 kg) of whole apples, 2 lb (900 g) of slices. To check yours, fill it to the brim with water from a measuring jug. Then allow about 6 oz (170 g) of prepared slices for every cup (240 ml) it holds. A 4.25-cup (1 litre) plate takes about 1 lb 10 oz (730 g) of slices from 2 1/2 lb (1.1 kg) of whole apples, which is the amount Cook’s Country’s recipe uses. A 6-cup (1.4 litre) plate takes about 2 1/4 lb (1 kg) of slices from 3 1/2 lb (1.6 kg). Scale the filling’s sugar, spice and starch with the apples. The streusel as written covers any of them; for the deepest plates, make one and a quarter times the dough.

Then the material. King Arthur Baking baked apple pies in metal, stoneware and glass on different racks. The metal pan gave “a lovely brown bottom crust when baked anywhere in the oven”; stoneware and glass on the middle rack “resulted in pie with damp, pale bottom crust” and needed the bottom rack. America’s Test Kitchen’s pie-plate tests explain why: “Thin, lightweight metal conducts heat better than thicker glass and ceramic do, so pie crust browns more quickly.” In those tests pies in glass needed 10 to 15 minutes more than pies in metal, and the heaviest ceramic plate took up to 25 minutes longer to bake a double-crust apple pie. So: a metal plate on a preheated baking sheet on the lower-middle rack, or a glass or ceramic plate on the lowest rack with the extra time. The sheet is not only there for drips. In King Arthur’s words it “also helps to concentrate the oven’s heat on the base.”

Because there is no lid, this pie has an option a double-crust pie does not: par-baking. King Arthur Baking says single-crust fruit pies with crumb toppings can be prebaked, and its figure for a partial bake is 375°F (190°C) for 20 minutes, with the shell lined with parchment or foil and filled with weights. It is worth doing if you bake in glass or ceramic, or if soggy bases have beaten you before; cool the shell, then fill and bake as written, with a ring of foil over the rim so it does not overbrown. The crust dust in step 5, 1 tsp flour and 1 tsp sugar on the base, is the lighter version of the same insurance. None of the ranking recipes we read blind-bakes the shell, and few say which rack to use.

Now doneness. Ranking recipes offer “golden and bubbly”, a time and nothing else, or, in one top-ranking recipe, a thermometer reading of 175°F (79°C) in the center, on the grounds that pectin breaks down and softens the apples at that temperature. The same number is what America’s Test Kitchen and the thermometer maker ThermoWorks print as the temperature at which to take a pumpkin pie out of the oven. Neither of those pages mentions fruit pies. For an apple pie the figure is too low twice over. The apples: by López-Alt’s figures, quoted on our apple pie filling page, apples whose pectin has not been set start to fall apart at about 183 to 185°F (84 to 85°C), so at 175°F (79°C) the slices can still be firm. The starch: cornstarch begins to swell at lower temperatures in plain water, but it needs to be just about boiling for its full strength, and the sugar and acid in a pie filling push that higher.

The only thermometer figure for a fruit pie from a tested source that this page could find is Stella Parks’s 195°F (91°C), and she bakes to it on purpose, below a boil, with tapioca starch, which swells before a simmer. That is why the test in step 7 is one you watch for: thick bubbles within 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 cm) of the center, then 10 more minutes. King Arthur’s instruction is to “Bake your apple pie for at least 10 more minutes after you see juice actively bubbling”, and Cook’s Country adds the knife test, baking until a “paring knife inserted in center meets no resistance.” If you thicken with tapioca instead of cornstarch, 195°F (91°C) in the center is a usable endpoint. With cornstarch, trust the bubbles.

Why it is called Dutch: the early pie had no crumb topping

Ranking pages give two answers. One says the pie comes from the Netherlands, where it has been made for centuries. The other, printed by one top-ranking recipe, says the name refers to the Pennsylvania Dutch and their tradition of topping pies with streusel instead of a second crust. The printed record supports neither as stated. A plain statement of the limit first: the American part of what follows rests on a full-text search of the Internet Archive’s scanned books, magazines and newspapers, and the large newspaper archives outside it were not searched. Every date here is the earliest we saw, not a first.

The earliest American text found says whose pie it is. On 8 August 1891 the Worcester, Massachusetts weekly Light reprinted a piece from the Philadelphia magazine Housekeeper’s Weekly under the heading “Dutch Apple Pie”. Many people, it says, find that an apple pie tastes like a shell filled with apple sauce. “This is not so with the pies which the Pennsylvania Dutch make. They do not cut the apples into little pieces, only slicing them down like tomatoes, occasionally cutting the slices in half.” The slices are laid on the bottom crust “with a little milk or water poured over them”, sugared and sprinkled with cinnamon. “There is no top crust”. So the Pennsylvania Dutch attribution has a primary source behind it. The streusel does not. The pie is open, and there is not a crumb on it.

