Apple Turnovers Recipe (Puff Pastry)
- Preparation 30 min + 15 min cooling
- Cooking 30 min
- Servings 12
- Freezing Absolutely
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🍎 Twelve golden turnovers, and twelve never make it to the table!
They shatter when you bite in! Puff pastry flakes go all over the counter, and inside the filling is still warm, brown-sugar sweet, with the cinnamon coming up at you. I ate two standing over the pan before they had finished cooling. Twelve in one batch, two sheets of store-bought pastry, and the longest part is waiting on the apples to cool. Make them on a Sunday afternoon: your house will smell like apple pie without you having made a pie!
⏱️ Five minutes in the skillet, not fifteen
Everybody cooks the apples until they go soft. I stop at five or six minutes. I used a mix of McIntosh, Empire and Cortland, exactly the kind of apples that fall apart if you look at them too long. They held. Which makes sense once you think about it: they still have 25 minutes in the oven ahead of them. Cook them all the way through in the pan and you end up with applesauce wrapped in pastry.
❄️ Do not skip the 15 minutes of cooling
Warm filling melts the butter in the puff pastry before it ever reaches the oven. The layers fuse together, nothing lifts, and your turnover comes out flat. So you wait. While you do, you pull out your first sheet of pastry and leave the second one cold until the last possible second. It sounds like a small thing. It is the whole difference between a turnover that puffs and one that lies there on the pan.
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🥄 Stir often or it catches
There is brown sugar and cornstarch sitting at the bottom of that skillet. Both sink and stick within seconds if you walk away to answer the phone. Stay in front of it, stir every 30 seconds, and scrape the bottom with your spoon. Five minutes is not long to babysit.
🍎 The apple variety matters less than you think
I used a mix of McIntosh, Empire and Cortland, three apples that turn to mush in most recipes. They held their shape because I cooked them five minutes instead of fifteen. Use whatever is in your fridge. Granny Smith or Honeycrisp will hold up even better and bring more tartness, but do not make a grocery run over it.
🧊 One sheet of pastry at a time
Store-bought puff pastry works against you the moment it warms up. The butter softens, the dough goes limp and sticks to the counter. Pull out one sheet, build your six turnovers, and leave the second one cold in the meantime. If the sheet you are working on starts to go soft, put it back in the fridge for ten minutes. Nothing is lost.
🍯 Brown sugar only, no white sugar
Plenty of recipes split it half and half. I dropped the granulated sugar entirely and brought the brown sugar up to half a cup. The molasses in brown sugar gives a depth white sugar cannot, and the filling stays darker, better looking the moment you break a turnover open.
📏 The 10 x 15 rectangle is not fussiness
Ten inches by fifteen. That gives you six even 5-inch squares, big enough to hold the filling without it pushing out the seams. Smaller and it overflows. Bigger and you are eating pastry.
📅 Make-ahead
The filling can be made the day before, start to finish. Cook your apples, let them cool, and store them in the fridge in a labeled container. Next day it comes out cold and ready, which also takes care of the fifteen-minute wait. You can whisk the egg wash ahead too, and line your baking sheets with parchment. What has to wait: rolling and filling. Puff pastry does not survive sitting filled in the fridge, it goes soggy underneath and you lose the crunch. Pull the pastry, build your twelve turnovers, and they go straight into the oven. Figure twenty minutes of assembly, and while they bake you are with your people instead of stuck at the counter.
🔥 Space them out on the pan
Two sheets for twelve turnovers is not fussiness either. Crowded together they steam each other and the sides stay pale. Spaced out, air moves around them and the edges brown at the same time as the tops. And if the top is deep golden, the bottom is too, so you do not need to lift each one to check.
✅ What to serve with my apple turnovers
Hot or warm, in your hand, with nothing else. That is when they are best. If you are putting together a fall dessert spread, set them next to my apple crisp and my apple fritters: three completely different textures from the same fruit. For something you cut at the table with forks, my open apple pie with calvados does the job. And if you want the dressed-up version of this same turnover, I have a recipe for turnovers with beer caramelized apples and cheddar that goes somewhere else entirely.
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Apple filling
- 6 large apples (2 McIntosh, 2 Empire, 2 Cortland), peeled and diced, about 600 g (5 cups)
- 2 tbsp (30 ml) lemon juice
- 1/2 cup (100 g) light brown sugar
- 2 tbsp (30 ml) cornstarch
- 1/2 tsp (2 ml) ground cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp (1 ml) ground nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp (2 ml) vanilla extract
- 1/3 cup (70 g) unsalted butter
Assembly
- 1 lb (450 g) store-bought puff pastry (2 sheets), thawed
- 1 egg
- 1 tbsp (15 ml) water
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Preparation
- Peel the apples and cut them into 1/2-inch (1 cm) dice. Put them in a large bowl and toss with the lemon juice.
- Add the brown sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla. Stir until the apples are well coated.
- Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat.
- Pour the bowl into the skillet and cook 5 to 6 minutes, stirring often. The sugar and cornstarch settle and catch on the bottom the second you leave them alone.
- Take off the heat and let cool at least 15 minutes. The filling should be lukewarm, never hot.
- Preheat the oven to 400 °F (205 °C), no convection. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
- Whisk the egg with the water in a small bowl.
- Take out one sheet of puff pastry and keep the other one cold. On a lightly floured surface, roll it into a rectangle about 10 x 15 inches (25 x 38 cm), then cut it into 6 squares.
- Spoon some filling into the center of each square, keeping the edges clear. Divide all the filling among the 12 turnovers.
- Brush the edges with a little water, fold one corner over the filling to the opposite corner to make a triangle, then press all around with your fingers. Seal with a fork.
- Repeat with the second sheet of pastry.
- Brush the tops with egg wash. Space the turnovers out on the sheets.
- Bake about 25 minutes, until the tops are deep golden.
- Let cool 5 minutes on the pan, then transfer to a rack. Serve hot or warm.
Store-bought puff pastry, and I say that without apology. You want 1 lb (450 g), which is two sheets, thawed in the fridge overnight. Puff pastry is what gives you those shattering layers, and the frozen stuff at the grocery store is genuinely good. Pie dough works but gives you a completely different thing, denser and more like a hand pie. Whatever you buy, the rule is the same: keep it cold until the second you need it.
No, and they are not close. A fritter is a batter, dropped into hot oil, with apple pieces suspended in it, usually glazed after. A turnover is pastry folded around a filling and baked. Different dough, different cooking method, different texture. If it is the fritter you are after, I have a whole recipe for those too.
Nine times out of ten, the filling was still warm when you assembled. Puff pastry is dozens of butter layers separated by dough. Heat melts that butter before the oven does, the layers fuse, and there is nothing left to lift. Let the filling cool at least fifteen minutes. The other likely cause: pastry that sat out too long on the counter and went soft while you worked.
Absolutely, and I freeze them baked. Cool them completely, put them in an airtight container, and they keep a good two months. To serve, go straight from the freezer into a 350 °F oven for about ten minutes, until the pastry crisps back up. Same trick works for next-day leftovers: use the oven, never the microwave, which leaves you with soft, sad pastry.
Hot or warm, in your hand, is where they shine. For a fall spread, serve them alongside my apple crisp and my apple fritters. If you want a dessert to slice at the table, go look at my open apple pie with calvados, and for a sweeter turnover in the same format, my Caramilk turnovers with caramelized pears.
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