Wednesday, February 2, 2011

The Ugly Pies of Winter 2011


One reason we have been loath to blog lately is that we cannot get excited about the way our pies are looking when they come out of the oven. We hesitate to use even the word 'homely' to describe these pie gargoyles. We cannot even bear to photograph them.

We were also in the tropics on January 23, National Pie Day, and we hope you all dedicated yourselves to observance of this sacred day. We ate a tiny slice of apple pie from one of the local Hawaiian bakeries as part of our fest.

As we recall, we've produced a couple of good lookers, pie-wise, since we last blogged at you. For Thanksgiving - the Mince, the Apple - but you've seen one pretty pie, you've seen them all, and we don't have any more tricks up our sleeves that improve those two models. And there was a nice potato-cheese-rosemary-leek gallette right after New Year's. But these were followed by a couple of bizarre-looking quiches, a funky looking lumpy blueberry pie, and...

What were we thinking? We had it in our heads to try out a recipe we found online during the summer for Chocolate Cherry Pie. In concept, we thought it sounded luscious and decadent. It called for whole pitted cherries and chunks of good dark chocolate. Our pals at Trader Joe's had the cherries, frozen, for a song, and we sacrificed one of our TJ 70% chocolate bars for the project. The idea, we think, was that the chocolate would melt to make a velvety coating with the cherry juice, and it would be all wine-dark and beautiful, and need no other embellishment.

It was enough to put one off pie-bakery for quite awhile. Although it tasted pretty nice when it was warm from the oven, it was a little gooshy. The frozen cherries did not cook down - this made the upper crust lumpy and the inside wet. When it cooled completely, the chocolate hardened back up into hard stringers throughout the filling. The cherries had no distinctive cherriness at all. POPS, weirdly, said he didn't think even ADDING MORE CHOCOLATE would improve the pie. Worse, we had the uncomfortable and unappetizing notion, looking down at the dessert plate, that we were eating a pie made with whole Kalamata olives. Yikes! Somebody call the law!

It all seems like a bad dream now. Next time, if there is a next time, we will make a compote on the stove of some of the cherries, and add this "jam" to the rest of the fruit. Using fresh cherries and mashing them a little to promote more thorough cooking of the fruit would be a good idea. Have you got any other ideas for ways to improve the outcome?

We have stepped back from the abyss since then to our old familiars. We also found some nicely designed ceramic pie dishes, about 6 inches in diameter, at the Crate and Barrel outlet ($3.50 each) that motivated us to get rolling again. It's time to start using the frozen fruit we squirrelled away in summer - we've never needed a taste of summer more than we do in February. We tried the compote approach with this weekend's pies made from frozen blueberries, and it seemed to help break down the whole berries. The compote just by itself, made with a spoonful of raw honey and a half teaspoon of fresh lemon juice, is irresistable. But that pie wasn't pretty. POPS reminds me that, maybe a lattice top will allow a lot of liquid to boil off so these frozen berry pies are a little less liquidy inside. Good tip - he's smart, and he's cute, too.