It stayed that way. In about 35 North American recipes titled “Dutch apple pie” and dated 1891 to 1937, none has a crumb or streusel top. In most of them the dish is a single bottom crust, apple halves, quarters or eighths laid in close rows, sugar and cinnamon, and a little milk, cream, sour cream or water poured over. They come from Pennsylvania and from across the Midwest, and from as far as California and Ontario. In Wallaces’ Farmer of 22 August 1902 a columnist signing herself Aunt Susan wrote: “This is called Dutch apple pie, and it is fine. People who have delicate digestions can eat this because it only has one crust.” A contributor to American Agriculturist’s household pages wrote on 20 May 1905, “Did you ever make, eat, or see a Dutch apple pie? If not, do make one.” The only crumbs in any of them are bread crumbs, and they go under the fruit, in a Wisconsin reader’s recipe of 1900. The cream version was still being celebrated in 1938, when Clementine Paddleford of the New York Herald Tribune described a restaurant’s open-face Dutch apple pie in a column we read in the word historian Barry Popik’s transcription, not on the original page: “The crust is filled with diced apples sprinkled with cinnamon. Cream is whipped with sugar and this poured over the fruit. This goes into a slow oven to cook down to a rich, heavenly mess, custardlike in appearance.”

The earliest crumb top seen under the name is in the Boston American of 5 April 1938: a cup (about 220 g) of packed brown sugar, four tablespoons of butter, three tablespoons of flour and a teaspoon of cinnamon, cut together and sprinkled over sliced apples in an unbaked shell. That is a sugar crumb, not today’s flour-heavy streusel. Three months later, on 7 July 1938, the Circleville Herald in Ohio said of a sour cream and brown sugar Dutch apple pie: “The brown sugar and sour cream will curdle but they form delicious little crumbs and flecks over the apples and the pie is very rich and satisfying.” The cream pie already looked crumb-topped when it came out of the oven. That the streusel grew out of it is our reading; no source says so.

By the 1950s the crumb version was something you could buy. The earliest streusel-topped Dutch apple pie seen on sale is in an Acme Super Markets advertisement in the Bristol Courier of Pennsylvania on 24 April 1952: “Delicious apples in tasty crust and topped with streussel”, for 55 cents. Chatelaine magazine in Toronto printed a modern-style recipe that November, a mix of flour, cinnamon, brown sugar and butter: “Sprinkle this crumbly mixture over top of apples.” On 21 January 1955 the A&P chain advertised its “JANE PARKER CINNAMON STREUSSEL Dutch Apple Pie”, promising “a crunchy, sweet contrast to the smooth, juicy apple filling.” No document we read explains the switch, and no person or company can be named as having made it.

The cream did not go quietly. Betty Crocker’s Good and Easy Cook Book of 1954 already has a “Dutch Apple Pie” that is a two-crust apple pie with cream poured “through slits in top crust” near the end of baking, and in the larger Betty Crocker cookbooks, from the 1956 Picture Cook Book to printings the archive dates as late as 1991, it sits beside a crumb-topped pie called “French Apple Pie”. A Gettysburg grocery advertisement of 2 May 1963 offered “Regular, French or Dutch APPLE PIE” side by side. The crumbs themselves are well documented in Pennsylvania German kitchens: Edith Thomas’s Mary at the Farm, a 1915 book of recipes collected among the Pennsylvania Germans, describes Rivel Kuchen as “a pie crust covered with a mixture of sugar, butter and flour crumbled together” and lists crumb pies eaten for breakfast. Its plain apple pie, though, printed as “Apple Tart”, is an open tart of halved apples with no crumbs. The crumbs and the apples were in the same kitchens before they were on the same pie, at least in that book.

As for the Netherlands: the appeltaart is far older than any of this. A cookbook published in Brussels around 1514 by Thomas van der Noot, which its modern scholarly edition calls the first printed cookbook in the Dutch language, has one, a lidded tart with no crumb topping that is described on our apple pie filling page. But no document we read traces a line from it, or from any Netherlands recipe, to the American crumb pie; pages that connect the two simply set them side by side. The Dutch newspaper record gives the idea no support. In the Dutch national library’s digitised newspapers the name of the crumb-topped apple tart does not turn up before 1980: a supermarket advertisement of June 1980 for a baking mix for apple or apricot kruimeltaart, a recipe headed “Appel kruimeltaart” that December, and the one-word appelkruimeltaart on 6 November 1981. The English phrase “Dutch apple pie” appears in a single article, in De Volkskrant on 3 July 1982, quoting a Grand Rapids, Michigan bakery’s advertisement welcoming Queen Beatrix. That database covers newspapers only, not cookbooks.

