

Here’s a look back at the evolution of the McDonald’s apple pie: 1968: Apple pie joins the menu He procured two of today’s standard baked apple pies and fried them, first at 375 degrees Fahrenheit, which proved too hot, and then at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for three minutes, which resulted in a pie that had “a crisp crust with the deep, burnished hue that immediately took me back to my childhood.” Kenji López-Alt, the culinary director of Serious Eats, documented his own personal experiment in 2012. Other like-minded fans have tried to recapture that texture. When you fry them, they bubble up.” It’s true that when that original recipe was deep-fried, tiny bubbles pocked the surface, creating a unique potato-chip crispness. Nobody makes something better than that,” he says.

“I’ve always believed in the saying that if you can’t make it better, you should buy it. Even so, Greenspan says some fried pie aficionados came out to the restaurant for a taste of the unofficial fan favorite dessert. We didn’t sell as many as we thought we would, because frankly it’s still fried apple pie after a grilled cheese sandwich. Greenspan met a man connected to a vendor that supplied the pies to McDonald’s, and the chef tells Eater he was able to acquire cases of those original pies to put on his restaurant’s menu. For some, the new baked version never really replaced the taste of that crispy, fried crust.Įric Greenspan, the chef behind the now-closed Greenspan’s Grilled Cheese in Los Angeles, found a treasure trove of McDonald’s original apple pies a few years ago while at a trade show in Chicago, according to Los Angeles magazine. The pies were really apple turnovers in the shape of a golden-flaky rectangle,” the pie blog Everything Pies wrote in one post. “The crunchy outer crust and the hot sweet filling inside is a match made in heaven. Though McDonald’s fried pies have been gone for 25 years, nostalgia for the original lives on. Then in 2018 the apple pie got a modern makeover: The new recipe contains less sugar and fewer ingredients overall, the company says, including real butter and additional cinnamon for more flavor. Versions of this pie were tested in Southern California and North Carolina before they were introduced nationwide. In 2016, McDonald’s tasked a culinary team with creating a new recipe for the pie that used sliced apples instead of diced and swapped the standard solid top for a more decorative lattice-top crust.

Today, the baked pies are filled with six varieties of apples the company says are handpicked and grown in the U.S.: Fuji, Golden Delicious, Jonagold, Rome, Gala, and Ida Red. McDonald’s made the decision to discontinue the fried pies in 1992, opting instead for a baked version to appeal to customer preferences and dining trends. (The tree and the other McDonaldland characters that were introduced at that time, including Officer Big Mac, Grimace, and the Hamburglar, were retired in 2003 Ronald McDonald is the chain’s only mascot currently.) In the 1970s, the McDonald’s apple pie inspired a new McDonaldland character, according to Mental Floss: the Apple Pie Tree. The original recipe and turnover-style pie was fried to crispiness with a light golden color and served hot in a folded cardboard carton. The apple pie was the first dessert added to the McDonald’s menu in 1968, the same year that the fast-food company introduced the Big Mac.

The recipe for McDonald’s apple pie came from a Knoxville, Tennessee, franchisee named Litton Cochran, who had opened that city’s first McDonald’s in 1960. Here’s a quick look back at the McDonald’s apple pie story. Outside the U.S., popular flavors include taro (China), sweet corn (Thailand), and berries and currant (UK). Over the years, the fast-food chain has created more than 40 variants of the apple pie with assorted fillings, including strawberry, pineapple, and pumpkin. Perhaps better described as a hand pie, the pastry-wrapped apple-filled treat’s story starts with its debut in the late 1960s, runs through a fried-versus-baked debate, and ends in the present day with another attempt to make the dessert healthier. McDonald’s apple pie has commanded the attention of the American dining public for years, going through numerous iterations in its nearly 50-year history.
