No, it is not dragon fruit.
Way before Sac Pie was Sac Pie, there was a little kid whose family spent some summer weekends with another family in southern New Jersey, one of the berry-growingest places in the country. Blues love the heat and sandy soil of the Jersey coastal plain. We would wake up on a July morning, and go out before it got hot, with our moms and sibs and a picnic lunch - about a dozen of us, in two enormous station wagons - to pick blueberries for a few hours at one of the local you-pick farms. The moms would split up the take, and bake and freeze and sprinkle blueberries every which way. Our families had full-size freezers, as was the rage in the 1970s, so the moms learned how to freeze and package blueberries so they would last us all year.
We gorged on the fresh, warm ones straight from the bushes while we were picking because we were naughty and unruly little people. We whined about being hot and thirsty and about the bucket of blue getting too heavy to carry. We chased each other down the endless rows of bushes. Our collective harvest was 20 or 30 pounds each time, so the farmer definitely did not lose money. In the days following our descent upon the berry farm like a swarm of locusts, there were pancakes, coffee cakes, ice cream, shakes, and fruit salads full of blueberries. There were eight or nine happy little kids with blue tongues, teeth, and fingers. And there was that one kid who got scarred for life picking blueberries and never willingly ate them again. Overall, it was really great. Our moms are gone now, but they made a life-long memory for us of the joy of picking delicious fruit while the sun shines.
The blueberry makes for pie nirvana. Today, we've got the semi-good-for-you whole wheat crust with palm oil shortening (with no trans fats and no cholesterol), about 5 cups of blueberries so plump they look like concord grapes (don't forget to remind everyone that you're getting a potent dose of antioxidants), about 3 tablespoons (to taste) of organic cane sugar, a third-cup of tapioca mixed in with the fruit, and some fresh grated lemon zest from the back yard tree. If you have your own stash of last summer's haul in the freezer, you might as well use it up, because more blueberries are on the way soon. If you are not stocked, go to Trader Joe's and buy their frozen blueberries, which are consistently good and not expensive (how do they do it?). As with any other frozen fruit filling, you will need to bake this pie a little longer than the fresh-fruit version.
Try this and see if it doesn't taste like summer. Or, at least, enough like summer to make you hang on for this year's crop. The unassuming, wall-flowerish blueberries are transformed into something jammy, and their perfume blends with that of the lemon zest to create a sillage, almost like roses, that evokes sitting among the berry bushes in the summer sunshine. You can almost hear the birds chirping. No, wait - those are real birds.
With juicier fruits like these, we like to make a mound of berries in the middle, and then press a subtle moat into the top crust before we seal it. The moat will catch any boiling juices that escape through the slits on the surface of the pie. It may take expanding the circumference of the upper crust by another 2 inches, so you have to plan ahead. But this way, we can further postpone cleaning the oven.
How's your crimping technique?
We learned this fluted edge from one of our favorite moms. We like it even better than the way we learned it from our own mom. And it is much, much, much more interesting than the freshman-level fork-crimping method. You just pinch the edge (from the inside of the pie pan) with thumb and forefinger of one hand (the left, in the example below). Then use the forefinger (or forefinger knuckle) and thumb of the other hand to push in and shape the edge from the outside of the pan, with just enough pressure exerted from both sides to seal the edge at the same time. As you practice this more, your flutes will become more uniform, and you will find that you can adjust the size of them so that the last flute you make blends seamlessly with the first one.
We are getting more confident with the use of whole wheat flour (this time, pastry flour) as a sub for half of the white flour in the dough. It added a definite tawny color to the final product, did not warp or ripple, and improves the firmness of the crust. Be advised that the dough may dry out faster than the usual formula - so you may have to roll it out more quickly than you would otherwise. But otherwise, no adjustments should be necessary.
Use caution, and a big spoon, if eating this pie in a hammock or on a white couch. That blueberry stain may come off your teeth and fingers, but it does not, not, not come out of fabrics!
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