There is an older “Dutch apple pie” still, and it is a third dish. The fifth edition of Vegetarian Cookery, published anonymously in London in 1852 and attributed to Martha Brotherton of Salford, has a recipe under that name for a covered pie of sliced apples layered with currants, lemon and candied peel, ending “cover with paste, and bake in a moderately hot oven.” The edition before it, of 1833, does not. The 1852 recipe is the earliest use of the phrase we saw anywhere, and it has little in common with the American pie beyond apples and pastry. So the honest answer to the question has three parts. “Dutch” here is the old American word for German, and the earliest American text we saw credits the pie by name to the Pennsylvania Dutch, the German-speaking settlers of Pennsylvania and their descendants; nothing we read ties it to the Netherlands. The name was attached to their open, lidless apple pie by 1891. And the crumb topping joined the name only around the middle of the twentieth century, in everything we could read.

The cream-poured version: a nod to the older pie

The pie that carried the name before the crumbs often had cream or milk poured over the apples, and that part is easy to bring back with one extra ingredient. Modern test kitchens have kept the cream alive alongside the crumbs: Cook’s Country writes that “The hallmark of Dutch apple pie is its creamy apple filling” and adds 1/2 cup (120 ml) of melted vanilla ice cream or heavy cream to its raw apples, and Betty Crocker poured the same amount of cream through the slits of a two-crust pie.

To make it with this recipe, change one thing. After the apples are in the shell and before the streusel goes on, pour 1/2 cup (120 ml) of heavy cream (double cream) slowly and evenly over them. Then scatter the streusel and bake as written, using the same test: bubbles near the center, then 10 more minutes. Expect a softer, more custard-like set than the plain version, and plan to bake it a day ahead and rest it overnight in the fridge, after its 2 hours on the rack; Cook’s Country says of its own cream-enriched pie that it “is best when baked a day ahead of time and allowed to rest overnight.” The old recipes used whatever the kitchen had, sweet cream, sour cream, milk and, in a 1932 Michigan club cookbook, evaporated milk. Heavy cream is what Betty Crocker used and what Cook’s Country allows in place of its melted ice cream, so it is the one suggested here.

It has three consequences, and they should be stated with it. Calories: 1/2 cup (120 ml) of heavy cream adds about 405 kcal and 43 g of fat to the pie, which is about 51 kcal and 5 g of fat a slice, for about 530 kcal. Allergens: milk is now in the filling as well as the crust and crumbs. Storage: the pie becomes a dairy pie under US extension guidance, so it goes into the fridge within 2 hours instead of sitting out for the usual 4-hour cool, and it keeps for 4 days, not 7. Cool it on a rack for 2 hours and let it finish setting in the fridge. Freezing is less certain; the extension pages say custard and cream pies “do not freeze well”, nobody has tested that on a cream-enriched apple filling as far as we could find, and some weeping should be expected.

Make-ahead, storing and reheating

For a holiday table the pie splits into parts that keep. The dough can be made up to 2 days ahead. The streusel can be mixed a day ahead and kept in the fridge, which only improves it, or frozen raw and scattered on straight from the freezer, as King Arthur Baking does with what it calls freezer streusel. The baked pie needs its 4 hours, so bake it in the morning for the evening, or the day before.

In the US the choice is between the counter and the fridge: loosely covered at room temperature for up to 2 days from baking, the day it was baked included, or in the fridge from the start. In a hot or humid kitchen use the fridge. UK guidance, read strictly, sends it to the fridge within 1 to 2 hours and gives it 2 days. The details and the sources are in the safety notes. Either way, cover it loosely and never while it is still warm, because trapped steam is what softens the crumbs. The streusel does lose some crispness in the fridge.

To bring it back, heat does the work. For a whole pie from the freezer, Iowa State’s extension service gives two routes: thawed in the fridge, then 350°F (175°C) for 10 to 15 minutes; or thawed for 1 hour on the counter, then 375°F (190°C) for about 30 minutes. It adds that the edges can be covered with foil if they start to burn. For single slices the first figure is a fair guide: about 10 to 15 minutes at 350°F (175°C), until the slice is hot through and the crumbs are dry to the touch. Rewarm only the slices you are about to eat, and under UK guidance do not rewarm the same slice twice. A microwave warms the filling and softens everything else.

For the freezer, change the starch. Use 3 tbsp (about 21 g) of tapioca starch in place of the cornstarch, the same swap as on our apple pie filling page, where 2 1/2 tbsp of tapioca replaces 1 tbsp plus 1 tsp of cornstarch, rounded up. If the pie will be frozen unbaked, Penn State Extension advises 1 tbsp more thickener, which makes 4 tbsp (about 28 g) of tapioca starch. Bake a frozen unbaked pie without thawing, by the Penn State schedule in the safety notes, and use the doneness test in step 7, not the clock.