Blueberry Pie for Labor Day

I love cooking and baking according to the seasons, and what’s fresh - it’s the best way to ensure a delicious and healthy dish, because preservatives don’t play quite so big a role when the ingredients are so fresh.  Plus, when ingredients are in season, they’re at their peak, so flavor is at maximum levels - at least that’s the way I see it.

Blueberry Pie - up close

I’m a huge fan of Ina Garten.  I learned an interesting lesson in one of her books (I believe it’s in Back to Basics but I’m not positive on that.)  Anyway, the lesson came from one of her trips to France.  She and her husband Jeffrey have homes here in New York (one in East Hampton right here in Suffolk County on Long Island, maybe an hour’s drive from where I live), one in the city, and one in Paris.  She was spending Thanksgiving in Paris and she and Jeffrey invited some friends over to their Parisian apartment, and she encountered a problem.  Some foods that are available to us here in New York are not available in Paris, at least not at Thanksgiving, when we use those ingredients to cook our Thanksgiving dinner.  I believe cranberries were among her examples.  The lesson I took from her experience which she shared with her readers is that cooking should be based on what’s in season, in order to keep it fresh and delicious.  So while Ina was able to put on an American Thanksgiving dinner in Paris, it took some major effort to find the ingredients, and some were frozen and she wasn’t happy about that (if I remember the story correctly).  And after the story, she reminds her readers to opt for the freshest ingredients, preferably those that are currently in season.

Blueberries are generally in season toward the latter part of the summer, at least that’s the case in northeastern United States.  And the true blueberries are the ones also labeled “bluet” - they have a pale colored inside flesh and dark skin (and the not-so-real blueberries have dark flesh as well - I think that’s important to remember!).

They say every good cook should have signature items, including signature cookies, cakes, and pies.  (When the holidays come around, I can’t wait to tell you all about my signature cookies - they reflect my Italian/Sicilian heritage and while they’re challenging, I love them so much and I look forward to sharing them with you.)

Since this blog post covers pie, I’ll tell you what my signature pies are.  My real signature pie is key lime pie - it’s the first pie I learned to make and now I do with without a recipe in front of me - I make it during the warmer months as I like to think of it almost like margarita in the form of dessert.  And the graham cracker crust is really quite simple to make.  If you look back a month or two ago, you’ll see the key lime pie in my 4th of July post.  My other signature pie, which I believe I covered in a post in June, is pecan pie, which I learned to make because it’s my dad’s favorite, and it seems quite difficult to find a good quality pecan pie here in New York, even in the best of American restaurants.  So I learned it, and thanks to a friend in the midwest who shared his recipe with me, the whole thing is quite easy.

“Raw"

As a child, my favorite pie was banana creme, and I’ve yet to attempt it, but I think it’ll be fairly simple - hopefully I’ll try soon and let you know about it!  My dad’s friend used to make it all the time when he came to our house when I was a kid, when the men in the family made wine in our cellar and planned fireworks shows for 4th of July parties at our house.  Eddie always brought cool desserts, including gingerbread cookies for my sister and me, Christmas cookies, apple pie, and of course my favorite, banana creme pie, and he even whipped the creme by hand.  How about that!  So yes, I’ll be learning to make banana creme pie.

But while blueberries are in season late in the summer, I decided it was time to try making blueberry pie.  I got the recipe from a dear family friend, who was also my piano teacher when I was growing up.  But the recipe didn’t include a specific pie crust recipe, so I turned to my sister, who makes an outrageously great apple pie.  That crust is fantastic, so that’s the one I wanted.  But instead of doing a complete cover crust, I opted for lattice, which I think looks nice on a richly colored berry pie filling.

Fresh out of the oven!

The filling includes about 5 cups of fresh blueberries (the real ones, bluet!), sugar, flour, and cinnamon, and once it’s in the pie crust, some lemon juice and tiny pieces of butter sprinkled over the berries.  The crust includes flour, shortening, salt, and cold water.  The crust is completely done by hand, and I doubled the recipe, because I wanted to ensure that the entire bottom crust would cover the Emile Henri pie dish, and also to make strips (cut with a pastry cutting wheel from Williams-Sonoma) long enough to make a proper lattice top for the pie.  Without giving away Lauren’s pie crust recipe, I’ll say that the shortening gets “cut” into the flour with butter knives, which takes a bit of time but it’s worth it, and when adding the water one tablespoon at a time, it gets blended in gently with a fork.  Do it by hand, she said, and not with the food processor.  You want to know how your dough feels throughout the process.  TRUE.

I used the butcher block as my surface and covered it with a bit of flour so as not to let it stick, and then rolled it out with a wooden rolling pin, and carefully, I got it quite thin, which is essential, and placed it very carefully in the pie dish.  I repeated the rolling for the second crust, except this one I cut into strips with the pastry cutting wheel (which works really well!).  I filled the crust with the blueberry mixture which was already starting to sort of macerate.  I carefully placed the strips of dough into a lattice which my mom helped me weave like a basket (since it was my first time doing lattice, 4 hands were better than two).

I then added a bit to it - I made an egg wash and brushed it on only the lattice and crust around the edges and not on the berries - and then sprinkled the whole pie with cinnamon sugar.  Perfect, I thought.

Into the oven for 45 minutes at 425 degrees F.

And voila!  A perfect blueberry pie emerged from the oven, bubbling around the edges and looking “golden brown” - I took so many pictures, I was so pleased with the way it looked.

Blueberry Pie with Vanilla Bean Gelato

And it was delicious, too.  It was served with a scoop of Talenti Tahitian vanilla bean gelato, and the sweet/tartness of the pie, the slight saltiness of the crust, and the sweetness of the gelato were a perfect match.

I was asked what would I pair with that - well, I’d say one of my favorite dessert wines - Alcyone late harvest Tannat from Uruguay, with its dark fruit and chocolate characteristics.

In all, I don’t think the whole prep time took longer than an hour, making this one of the less complicated and time consuming desserts in my repertoire.  And I’m pretty sure this will become my signature berry pie.  It’s too beautiful and delicious not to!