Sous Vide Apple Craziness

A friend brought me a big bag of random apples (no idea what kind, just harvested from some trees he was working near), and I was trying to think of something more interesting than an apple crisp to make with them.  What I ended up making turned out pretty freaking cool...

The recipe was inspired by a post over at the Sous Vide Supreme Blog.  Since I don't own an apple-corer (I've honestly never had a need to core an un-sliced apple before this recipe...), the coring process was a little ghetto, but I got better as I went along.  I threw the cored apples in a bowl of water with citric acid to prevent oxidation while I screwed around with the rest of the recipe...

At some point in this process (not pictured), you'll want to go ahead and make some dulce de leche by vacuum-sealing the contents of a can of sweetened condensed milk and then cooking it sous vide at 183°F for at least 6 hours or (as I did) overnight, until it's as beautiful and caramelized as you want it.  If you're short on time you can do this on the stove top, but I love the hands-off simplicity of the sous vide method...  I mostly followed the recipe for the apple filling, but I used fresh-ground cinnamon and also incorporated some fresh-grated nutmeg.  I've found that it doesn't take much beating to soften even very cold butter in my KitchenAid, so I used my beater blade to combine the sugar, spices, and butter...

Then it was just a (messy) process of cramming the butter into the center of the apples...  Don't worry about how ugly this looks right now... It will get lovely when the time comes...

The stuffed apples are then vacuum-sealed in preparation for sous vide cooking. 

The pouches will be cooked sous vide at 183°F for about an hour and a half whenever you're ready.  I did this in advance then chilled in a water bath until about a half hour before dessert, at which point the apple pouches and dulce de leche pouch went back into a 183°F water bath for 30 minutes to re-heat.  The one final component is the crunchy topping, which I made just as the recipe prescribes except for substituting slivered almonds for the pecans (since my dad and I are both quite strongly anti-pecan...).

When it's time to plate, an apple goes down, followed by an ooze (it's too thick to call it a "drizzle") of dulce de leche, then a sprinkle of the crumble topping...

To make this even crazier, the recipe suggests topping with butter pecan ice cream.  We thought that might clash, since we had used almonds in place of pecans in the topping, so my mom whipped up a batch of buttered almond ice cream before she came over for dinner.  So. Freaking. Awesome.

So, you may have noticed that there were a whole lot of apples in the picture up there... More than a kid like me could eat on her own in a reasonable amount of time without bringing on death by sugar overdose... I had four guests over for dinner the first night, but I knew I needed to re-package the rest if I was ever going to eat them...  Here's the brilliant idea I came up with:

I re-vacuum-sealed individual apples into their own bags, trying to get the seal as close to the apple as possible, then I piped a serving of dulce de leche into the top portion of the bag and sealed it off after pushing as much air as possible out by hand.  (I use my old FoodSaver as a bag-sealer...)  An individual packet can just go into a 183°F when I want to make a single-serving of dessert...  and to make it even more convenient, I did the same with the leftover ice cream and topping (vacuum-seal a portion of ice cream, then add the crumble and seal it without vacuum):

Can't tell you how happy I am to have this crazy apple goodness waiting for me in my chest freezer...