I’m eating the last slice of this as I type. Delicious. I’ve had a string of crust-related pie failures recently — too much experimenting/trying to go too fast – so it was nice to have one turn out this nicely.
The last time I baked, it was cupcakes and they took approximately one million hours to complete. Conclusive evidence that pie is better than cake – it’s way easier to make, tastes better and doesn’t take very long.
For this crust, I stuck with what I know: a simple, all butter crust. This is for a double crust pie:
- 2 sticks of butter, really cold. I think this crust turned out so great because I got the butter super cold and then was just really patient with how long it took to break it up into the flour.
- 1 teaspoon of salt.
- 1 tablespoon of sugar
- 2 3/4 cups of flour.
- 1 cup of cold water.
To make it just do the following:
- Sift the flour into a big bowl. Mix it with the sugar and salt.
- Mix in the cold butter with your hands. Keep rubbing it into the dry mix until it’s really small – the size of a pea.
- Mix in half the cold water. Knead the dough together with your hands. Mix in the rest of the water slowly, pulling the dough up from the bottom.
- Form two balls from the dough. Squish into disks, wrap in was paper and put in the fridge for an hour.
This is what my kitchen looks like during the rolling of the dough. (Yes, that power outlet is installed upside down. That’s pretty much how the shack I live in rolls.)
The filling is also super easy:
- Cut up a bunch (like four or five) of nectarines. Cut up the same number of apricots. Throw them in a bowl.
- Throw four cups of blueberries in there too.
- Mix with about a cup of agave syrup.
- Mix with 1/4 cups of flour to thicken the fruit so it’s not all watery and gross.
Roll out the shell dough, transfer it to the pie tin. It was hot in my kitchen so I stuck the shell in the freezer for five minutes to make the dough easier to shape and more likely to hold up under two pounds of fruit. It was a good call.
I love how pretty a fruit pie looks right before you put the top crust on.
Then, on goes the top crust and the whole thing went into an oven pre-heated at 350-degrees for an hour. After 40 minutes, I turned the heat up to 400-degrees.
Must have turned out pretty good because Oliver won’t stop talking about it. It lasted us about three days and, surprisingly for a fruit pie, held up without getting mushy. Definitely a prize winner – at least relative to recent pie disasters that have come out of our kitchen.
