Ina Garten came to the American masses at a curious moment. She arrived in the late 1990s, long after Julia Child taught home cooks to prepare duck à l’orange and years after Martha Stewart made her aspiring employees distinguish between toile, tulle, tool, tuile, toyle, and toil.
As such, many regarded Garten as a breath of fresh air. She offered, with unparalleled ease, a vision of all-American simplicity that didn’t require hard-to-find ingredients, did away with rigid things, and allowed you to be exactly who you were — and find beauty in something as simple as homemade tomato soup and a well-toasted grilled cheese.
Garten’s recipes for lemon roast chicken and shrimp scampi from her first cookbook, 1999’s The Barefoot Contessa, quickly made it to weeknight rotations nationwide. Almost two decades later, in her 2016 homage to her husband, Cooking for Jeffrey, she gave us another classic, this one a contender for the canon of timeless holiday recipes (like Marian Burros’s plum torte and Nigella Lawson’s quintessential chocolate cake): apple pie bars.
Garten reportedly got the inspiration for the dessert in 1978 while traveling through California with Jeffrey. This wasn’t long before she purchased Barefoot Contessa, the Hamptons specialty store where she would start to make her reputation. (The previous owners named it after the 1954 movie with Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart, which to Garten means “being both elegant and earthy.”)
It’s easy to see why so many bakers applaud the straightforward recipe: it’s a shortbread-pie hybrid that calls for a buttery dough that forms both the base and the topping. Two-thirds of the dough is pressed onto a rimmed baking tray and parbaked. It’s then topped with thinly sliced apples that have been cooked with butter, cinnamon, and vanilla. Finally, the remaining shortbread scraps are crumbled on top along with walnuts, and the pie is baked again.
This year, a number of home cooks and bakers are celebrating Garten’s apple pie bars. Jenny Osipova, the Australia-based baker behind Jenny’s Table who is known for her Sex and the City-inspired dishes, first made the bars after receiving Cooking with Jeffrey from a friend. “It was the first recipe I made,” Osipova says. “I was so impressed with how easy the recipe was to follow, and once they were out of the oven I fell in love with the golden buttery goodness.”
Trent Pheifer, a home cook and an Ina Garten superfan, has cooked through every Garten book over the past seven years. He estimates having made close to 1,350 of her recipes. Pheifer, who is behind the project Store-Bought Is Fine (named after Garten’s catchphrase), first made the bars in 2016, and most recently, a few weeks ago for a friend’s birthday party. “Apple pies can be intimidating unless you’re buying store-bought pastry dough or a store-bought crust,” he says, “It’s so American that it should be so easy to make. But I do find that apple pies are kind of finicky.”
Garten’s recipe, he explains, “takes out a lot of variables that can mess up an apple pie.” He points out that the recipe removes excess moisture by cooking the apples down beforehand, which avoids a soggy bottom or what he calls a “weird dome” on top. The pressed crust, too, is forgiving and doesn’t require rolling out a perfect circle or neatly trimming ribbons of dough for a lattice top. “I feel like she takes out a lot of the things in an apple pie that can go wrong for an inexperienced cook,” Pheifer says. Along with this recipe, he enjoys making Garten’s French-style apple tart, which uses a similar format.
Joy Wilson, the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Baking and the creator of Drake on Cake, makes Garten’s apple pie bars every holiday season. She thinks that the mix of granulated and brown sugars in the crust and the chopped walnuts in the shortbread topping make the recipe “feel extra special.” When she tries a Garten recipe, Wilson adds, “I always feel like I can trust that it’s going to be straightforward and delicious.”
Osipova echoes Wilson’s endorsement. “Her recipes never fail,” she says. “The woman can do no wrong. Jeffery is eating really well!”
In my own experience, Garten’s apple pie bars quietly solve all the anxieties of pie making, offering something that feels nostalgic and embraces fallibility. In a world where ease is seldom without its trade-offs, these bars are exactly what they appear to be: an uncomplicated treat that delivers, without apology, everything we ask of a holiday dessert. If apple pie isn’t your thing, swap the apples for a blueberry, strawberry, rhubarb, pumpkin, chocolate, or pecan filling, and proceed as usual. Serve with vanilla ice cream — store-bought is more than fine.
Mehr Singh is a food and culture reporter based in New York. Her work appears in Bon Appétit, Food52, and other publications.
Additional photo illustration credits: apple pie bar photo by Trent Pheifer
