Low-Fat Apple Crisp: 3 g of Fat a Serving, Topping Still Crunchy

Low-Fat Apple Crisp: 3 g of Fat a Serving, Topping Still Crunchy

A standard apple crisp topping is oats, flour, sugar and most of a stick of butter. The butter is the whole problem and also the whole point: it is around 100 grams of pure fat spread across eight portions, and it is doing two separate jobs up there. Most low-fat versions fail because they remove the butter and only replace one of them.

This one replaces both. The oats are toasted dry before they go anywhere near the fruit, which puts the crunch in before baking even starts, and the clumps are held together by a spoonful of oil and a little thawed apple juice concentrate instead. Three grams of fat a serving, a topping you can hear when you spoon through it, and a filling that needs no added fat at all.

Fat: 3 g · Saturated fat: 0.5 g · Calories: 195 · Fibre: 4 g · Serves: 8 · Prep: 20 min · Cook: 40 min

Why This Version Works

Butter in a crisp topping does two things. It binds the dry crumbs into clumps, and as its water boils off in the oven it dries and crisps the flour and oats around it. Swap it for oil and you get the binding but not the crisping, which is why oil-only toppings come out sandy and slightly greasy. Swap it for fruit juice alone and you get clumps that steam rather than bake.

Toasting the oats first takes the crisping job out of the oven entirely. Eight minutes on a dry tray drives the moisture out of the flakes and browns their surface starch, so they arrive at the dish already crunchy and only have to stay that way. One tablespoon of oil rubbed through the flour is enough to coat it so it does not go pasty when the juice goes in.

The apple juice concentrate is the quiet trick. It is sticky enough to pull the dry mixture into clumps the way melted butter does, and concentrated enough that its sugars caramelise at the edges, which is most of what we read as a buttery topping. Scattering it loosely and baking low in the oven keeps steam moving away from the top rather than through it.

Ingredients

Serves 8.

• 900 g (about 6 medium) cooking apples, peeled, cored and sliced 1 cm thick
• 2 tbsp light brown sugar, for the fruit
• 1 tbsp cornflour (cornstarch)
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon, for the fruit
• Juice of half a lemon
• 2 tbsp water
• 120 g (1¼ cups) rolled oats
• 60 g (½ cup) plain flour
• 60 g light brown sugar, for the topping
• ½ tsp ground cinnamon, for the topping
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 tbsp rapeseed or light olive oil
• 3 tbsp frozen apple juice concentrate, thawed (or 3 tbsp apple juice plus 1 tsp honey)

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to 190°C (375°F). Spread the oats on a dry baking tray and toast them for 8 minutes, stirring once, until they smell nutty and look a shade darker. This is where the crunch comes from, so do not skip it. Let them cool.
2. Toss the apples with the 2 tbsp of brown sugar, the cornflour, 1 tsp cinnamon, lemon juice and water, and spread them in a 20 x 25 cm baking dish.
3. Stir the cooled oats together with the flour, the 60 g of sugar, the salt and the ½ tsp of cinnamon. Drizzle the oil over and rub it through with your fingertips until the mixture looks like damp sand.
4. Add the apple juice concentrate a spoonful at a time, tossing with a fork, until the mixture clumps when you squeeze a handful but still falls apart when you let go.
5. Scatter the topping over the fruit in uneven clumps and do not press it down. The gaps let steam escape, and trapped steam is what turns a crisp topping soft.
6. Bake for 35–40 minutes on a low shelf, until the fruit bubbles at the edges and the top is deep gold. If it colours too quickly, lay a sheet of foil loosely over it for the last 10 minutes.
7. Let it stand for 15 minutes before serving. The filling thickens as it cools.

Nutrition

Per serving, with the dish cut into eight:

• Total fat: 3 g
• Saturated fat: 0.5 g
• Calories: 195 kcal
• Protein: 3 g
• Carbohydrate: 38 g
• Fibre: 4 g

The same crisp with 100 g of butter in the topping comes out at roughly 13 g of fat a serving, about 8 g of it saturated. The fruit layer is identical in both — apples bring essentially no fat of their own, so the topping is the only thing worth changing.

Variations

• Apple and blackberry. Swap 150 g of the apples for blackberries and cut the cornflour to 2 tsp, since the berries release less liquid than they look like they will.
• Pear and ginger. Use half pears, half apples, and add ½ tsp of ground ginger to the topping.
• Gluten-free. Use certified gluten-free oats and replace the plain flour with oat flour, blitzed from another 60 g of the same oats.
• Single portions. Divide between six ramekins and bake 20–25 minutes. Good for freezing one at a time.

Storing

Covered, it keeps 3 days in the fridge. The topping softens overnight, which is normal and completely fixable: reheat it uncovered at 180°C for 10 minutes and the crunch comes back. A microwave will warm it through but leaves the top damp.

Baked, it freezes for 2 months. Cool it completely, wrap the dish well, and reheat from frozen at 170°C for about 35 minutes with foil on, then 10 minutes with the foil off. You can also freeze the raw topping in a bag and scatter it straight from the freezer onto fresh fruit.

Serve With

• Plain 0% Greek yogurt, loosened with a teaspoon of honey
• Custard made with skimmed milk
• Warm, on its own, which is how it is best anyway

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Questions People Ask

Can I just use butter and still call it low-fat?

Not at the numbers on this page. A hundred grams of butter across eight servings adds about 10 g of fat and 6 g of saturated fat to each one, which takes the dish from 3 g to around 13 g. If you want a middle path, use 30 g of butter alongside the toasted oats and drop the oil — that lands near 6 g a serving.

Why did my topping go soggy?

Usually one of three things: the oats were not toasted, the topping was pressed down flat, or the fruit was too wet. Toast the oats, scatter the topping in loose clumps so steam can get out between them, and keep the cornflour in the filling — it holds the juice as a syrup instead of letting it flood upwards.

Do I need the apple juice concentrate?

It is the easiest binder, but not the only one. Three tablespoons of ordinary apple juice reduced in a pan to one tablespoon works the same way, and so does 2 tbsp of smooth apple sauce with 1 tsp of honey. What you are after is something sticky and sugary rather than something merely wet.

Can I put it together ahead of time?

Prepare the fruit and the topping separately and keep them in the fridge for up to a day, then combine and bake. Do not assemble it and leave it standing — the topping draws up juice from the apples and you lose the crunch before it ever reaches the oven.