5 posts tagged “strawberries”

My mom has been agitating for a glazed strawberry pie.  You know the kind, where fresh strawberries are held together by a matrix of red glop.  I was skeptical until I saw that Rose Levy Beranbaum had a recipe inspired by a family obsession with this kind of pie.  So remember how I thought I had my cornstarch disability licked?  Well, one look at this candidate for the Little Shop of Horrors will tell the story.  

The glop is created with a lightly sweetened, dilute mixture of cran-raspberry concentrate thickened with cornstarch.  It seemed perfect.  The mixture turned deep pinkish red and thickened. The cornstarch flavor cooked out.  And then it started to cool.  And got thicker.  And thicker.  So thick I was afraid that the perfectly ripe and fragile Harry’s Berries would be crushed by the weight of the glop.  But hey, that’s what moms are for…to eat your mistakes and swallow the criticism.

I had made a really delicious chocolate crust from Dorie Greenspan.  So I bit the bullet so to speak and mixed the berries with the glop.  A few of them fell apart, but I soldiered on and poured the bloody goo into the pie shell and popped it into the fridge.  After I got home from lovely cocktails at The Varnish with fabu group of ladies, I opened the fridge and pulled out the pie.  Mom was ready for a late night snack.  I cut the pie, plopped it on a plate and brought it to her in bed.  She loved it.  I tried it.  It was delicious.  Bloody delicious.  Note to self, call RLB and ask for a tutorial on thickeners.

The first Strawberry Pie of this ongoing project wasn’t fabulous so I’ve been combing through pie books for inspiration.  I came upon a great idea in the massive tome, Pie by Ken Haedrich.  It starts with a chocolate crust that's allowed to cool then napped with cornstarch thickened strawberry puree.  Sliced raw berries are arranged atop the puree and then topped with whipped cream enhanced with more strawberry puree. 

I changed up the recipe a bit.  Ken’s crust was made with chocolate wafers eg, the outside of oreos.  I arrived at Angeli this afternoon to find that chef Kathy had blind baked a beautiful chocolate crust made from a recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking from My Home to Yours.  It smelled and looked wonderful.  So I chopped up some strawberries, added a bit of lemon zest and sugar then cooked the fruit down to a thick puree, relying on the pectin in the fruit to thicken the puree.  I poured the boiling strawberry puree into a large bowl and put it in the walk-in refrigerator to cool down.

Once it was cool I beat manufacturing cream with a teaspoon of honey and a bit of confectioners sugar until stiff.  I then folded in half the chilled strawberry puree.  The remaining half was thinly slathered over the baked and cooled crust.  The strawberries were arranged onto the puree then I piled the strawberry whipped cream on top and

 It was a bit hit with my servers.  I only hope that they don’t eat it all.

Another confession, (interesting how this pie thing is so confessional).  Today is the first time I've made a cornstarch thickened custard since I was regularly cooking out of the plaid, ring bound cookbook.  Again, I was inspired by James McNair's Pie Cookbook.  His recipe for Cherry Cream Pie came from his Grandmother Keith in Jackson, Mississippi.
I made that superb Cherry Clafoutis Pie just a couple of days ago and Harry's Berries from the farmers markets are haunting me, so I decided to make the pie with strawberries instead of cherries.  I'm still not convinced about the cornstarch, in fact I think the 2 tablespoons used to thicken the fruit may have been a typo.  I'm going to try another version of a Strawberry Cream Pie with a different custard recipe.  We did enjoy the filling as a pudding although a little went a long way.  I brought the pie with me to a meeting at the DineLA advisory board today.

Listener and Good Food guest Mars Berman sent us an update on what's happening in Poland.  It seems that they are having strawberry overload over there.  Here's what she wrote:

I don't have a lot of experience with rhubarb.  I've never grown it and I've never cooked with it.  Again, no excuses.  I think I've always associated rhubarb with 40s-50s style painted aprons with rickrack and big farm style kitchen tables set in the middle of a giant square kitchen with white metal cabinets.  So it's not surprising that once again the sweet 40s-50s farm style of The Farm Chicks in the Kitchen seduced me. 

I think I was afraid that t I wouldn't trust the amount of sugar needed to balance the sourness of the rhubarb, but with Harry's Berries in my court I knew I didn't have to worry.   However, my anxiety about the rhubarb played out in buying it both at the farmers market (very young, thin and green) and at the supermarket (huge, thick and older).  The bigger stalks were actually much more tender and I ended up combining both in the pie.

I made the top crust look like pink polka dots by poking out some holes with a small biscuit cutter.  Pretty yummy I must say especially with the super short pie dough made with Plugra.