Yesterday, having an abundance of strawberries given to us by our friends after their juicing party, I made this delicious pie. It was my first time using rhubarb, and making a pie with a lattice crust. Whenever I look up recipes and get them from blogs, I get a bit irritated by all the chitchat about the food by the blogger before they finally get to the recipe, but I do see the appeal now that I'm typing one up.
I modified this from a marthastewart.com recipe. I highly recommend that website for all your baking recipes, and feel free to go straight there now, but I always end up changing something to suit my desires and circumvent eggs, which I can't eat. In short, I used less sugar, less rhubarb, added cardamom, did not use egg and replaced about half of the crust flour with almond meal.
But I'll get to the point, here is the recipe! Enjoy:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Make the filling: Mix together rhubarb, strawberries, sugar, cornstarch, zest and juice, and 1/4 teaspoon salt.
- Filling
- 1 1/2 pounds strawberries, cut roughly into quarters
- 1 large stalk of rhubarb, cut into 3/4 inch pieces
- 1 cup turbinado sugar
- 1/4 cup cornstarch
- zest of one orange, and its juice
- 1/4 teaspoon cardamom
- sea salt
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- Make the crust:
- Crust
- 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (you can use white flour, but why, when it's still good with whole grain?)
- 1 1/4 cups almond meal
- 1 tablespoon turbinado sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
- 2 sticks cold butter, cut into small pieces
- 1/3 cup ice water
- Whisk flour, sugar and salt in a bowl. Add butter and mash in with a fork (or pastry blender if you have one) until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Drizzle in ice water over the mixture and mix in (I used my hands) until it holds when pressed together. Add more water if needed to achieve this.
- Shape dough into 2 disks and chill in the fridge until firm (this was about 20 min for me)
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- Roll out 1 disk of dough to a 1/8-inch thickness on a lightly floured surface (or parchment paper). Fit dough into a 9-inch pie plate. Pour in filling. Refrigerate while making top crust.
- Roll remaining dough out as you did with the first disk. Cut into about 15 or so 1/2 inch (or smaller, like I did) strips using a knife or pasty cutter.
- Lay 8 strips across the pie. Fold back every other strip, and lay a horizontal strip across the center of the pie. Unfold folded strips, then fold back remaining strips. Lay another horizontal strip across pie. Repeat folding and unfolding strips to weave a lattice pattern. Repeat on remaining side.
- Press together edges of top and bottom crusts to seal. Push the excess dough up to form a ridge of crust. Use a fork to crimp if desired. I used a chopstick to press into the dough at intervals. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.
- Bake pie on the middle rack on a parchment paper or foil lined baking sheet to catch juices. Bake 1 hour, then check on the pie. If the crust is getting too brown, loosely drape foil over the pie. Then bake for about another 30 min. Let cool so it can set before serving.
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- When serving, this would be amazing with vanilla ice cream. I think the pie was luxurious enough, so I served it with 2 tablespoons of plain yogurt draped on top. Yum!
