Blueberry pie

This weekend’s pie was blueberry. I read up on a few blueberry pie recipes and didn’t find one that accommodated frozen blueberries. Most of them called for cooking some blueberries and then adding fresh uncooked ones, which technique makes for a great pie when fresh berries are available– but in early spring, when you are longing for fruit that isn’t apple/ pear/ banana/ orange, it’s no good, because the frozen berries will leak juice everywhere.

I briefly considered making blueberry cobbler. One of my pie cookbooks includes recipes for cobblers and fruit crumbles under “pie”, thanks to some sophistry I cannot now remember. To be honest, the past two weekends the thought of pie making has produced some feelings of lassitude. However, I told myself to toughen up, and to come up with my own blueberry pie recipe.

I knew I wanted pure, clean blueberry taste, not too sweet. The kind of pie you think of when you think “blueberry pie”. This, for me, ruled out any secondary orange or lemon flavour, which I had been considering until the last minute. So to start, and after some reflection, I decided to go the partially cooked berry route. I cooked a cup of blueberries with 3/4 cup of sugar, a pinch of salt, two tablespoons of water, and two tablespoons of cornstarch, until the mixture came together. It was my hope that this would help the cornstarch amalgamate with the sugar and thicken the pie, and this would overcome the leakiness of frozen blueberries. I then mixed in three and a half cups more of blueberries and put it in the pie crust.

The pie crust I did with a lattice top, and I followed a suggestion I came across in a cooking magazine, to weave the lattice separately on a plate. Once the pie crust was filled, it was an easy matter to flip the woven lattice over the top. I baked it at 425F for 20 minutes and then down at 350F for another 45 minutes.

The one problem I ran into was that I did not have enough cornstarch and so it was more like blueberry soup. Sad, but true. My recipe needs to be modified to double the amount of cornstarch. The sweetness and the taste were absolutely perfect and satisfying, though. I took pie over to Ash and Kristin, so hopefully they will agree (I’m mentioning this to indicate that the taste testers haven’t weighed in yet, so it might be just me being a blueberry lover). The piecrust came out beautifully: flaky, well-cooked, buttery. As I had my piece of pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream I was so excited over how perfect the pie was (other than the aforementioned soupiness) that I was bouncing on the balls of my feet, happily congratulating myself on how well I had done!

The pie and an early morning trip to the farmer’s market to buy some local, hormone-free, pasture-fed meat got me excited about making dinner tonight. I thought I would share with you what I had: some tiny lamb chops, minted peas, sliced tomatoes with salt, and zucchini fritters.

For dessert I had a piece of blueberry pie. I think you can just make out in this photo how flaky the pastry is. I think I really am getting to be pretty good with pie crust: