Absolutely. The "Easy Debian without the Apps" is a procedure for replacing the automatically downloaded image file (which is packed to the rafters with pre-installed apps) with a much emptier version with no apps installed. But you need to install the easy-deb-chroot app first in order to get the infrastructure in place.

I wonder what this mysterious "R." is, that someone would go to such lengths to install it? It must be something really big, otherwise you would have installed it in the standard Easy Debian.