First, the end-result photo, then details about the making of, below.
Yum. More details below...
I've taken to making and freezing a little extra dough each time I use Mark Bittman's excellent pie crust recipe (yielding a ziploc in the freezer with little tennis-ball-sized balls of dough wrapped in plastic wrap), and so this time I had one already made. I thawed it in the fridge overnight and set it out on the counter an hour ahead of time, but still needed a second batch for the lattice top. I made that up (and a second for freezing-- it's pretty easy to just double the recipe and divide the dough in half by hand), then put it in the fridge to cool. Then I rolled out and shaped the bottom into the pie pan.
At which point it looked like this:
As you can see, I tend to have to patch a lot of holes. Since I also inevitably wind up with lopsided not-round shapes after rolling the dough out, there's a lot of scraps hanging off the sides that can be torn off and used as patches. The end result doesn't seem to show what a ramshackle process it is. Basically, pie-making, so far, is a surprisingly forgiving process. I think I always thought of it as really hard. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Or right. Or something.
I poked the shaped crust with a fork, covered it with buttered foil, weighted the foil down with beans (I've taken to using dried beans as pre-baking weights-- when I finish the 10 minutes of pre-baking, I throw them in a pot and cover them with water, and later when I cook them they cook surprisingly quickly, presumably for having been baked first. It's kind of a pleasantly convenient convergence), then refrigerated the foil-covered crust for another 15 minutes or so.
In the meantime I rinsed, patted dry, and mixed the berries in with sugar, almond extract, lemon zest, and tapioca starch. The mixture was very photogenic:
The recipe calls for this mixture to sit for a half-hour, which works pretty well, as that gives me time to get the crust nice and cold, then pop it into a preheated oven to pre-bake for 10 minutes. When all that was done, I took the foil off and ladled the berries in.
I usually wind up with a lot of leftover fruit liquid in the bottom of the bowl, which I've taken to saving and making later (via just heating in a saucepan) into a fruit syrup for pancakes. (It tends to be extremely gummy because of the starch, but it tastes great).
Odd note about berries and sugar: I'm using sweet, ripe berries, and putting in the maximum amount of sugar called for in the recipe- yet the pies don't taste especially sweet. I mean, they're coming out just right, not too sweet, not too tart. At some point I'm going to err on one side or the other but at the moment I suspect there's something about the chemistry of the acidic berries that makes the juice absorb a lot of the sugar, so that what actually gets into the pie is automatically self-adjusting. (This is just a theory and may be a dumb one. Maybe my next pie will be sickly sweet or inedibly sour).
Here's what the pie looked like, filled but unbaked:
Then I took the other dough ball out, rolled it out, and used a pizza-cutter to slice into strips. I immediately had trouble this time- the dough was too soft and my strips kept breaking. I'm not sure what was different. You can see in the photo below that I had a relatively clumsy lattice situation as a result of having to smush a lot of bits of dough together:
However, the magic of pies is that they're delicious even if you're a klutz. And this one looked pretty good, right out of the oven. Note the bubbling fruit, which was still in mid-bubble as the picture was taken.
These pies keep quite well. I timed things poorly and didn't get to actually give this pie to the birthday girl until the next day. At which point I heated it in a warm oven for 15 minutes or so, and then it tasted delicious and crispy and flaky and, well, pretty much just right. Other pies have lasted several days (refrigerated) with very little diminishment of deliciousness.
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