Fresh Strawberries = Strawberry Pie

Sarah is being kind of dumb.  She saw the title to this post and then had some sciency mathy comment saying that it doesn't make sense.  Well, fresh strawberries defy science and math.

Moving on.

Sarah took James to pick strawberries a few days ago.  It sounds like there is a bumper crop of strawberries now.  They're about three weeks late due to the cool spring and early summer, but their flavor more than makes up for their late appearance.  It is nearly impossible to put one of those strawberries in your mouth and not make a yummy noise.  Once Sarah heard that this strawberry patch doesn't mind if you eat while you pick, she stopped trying to rein in James's gorging on berries.  Clearly his face and fingers show just how good these berries are.

While simply eating them alone or with whipped cream is pretty good, I thought it would be fun to try to make a strawberry pie.  Strawberry pie usually looks pretty good, but you know those strawberry pies at so many restaurants usually fail to please.  We did not want strawberries floating in artificially colored jello.

Crappy pie is not allowed in our house.

Sarah found a recipe based on a Cook's Illustrated recipe that we thought looked good.  Cook's Illustrated is a fantastic magazine.  We got it for ourselves one Christmas and there's never been a question about whether to renew our subscription or not.  Sometimes the recipes are a bit involved or take a long time, but we've never had any bad food when we used one of their recipes.

The first thing to ponder though, was the crust.  I wanted to be sure to have a good flaky crust since it was going to be a pretty moist pie.  So I decided to go another Cook's Illustrated recipe, their vodka pie crust:  http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2007/11/cooks-illustrated-foolproof-pie-dough-recipe.html

About the only change I make when making this crust is using lard instead of vegetable shortening.  The lard kind of smells bad, but it is great in pie crust.  It is very important to use some kind of pie weights while blind baking the crust too, or it would puff up like crazy.  Even after I remove the pie weights (I use a couple pounds of dry beans with some parchment paper to separate them from the crust), I still dock the crust to reduce air pockets.

Here is the result.  I was VERY satisfied with how flaky it was.  But as you can see, there were still some air pockets.  Oh well.  There are worse things in the world.  About the only other thing that I don't care for about this crust recipe is that the dough is so soft, that you can't really flute the rim of the crust very well.  I suppose that I will still survive if there are a few things I do that aren't pretty.

Here is the recipe for the filling:  http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2011/06/14/fresh-strawberry-pie-recipe/ And here is the result, once I put the filling into the shell:

The taste was pretty good.  I don't know that I've had anything that was so intensely strawberry-flavored as this.  The glaze is essentially cooked down strawberry puree with some sugar and corn starch.  Though the taste was pretty good, there are a few changes I would make for next time.  

• It seemed a little too much like strawberries piled into a pie shell, so next time, I would probably use fewer strawberries, and make a little more of the glaze to bind things a bit more.
• I would let the pie set a bit longer... but I don't know if that is a possibility in this house.  The slices we cut the following day held together a bit better than the first couple of slices we cut.
• The glaze was a bit sweet with the strawberries being so sweet on their own, so I would  cut down on the sugar.  I suppose this would really have to depend on the strawberries though.  I'm not sure I've ever had fresh strawberries that were this sweet.

There are a couple changes I would consider just for experimentation too:

• Perhaps put a small layer of custard down on the bottom.
• Sarah said that she found a few recipes that have a sweet cream cheese, like cheesecake, on the bottom.  That could be pretty good.
• Sarah also says that it could always use more whipped cream... I mean the pie is really just a vehicle for the delivery of whipped cream.

All in all, we were pretty happy with this pie.  I just may have to make another one while it is still strawberry season.