Rhubarb Pie

Is this the best pie I've ever made? You can't tell by the photos... and I don't want to oversell this... but, yes.

I'm not sure I've ever actually had rhubarb pie on its own... I know I've had and enjoyed (and even made) strawberry-rhubarb. But for some reason apparently I've been missing out on the most delicious pie filling ever. Because rhubarb on its own is just about perfect. Either that or I just lucked out while putting this together.

The recipe I'm using is dead-simple, and came from a find on Allrecipes. As usual, I'll re-post it here, but it's easy enough you could memorize it after the second time. (Which I intend to do.)

Ingredients

• 4 cups chopped rhubarb
• 1 1/3 cups white sugar
• 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie (I used my current standby, the Four & Twenty Blackbirds recipe)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C).
2. Combine sugar and flour. Sprinkle 1/4 of it over pastry in pie plate. Heap rhubarb over this mixture. Sprinkle with remaining sugar and flour. Dot with small pieces of butter. Cover with top crust.
3. Place pie on lowest rack in oven. Bake for 15 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C), and continue baking for 40 to 45 minutes. Serve warm or cold.

Not too hard, huh?

Now... I've been having trouble with my crusts boiling away the moisture- leaving them crispy rather than flaky. A friend told me this might be due to butter being not in small enough pieces to integrate with the water. So I decided to really stomp the butter into the flour with the pastry blender this time, to make sure that I got the butter mixed in pretty thoroughly. (I also made a double batch, or four dough balls for two double crusts- which is why there's so much dough in the bowl in the below photos!).

Here the dough's almost wet enough, and starting to look nicely shaggy:

However, when refrigerated and unwrapped later, I find that I really needed a tad more water. Crumble city. I sprinkled some water on and used the plastic wrap to mush it in. 

Sigh. The water only got to the outermost layer, meaning that when I unwrapped it again, things were really fragmenting. Rolling it out was a real struggle, and, as you can see, did not yield the loveliest of results. (Aren't I supposed to be getting good at this by now?)

Transferring it into the pie pan was an even bigger disaster. You'd think I'd never done this before. 

However, after 45 pies so far since last summer... I'm not too easily stopped by something as simple as a messy crust. So I molded it quickly into a workable shape, tearing off edges and shoring up cracks and gaps.

I'm not sure peeling the rhubarb was actually necessary, but it seemed like a good idea. Warning: peeling rhubarb will result in tiny red splatter droplets all over your kitchen. You can't tell by the photo, but it looks like a tiny serial killer was slaughtering Barbie and Ken with a small hacksaw in here.

Now, to add the sugar & flour mixture:

And then rhubarb on top:

More sugar over that, then a surprisingly-decent-consistency top crust.

After a little shaping, it's starting to look like pie competence.

Since my biggest failing has been under-baking, I actually left this pie in a good 10 minutes longer than expected. (I'm going to do that every time from now on!) As a result, there's some charred edges here- but those are actually sugar/rhubarb juice stalactites that burned while drooling out of the sides. Be sure to always put a catcher cookie sheet underneath... or you'll wind up with a lake of charcoal in your oven.

 The crust is perfectly flaky, crispy and buttery on both the top and bottom layers. And the filling is a wonderful sweet & sour mixture.

I served this with Creme Brulee-flavored ice cream. But Vanilla would be even better.