Cheap Tart Bakery update: Apple Pie

There is nothing but nothing that smells as good as apple pie baking. Cheap Tart makes our filling with the juiciest, tartest, crispest apples we can find (the pies pictured above are full of Liberty apples from Fairhaven Fruit Farm in Thomson, IL), sugar, flour, a little fresh lemon juice, and zest, and a health dose of ground cinnamon. All the crusts we make at Cheap Tart are made with butter only, no shortening (unless you’re allergic to dairy, in which case we’re happy to go the butterless route). Crisco makes a damn fine crust–it also scares the hell out of us. There are other shortenings out there that are organic and aren’t hydrogenated, Spectrum makes one we’ve used before. That said, we at Cheap Tart prefer our ingredients in as raw and unprocessed a state as possible. Frankly, we don’t see ourselves pressing palm kernels for their oil any time soon. Butter, on the other hand, can be made with precisely zero equipment (unless you count a jar), and the Midwest has dairy coming out of its ears.