This one was another flop, though it was an educational one. A friend sent a vague recipe by email; I decided to take that vague recipe and wing it and go with my gut and modify as I went. The consequences? Not-quite-right filling (with painfully tart cranberries) and a soggy, mushy bottom crust. However, I think I've learned some lessons from my errors, which is after all why I'm doing all this pie experimenting to begin with.
The idea seemed simple enough: 6 pears, a cup and a half of fresh cranberries, a little lemon juice from a half-lemon, some grated nutmeg, 1/2 cup-3/4 cups sugar (for which I substituted 1/2 cup of honey- I was worried that this would make for a wet filling but the filling itself seemed fine), a little fresh-grated ginger, and some cinnamon.
Here's my filling:
Here's my filling:
And, my pie crust, using as usual Carolyn's technique:
Sigh. It looked so good.
Here it is, filled. Notice my fatal error: I didn't prebake the crust. I always do. Why did I think I didn't need to this time? Maybe because I was in a hurry. Sigh.
Now, to try something ridiculous: a sugarless crumble topping. The recipe I saw said: 1 cup butter, 1/2-3/4 cup brown sugar, tablespoon cinnamon, 1 cup oats, 1 cup flour. I substituted 1/2 cup agave, and it actually worked pretty well. (I also added a dash of salt, and due to hurry and hard butter wound up throwing this in the food processor, which may have been silly). It worked pretty well though!
As you can see from the photo at the top of this post, this pie looked plenty done from the top. It was only after it had cooled, that Su pointed out that the bottom was fish-belly white. Sure enough: mushy bottom crust disaster. Also, the cranberries were too tart- if I try this again I'll halve the cranberries and roll them in honey ahead of time.
Lesson learned: when experimenting, err on the side of overbaking.
No comments:
Post a Comment