The Green Bluff

Fifteen minutes north of Spokane there are thirty-odd family farms and orchards, and from September into October they are full of apples. Half the city has a childhood memory of standing in one of those orchards with a paper bag or random cardboard box.

This is the pie for that. It's the most uniquely Spokane pie we make, and it only exists for about six weeks a year.

The idea behind it

Pork, apple and sage is one of the oldest combinations in European cooking, and it works for a simple reason: fennel sausage is fatty and aromatic, apple is sweet and acidic, and sage is bitter and resinous enough to keep the other two honest. Take any one away and it goes slack.

The part that makes it a pizza is the base. There's no tomato and no garlic oil here. Instead it's butter cooked until the milk solids brown and go nutty, with sage leaves crisped in it. Brown butter is sweet and toasted in a way that olive oil cant be, and it meets the apple halfway instead of just carrying it.

That gives us a fourth base on the menu, which matters more than it sounds. Our fig pie is garlic olive oil, the Porky Pie is barbecue, the Uncle Teddy is red sauce. Four pies, four completely different foundations.

Fontina goes on alongside the mozzarella. It melts into something silky and has a mild nuttiness that sits well next to browned butter, where a sharper cheese would pick a fight with the apple.

Finish with a drizzle of hot honey if you like, but always after the bake. A thin drizzle. It's there for the chili heat as much as the sweetness, some say it ties the pie together some say its over kill. On the side so you decide.

What to expect when you eat it

Nutty and savory first, then the apple arrives as a sort of brightness rather than as obvious fruit, then a slow warmth at the back from the honey.

The apple is sliced thin enough to soften and curl at the edges without turning to sauce. You want it in the bite, not underneath it. Firm, tart varieties hold up best, which is convenient, because that's most of what the orchards up there grow.

The crisped sage is the sleeper ingredient. People tend to notice it last and then pick the leaves off the plate afterward.

It's rich but not heavy, which surprises people who hear "butter base" and brace for something leaden.

When to order it

September and October, and that's genuinely it.

Apple season up at the orchards starts in late August with the early varieties and runs through the fall. Our window is roughly that, which makes this the most tightly seasonal pie we do. The month-by-month version of all of this is in what Spokane grows.

It's the right pizza for the first properly cold evening of the year, which in Spokane tends to arrive without much warning sometime in October.

What to drink with it

This one's easy, because the obvious answer is also the local one: hard cider.

Apple next to apple sounds too neat and it just works. Something dry rather than sweet, since there's already honey on the pizza, and the Inland Northwest and the orchards east of the Cascades produce plenty of it.

Beyond cider: a saison, for the pepper and the dryness. A Belgian-style ale with some yeast character. For wine, an off-dry riesling or a gewürztraminer, both of which are grown in Washington and both of which handle sweet-and-savory better than almost anything else.

Avoid heavy reds and anything heavily hopped. They flatten the sage.

Why it's named that

Because the apples come from up there, and because naming a pizza after a place is a reasonable way to say thank you.

It's also honest about what the pie is. This isn't a recipe we found and localized. It's an autumn pizza that exists because there happen to be thirty family orchards a quarter of an hour from the oven, and in a city without them we'd be making something else.

If you want to build one, pizza basics covers the fundamentals and crust matters is the argument for spending time on dough. Brown the butter further than you think you should, and put the apple on thinner than feels right.

The current menu will tell you whether we're still in the window.