32 Delicious Ways to Savor Apple Season

Celebrate autumn with this vibrant chicory salad, featuring sweet roasted delicata squash, crisp apples, and a savory seed and seaweed granola. The black tahini dressing adds a nutty, creamy richness that ties the ingredients together beautifully.

The spices in this salad are like those in French gingerbread, or pain d’épice. If you make it with walnut oil, use walnuts; if you make it with hazelnut oil, use hazelnuts.

Crisp bites of bitter radicchio make an excellent match for dressing sweetened with a drizzle of reduced cider. For a more substantial salad, Piper Davis, co-owner and cuisine director at Grand Central Bakery in Portland and Seattle, suggests adding matchsticks of sharp, nutty cheddar cheese, like Beecher’s Flagship, to her recipe.

Greek yogurt is the secret to this light but creamy dressing. And because raw kale is so sturdy, it can sit for quite a while without getting soggy.

Kasha—roasted buckwheat that’s been hulled and crushed—has a nutty, smoky flavor that goes well with sweet apples and mildly bitter frisée. You could swap in spelt or wheat berries for the buckwheat.

For such a simple, fast recipe, this salad—from chef-partner Steven Redzikowski of Oak at Fourteenth, in Boulder, Colorado—packs a surprising amount of complexity and flavor. Ichimi togarashi, a Japanese ground red pepper, really makes it pop.

This classic salad is best right now, when apples are at their peak.

In addition to apple season, it’s also fennel season. This salad celebrates the two.

If you’re not a fan of fruit-based soups, you could easily substitute potatoes or more parsnips for the apples with equally delicious results.

Grilling the kale leaves whole makes them slightly crunchy and smoky tasting. Just make sure they’re completely dry or else they’ll steam and wilt.

This simple winter salad gets plenty of fresh crunch from a mix of radishes, and pungent richness from blue cheese. It’s good without the apple too.

This light salad, based on one our reader had while vacationing in Germany, is great alongside grilled meat or fish. Squeezing out excess liquid from the fruit and vegetables keeps the salad from getting watery.

“Fab, fuss-free dinners are my holy grail,” says Michelle Tam of Nom Nom Paleo about sheet pan meals. This one is adapted from her and husband Henry Fong’s Nom Nom Paleo cookbook, Ready or Not! “Sheet pan suppers allow me to maximize the amount of veggies for dinner,” she says. “And cleanup is a breeze.”

It’s an unusual combination, but when coffee and chile mingle with meat, the flavor is extraordinary. The relish adds an exclamation point.

This colorful slaw is a fresher and faster version of the classic German long-cooked red cabbage. We serve it with pork, but it also makes a nice cool-weather side with simply cooked chicken or steak.

Apple butter used as a spread makes these grilled turkey sandwiches special, and apple slices add a little crispness.

What’s more fall than a salsa made of apples? The apples are seared slightly alongside chopped shallots before being tossed in a dressing of lemon juice, dijon mustard, and fresh herbs. The texture plays nicely alongside the hazelnut crust on a soft white fish like halibut.

The seasoning blend called Chinese five-spice adds a warm note without pushing the apples into pie territory, and the apples are tart enough to balance the flavor too. Cooked fennel bulbs add a warm, aromatic note that makes this sheet pan dinner smell like a cozy, autumn night. Roasting ingredients together on a sheet pan saves time and reduces cleanup. Make sure to head to your farmer’s market between August and November for the freshest, ripest apples that will yield the most flavorful, sweet results.

No roast is more epic than a goose–it is, after all, the bird Charles Dickens forever immortalized in A Christmas Carol. A goose is all dark meat and very rich. The fat that drips from it is excellent for roasting potatoes and vegetables, and the skin turns golden and crisp, the poultry equivalent of pork cracklings.

Zoe Nathan of Santa Monica’s Huckleberry Bakery tops her pies with a variety of cutout shapes; for this one, you’ll need a 2 1/2-in. apple-shaped cookie cutter.

We tested and then tested some more to arrive at the perfect proportions of buttery oat topping and sweetly spiced filling ingredients for this family-friendly recipe.

Basically an open-face pie, this galette is a great dessert for pie-phobes to make because the crust is so easy to handle–you don’t even need a pie pan.

Oakland food writer and photographer Nik Sharma, author of Season: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food, is known for his dazzling ways with Indian flavors. Serve these cross-cultural sweet-savory tidbits as snacks or appetizers, with Tamarind Chutney.

Sauvignon Blanc’s characteristic green-apple flavors blend seamlessly with the fruit itself. The recipe was a preview from The Apple Cookbook: 100 Sweet and Savory Recipes by Amy Traverse.

Portland pasty chef Michelle Vernier cooks the fruit ahead so the pie won’t collapse in the oven.

To keep these sweet and spicy waffles warm and crisp, put directly on a rack in a 200° oven for up to 40 minutes.

A Chez Panisse staple, Alice Waters’ galette is sure to impress year-round and can be made with any sturdy fruit you can find at the market, like pears, peaches, plums, or apricots.

Keeping the skin on the apples retains their natural flavonoids; pecans and cinnamon are also antioxidant-rich.

Our favorite formula for the classic crisp topping—equal parts old-fashioned oats, flour, and brown sugar, plus plenty of butter—bakes up tender enough to meld with the fruit but firm enough to support a scoop of ice cream. In terms of apples, Gravensteins, a lumpy, red-striped variety prized since the early 1800s, have exceptional aroma and sweet-tart flavor, if you can find them. But all three of the tart-sweet apple choices below require only a touch of sugar and lemon, and they take well to generous amounts of spices and brandy.

Oakland food writer and photographer Nik Sharma grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, and is known for his cross-cultural ways with Indian flavors. For this rustic, not-too-sweet cake, adapted from his 2018 cookbook Season: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food, he grinds Darjeeling tea leaves into the flour. It is excellent served with sweet, milky cups of actual chai. You can buy chai masala (tea spice mix) at Indian grocery stores, or make your own.

When it is warm outdoors, the last thing you want to do is heat up the house with the oven. Try baking on the grill using indirect heat. Assemble the simple crisp featuring two types of apples, Golden Delicious and Granny Smith, top with the buttery crust, and bake.

Sarah Ann Hahn, a gluten-free baker and trick horse rider, created this sophisticated dessert for a dinner at Big Table Farm winery in Oregon using ingredients from the farm, including a splash of wine.