Red, White and Purple: Pure Blueberry


I've been wanting comfort, and Blueberry strikes me as that plus patriotic, so I'd already decided on it for the Fourth when my friend Glenn requested it, too. It fits him: blueberry is a stand-up citizen, tasty, not pretentious, but juicy under the surface. It's sour enough to be interesting and full of antioxidants you need though you're not sure why. This pie made its debut at a Fourth of July party where we celebrated the USA with beer and exploding watermelons. Despite the fact that Glenn's not quite an American citizen. No big deal. Blueberry pie might be patriotic, but it doesn't have to be all-American. It could be, say, all-Canadian.

Blueberry scared me, though. Northwesterners are more into the hardy blackberry, and I'm thrown off by the super juiciness of the unadulterated blueberry (read: soupy when sliced). You can dose it with starch, only to get gelatinous mush. I hate sticky, syrupy deli pie! Hence this blog: never again a bad candied-up pie.

So I compromised. This pie is half plump fresh berry, half frozen wild berry. The result was a tart-sweet filling that held up beautifully under the knife and made everybody go happily silent while they took the first bites. Firecrackers boomed outside and we ate pie: I gotta say, I felt sentimental, and I'm not one for the patriotic. Feliz Cuatro de Julio, as we say in Tejas.
Fresh/Frozen Blueberry Pie

Prepare 1 double pie crust (see: Fearless Pie Crust)

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees

Filling
3 cups fresh blueberries
3 cups frozen wild blueberries (these are small and intensely flavored)
4 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon fresh-squeezed lemon juice
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons diced butter (sprinkle over fruit before baking)

Gently toss berries with starch, sugar, and lemon. Mix the fresh berries first. Take the frozen berries out of the freezer at the last possible second, toss quickly with the fresh, and pour into crust. It's important they don't thaw or it'll get mushy, the kiss of pie death. Top with a full crust or lattice; I opted for lattice because the berries are such a gorgeous color.

Bake for 40 minutes at 400 degrees, then another 20-30 at 350, until it's bubbling and the crust lightly browned. Put a cookie sheet on the rack below to catch excess juice!

Comments

DCP said…
Awww, thanks for the kind words. If you ever need taste-testers, you know where to find me.

PS - The blueberry was great.
July 6, 2008 at 9:00 AM
noodle777 said…
hi Irene! Wheres the pie? they look yummy Joni and noodle. got any bone pie love nood
July 20, 2008 at 11:16 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Made For Each Other: Strawberry Rhubarb

Image
This is a summertime classic, warm and gooey, with sour rhubarb to offset the sweet-but-predictable strawberry. It's a family favorite and definitely one of my pie staples. Plain old strawberry pie verges on saccharine, so you need the rhubarb to kick it up. You know how it is. The best couples usually have a sweet/sour factor going for them - good cop/bad cop, social butterfly/nerd, dreamer/breadwinner, Obama/Biden. Rhubarb is grown in huge quantities in the Northwest but it's hard to find in Texas. In fact, I bought a bunch at the grocery store here and the chec ker asked, "what is this? Is it some kind of red celery?" Gasp, no. It is heavenly. For this pie, I like to go fifty-fifty on the rhubarb to berry ratio, and I slice the strawberries only in half, so you get nice fat bites of them. One caveat: cook and sweeten the rhubarb before filling and baking . It's kind of a tough customer, though nothing a little heat and sugar can't fix. Strawberry-Rhu
Read more

Home, Sweet Pie

Image
There's a reason I've been slow to post lately - I'm west of Seattle (yes, there is something west of Seattle), land of intermittent internet connections. The north Kitsap Peninsula contains trees, salmon, old loggers, new yuppies, rocky beaches, tons of berry bushes, my huge family, and hundreds of pie bakers. I come back here and I'm put in my place. Of course you make the crust from scratch. And my family will tell me if there's too much cinnamon or the filling is undercooked in the middle. They like my pies, don't get me wrong, but it's a far cry from the city kids I usually eat with. Turns out I'm a bit of city kid myself when I get back; the lazy days and long drive to the grocery store (well, to anything) throw me off at first. Then I adjust. I don't go online, I wander the seaweed-y beach, I tromp around for hours searching out berries ... I couldn't live like this all the time, but it's pretty good stuff for a couple weeks. Morgan an
Read more